The Purchase of the North Pole
In this wildly prescient 1889 sequel to From the Earth to the Moon, the Baltimore Gun Club returns with a scheme so audacious it reads like climate-fiction written 130 years too early. These space-hucksters propose to purchase the North Pole, then fire a colossal cannon into the ice to shift Earth's axis itself, eliminating seasons, melting the polar ice caps, and exposing the coal deposits beneath. The unintended consequences: flooding that threatens to swallow entire nations. As the world scrambles to stop them, only a single miscalculation may prevent catastrophe or ensure it. Verne, writing before industrial warming was even conceived, somehow predicted our present moment: scientists debating whether to geoengineer the planet, corporations eyeing the Arctic's resources, and humans convinced they can engineer nature into submission. The result is a ripping adventure that doubles as a sharp satire on scientific hubris and the dangers of treating the Earth as a machine to be tinkered with.
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“THEY'D CHANGE THE AXIS OF THE EARTH!There are fortunes to be made in polar real estate! Just change the climate of both poles, warm them up, give them mild winters and pleasant summers, and watch the boom! At the same time, cool off the tropics, clear out the jungles, and there's billions more in it!That was the scheme of the famous Gun Club, the same space engineers who had fired the shot "From the Earth to the Moon." The story of how they planned to change the face of the Earth itself is a Jules Verne classic long out of print that's a delight to read and a real adventure in logical super-science.””
— Jules Verne
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Verne, Jules. The Purchase of the North Pole. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-purchase-of-the-north-pole-3f63bd26-471e-4338-9142-b8a951276e46.Verne, J. (n.d.). The Purchase of the North Pole. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-purchase-of-the-north-pole-3f63bd26-471e-4338-9142-b8a951276e46Verne, Jules. The Purchase of the North Pole. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-purchase-of-the-north-pole-3f63bd26-471e-4338-9142-b8a951276e46.
