“I MAKE USE OF PHYSICS. I GO TO THE MOON IN A CANNONball, discharged from a cannon. He [H. G. Wells] goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. That’s all very well, but show me this metal. Let him produce it.”

Thus, in his scathing review (in T.P.‘s Weekly) of Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), Jules Verne points up the gulf between Wells’s romantic fantasy and his own meticulously detailed From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel, Around the Moon (1870). In his two extraterrestrial science fiction adventures, Verne launches his astronauts from a gigantic cannon, has the trajectory of their space capsule altered by a passing asteroid—which results in their orbiting the moon—and then has them use rockets intended for braking to return the projectile to Earth.

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