From the Earth to the Moon (2 page)

Similarly, he correctly foretold the shape of the capsule, the number of astronauts (three), weightlessness in space, a splashdown at sea picked up by the American Navy, and even the use of rockets to change orbit and return to earth. These last three details come from the book’s sequel,
Around the Moon,
which Verne published five years after
From the Earth to the Moon.
It takes up the voyage itself, which swings around the moon and returns. There are errors, too, such as a scene in which the astronauts simply open a window on what should have been a vacuum and toss out a dead dog.

The biggest error in Verne’s calculations is the cannon itself. At the acceleration needed to reach the earth’s escape
velocity of seven miles
per second,
the force would have smeared the hearty astronauts into a thin, bloody paste. Verne always tended to minimize problems in dynamics. He felt that by the time engineers could build his imaginary machines, they would have a lot of new tricks up their sleeves. These would make matters easier than they seemed in Verne’s own time. In this he was right—a true moon-rocket launch imposes only a few times the earth’s gravitational acceleration (“gees”) on the passengers.

Nevertheless, his moon-launching cannon is an embarrassment. Verne’s adventurers would have been squashed. He gives them some help with a water shock absorber, and discusses it in detail. But he must have known that it would not have helped much.

It is a bit curious why Verne chose this brute-force method when the rocket was known to him—though only as a minor military weapon and as fireworks. When he wrote
Around the Moon,
he showed that he indeed understood the principles of rocketry, since he let his capsule fire several to propel it back to earth. Verne probably wanted the luscious specifics of artillery to light up his story—to ground it in reality. People knew that cannons worked with awful efficiency. Rockets would have seemed to his audience rather odd, speculative, and unlikely.

Then again, maybe Verne was not so far wrong about artillery and outer space—only he saw further into the future than our time. Although rockets opened the space frontier, through the inventions of the American Robert Goddard (an ardent Verne fan), cannons are making a comeback.

In 1991 the U.S. government began a research program aiming to deliver payloads into orbit around the earth at a
low price—by using guns. The barrel, reinforced by steel and concrete, is a narrow pipe about three hundred feet long. An explosion starts the process, driving hydrogen gas against the underside of a bullet-shaped capsule. The goal is to place a capsule in orbit within three years. Once there, it will use rockets to maneuver itself into a proper, nearly circular orbit about the earth—just as Verne predicted.

Why now, nearly 130 years after
From the Earth to the
Moon, are we finally exploring the full potential of industrial-age technology? The trick is that only computer-age engineering can deal with the massive acceleration—thousands of times the earth’s “gee.” We now know how to make tiny circuits in rock-solid silicon. We have rockets with hard-packed chemical fuel.

Nothing in the capsule will be free to break loose and smash into the rest of the extremely compact “spaceship.” Its instruments will be fitted together at extremely fine tolerances, with not a hairbreadth of misalignment or wasted space. This is so that the engineers can pack into a few pounds the capability to look down and monitor the earth’s environment, take readings of the conditions in orbit, and even gaze outward through fine-ground lenses to study other worlds. Such capability must be crammed into a short tube that can pass through a narrow barrel about an inch wide.

With further engineering it seems possible to send these solid ambassadors to probe other planets, and the moon too. They would be much cheaper than present spacecraft. Firing them into orbit (with a huge bang that would have gratified Verne) will cost about one percent of the price of putting a pound in orbit using our present shuttle craft.

One of the book’s chapter titles, “The Hymn to the
Projectile,” is almost a parody of Verne’s reverence for technology. His J. T. Maston rhapsodizes, “Would you like figures? I’ll give you some eloquent ones!”—and reels off the specifications on gunpowder and mass, a poetry of arithmetic unique to Verne. He reasoned that people can be convinced of the reality of a possibility only if it is described with great specificity. His characters are masters of geometry: “Here and there he wrote a pi or an x
²
. He even appeared to extract a certain cube root with the greatest of ease.”

They know their guns too. Their huge construction “will be a cannon, since its chamber will have the same diameter as its bore; it will be a howitzer, since it will fire a hollow shell; and it will be a mortar, since it will be elevated at an angle of ninety degrees …” One of the best ways to convince your readers that you are a reliable narrator is to tell them something about their own world—such as the distinctions between types of artillery—that they didn’t know before. (Verne handed this strategy down to the countless authors of today who tell us how hotels, airports, battleships, hospitals, or law firms work, all in relentless, telling detail.)

This isn’t merely Verne’s enthusiasm overpowering his story. Rather, it marks the birth of “hard” science fiction, the variety that stays loyal to the facts, as nearly as the author knows them. Hard sf also describes the way engineers and scientists actually work: no lonely experimenters on mountaintops, inventing Frankensteins out of dead body parts; no easy improvising to get around tough problems—Verne’s tinkerers work in groups, argue, make hard choices. Audiences of his time found such detail gripping and convincing.

Writers such as Arthur C. Clarke
(2001: A Space Odyssey),
Robert A. Heinlein, and the other master sf
writer of the nineteenth century, H. G. Wells, followed in this tradition. Verne influenced even those who didn’t quite know who he was. Isaac Asimov once told me that when he was still a young science fiction fan he found himself listening to a lecture about a great foreign writer, a master of fantastic literature. But Asimov couldn’t recognize the name. Giving the French pronunciation, the lecturer said, “Surely you must know Zueel Pfern,” and described
From the Earth to the Moon.
Asimov replied in his Brooklyn accent, “Oh, you mean Jewels Voine!”

