A Columbus of Space

Here is a hero for the ages, even if history has forgotten his name. Edmund Stonewall is a reclusive genius who has cracked the secret of inter-atomic energy, and he has built something extraordinary from his discovery: a vehicle capable of tearing through the atmosphere and into the black beyond. When he summons his skeptical friends to his laboratory, he offers them something no human has ever held in their hands: a ticket to the stars. They accept, and within pages they are soaring past the moon, past the reaches of Earth, toward Venus and its mysteries. What awaits them on that alien world, Serviss reveals with the confident swagger of a writer who believes the universe belongs to those daring enough to reach for it. This is early space adventure at its most gleeful, a 1909 fever dream of scientific possibility written when the word 'science fiction' had not yet been coined. It is the kind of book that makes you miss a bedtime stop, the kind that makes you wish you could climb inside it and ride alongside Stonewall toward that incandescent planet. For anyone who has looked up at Venus and wondered.