Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star

In 1886, a ragtag crew of explorers launches into the cosmos from the Adirondack mountains aboard a vessel powered by clockwork explosives. They crash-land on an alien world and must survive as colonists among bizarre, intelligent lifeforms that defy every human assumption about nature. Their frayed bonds are tested as they struggle to claim the planet's resources and decide whether to rule or coexist. Dieudonné, writing decades before golden age science fiction, created something genuinely alien: a world that feels strange and unsettling, not simply Earth with different scenery. The novel wrestles with questions of colonization, power, and what it means to be human in a universe far stranger than Victorians dared imagine. This is early speculative fiction at its most exuberant and strange, a wild burst of imagination that predates modern alien literature by generations.