I had a similar experience, not realizing for years that Verne was not an American—after all, he set so many of his stories in the United States. In tribute, I named a character in my first hard sf novel,
Jupiter Project,
after one of his.

Verne died only a few months before the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. But he had seen such flights in his mind’s eye decades before, and the brothers had read his novels. We can get a feeling for his faith in the long-range possibilities of humanity from the remarkable memorial his son placed over his grave. It shows Verne with hair streaming, as if he were in flight, breaking free of his shroud and tomb, rising up magnificently from the dead. Above it are simply his name and the words
Onward to immortality and eternal youth.
It’s hard to be more optimistic than that.

Hard sf is often optimistic, but it is not unsophisticated. Verne slips in plenty of humor that makes light-hearted fun of his adventurers. When they discuss whether other planets could be inhabited and mention that the tilt of the earth’s axis makes for some violent weather, an enthusiastic voice cries, “Let’s unite our efforts, invent machines, and straighten out the earth’s axis!”

In addition to great scientific and technological advances, Verne foresaw many bleak aspects of our century—total war, industrial squalor, social dislocations. But he always saw fresh possibility looming beyond the troubles. Many of his inventions “came true,” whereas the other great founder of modern science fiction, H. G. Wells, played a bit looser with the facts and their implications. When Wells followed Verne, writing
The First Men in the Moon
(1901), he got his astronauts there with a metal that simply did away with the law of gravity—presto! Verne said dismissively, “I make use of physics. He invents … Show me this metal. Let him produce it!”

Ever since he was a struggling writer, Verne intended to ground his fiction in scientific fact. Reflecting upon his ambitions in 1856, he wrote in his journal: “Not mere poetry, but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people, love giving way to deduction and other sources of ideas, style, subject, interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head …”

This attention to detail, balanced by Verne’s soaring imagination, makes the book in your hands still exciting. He published it in the last year of the American Civil War, 1865, 104 years before we voyaged to the moon. By reliving the visions of yesterday, it teaches us a lot about
why
people spin great dreams. His characters seek to expand human horizons—both physical and conceptual.

And what dreams Verne had! We can grasp how much he changed the world by recalling real events that appeared first as acts of imagination in his novels. The American submarine
Nautilus,
its name taken from
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
surfaced at the north pole and its captain (not named Nemo, alas) talked by radio with President Eisenhower less than a century after the
novel was published. The explorer Haroun Tazieff, a Verne fan who had read
Journey to the Center of the Earth,
climbed down into the rumbling throat of a volcano in Africa, seeking secrets of the earth’s core. An Italian venturer coasted over the icy Arctic wastes in a dirigible just as Verne proposed. A French explorer crawled into the caves of southern Europe, stumbled upon the ancient campgrounds of early man, and stood before underground lakes where mammoths once roasted over crackling fires—as Verne had envisioned. In 1877 Verne foresaw a journey through the entire solar system, a feat accomplished by NASA’s robot voyagers a century later.

So he endures. Many of his precisely envisioned dreams will never find an echo in actual events. But Jules Verne saw huge possibility when others saw mere social mannerisms—the great concern of most nineteenth-century novels.

Perhaps we can learn this from him: that potential lasts longer than details of the moment. And that wonder works.

Gregory Benford

November 1992

D
URING THE
Civil War in the United States an influential club was formed in Baltimore. The vigor with which the military instinct developed in that nation of shipowners, merchants, and mechanics is well known. Shopkeepers left their counters and became captains, colonels, and generals without ever having gone to West Point. They soon equaled their Old World colleagues in the “art of war” and, like them, won victories by lavishly expending ammunition, money, and men.

But in the science of ballistics the Americans far surpassed the Europeans. Not that their guns attained a higher degree of perfection, but they were made much larger and therefore reached much greater ranges. When it comes to grazing fire, plunging fire, direct fire, oblique fire, or raking fire, the English, French, and Prussians have nothing to learn, but their cannons, howitzers, and mortars are only pocket pistols compared to the awesome engines of the American artillery.

This should surprise no one. The Yankees, the world’s best mechanics, are engineers the way Italians are musicians and Germans are metaphysicians: by birth. Nothing could then be more natural than for them to bring their bold ingenuity to the science of ballistics. The wonders performed in this domain by men like Parrott,
Dahlgren, and Rodman are known to everyone. Armstrong, Paliser, and Treuille de Beaulieu could only bow to their transatlantic rivals.

And so during the terrible struggle between the North and the South the artillerymen reigned supreme. The Union newspapers enthusiastically extolled their inventions, and there was no tradesman so humble, no idler so guileless that he did not rack his brain day and night calculating fantastic trajectories.

Now when an American has an idea he looks for another American who shares it. If there are three of them they elect a president and two vice presidents. If there are four they appoint a secretary and their staff is ready to function. If there are five they convene in a general assembly and their club is formed. That was how it happened in Baltimore. A man who had invented a new cannon associated himself with the man who had cast it and the man who had bored it. That was the nucleus of the Gun Club. A month after its formation it had 1,833 resident members and 30,575 corresponding members.

There was one strict condition for membership in the club: the applicant had to have invented or at least improved a cannon; or if not a cannon, some other kind of firearm. But it must be said that inventors of fifteen-shot revolvers, pivoting rifles, or saber pistols were not held in high esteem. The artillerymen took precedence over them in all circumstances.