All Around the Moon

In 1865, Jules Verne imagined what no human had ever done: shoot three men to the moon in a giant aluminium bullet. All Around the Moon picks up where From the Earth to the Moon left off, as Barbican, M'Nicholl, and Ardan blast off from Florida in the Columbiad gun, thousands of tons of gunpowder propelling them toward an alien world. What follows is at once a scientific treatise and a grand adventure: the travelers weightlessly tumble around their cabin, mistake a meteor for the moon, argue over whether they've seen lunar cities, and grapple with the terrifying silence of space. Verne's genius lies in his precision. He calculated trajectories, debated whether Earth's atmosphere would crush them, and described lunar landscapes that wouldn't be photographed for a century. Yet this is no dry textbook. It's a swashbuckling ode to human hubris, to the ridiculous and magnificent idea of strapping yourself to an explosion and hoping for the best. Reading it now feels like discovering someone's diary from the future they were never supposed to see.