What if love were so absolute you'd steal your beloved from an arranged marriage and flee the planet? That's the audacious premise of this 1901 science fiction adventure, one of the very first novels to imagine human travel through the solar system. Lord Redgrave has built the Astronef, an airship capable of breaking free from Earth's gravity, and he uses it for something far more personal than expanding human knowledge: he intends to claim Zaidie, his old flame, before she's forced into a loveless union. With her chaperone in-tow, he simply takes her out of this world. What follows is a whirlwind tour of the cosmos that feels remarkably fresh: subterranean civilizations beneath the moon's surface, militaristic Martians, and the ethereal, music-obsessed inhabitants of Venus. Griffith writes with breathless Victorian adventure prose, his scientific speculation intertwined with romantic earnestness. The Darwinian framework of the era permeates every alien encounter, each world representing a different branch of evolution's tree. This is pulp adventure at its most gleeful, a story that understands the appeal of escape literally becoming absolute.
