They may have forgotten the fact and purpose of their voyage, but the ship itself has shaped them. Although Verne got a few of his calculations wrong (the length of the cannon’s barrel would have to have been much longer), most of what he describes seems remarkably prescient when you consider it was written a century before the first real moon landings.Īs members of a tribe of primitive people undertake a quest through an overgrown jungle, it slowly becomes apparent that they are aboard a huge spaceship, and the descendants of its original crew. Published in 1865, this novel was one of the first to take a serious stab at describing a space vessel and its means of propulsion (earlier attempts involving balloons and geese notwithstanding). In the aftermath of the US civil war, members of the Baltimore Gun Club construct a cannon capable of launching three men to the moon.

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne The story has wit and style, but it's the ideas that maintain a grip on the reader.Taking off … a coloured engraving from a 19th-century edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Ultimately the issue becomes whether humanity should be eliminated for being responsible for the murder. A wide-ranging debate on the fate of the galaxy unfolds following the unprecedented event of the murder of one of the higher beings.

What is the meaning of a plural 'self'?Īmong the fun elements of the book is the literary device of creating a galactic computer teleconference, which itself becomes an actor in the story. Vinge explores what it is like to have a mind that endures and evolves even as the components in it mature and die. Perhaps the most inventive concept in Vernor Vinge's science fiction novel A Fire Upon the Deep is the group mind created by the integration of the individual consciousnesses of a species resembling a cross between wolves and ferrets on a distant world (also in the 'slow-zone'). Further out that axis, beings of higher and higher mental capability inhabit the galaxy, their thought processes not inhibited by living in the 'slow-zone.' Unfortunately, we inhabit the slow-zone and so can't even imagine a world of faster-than-light travel and higher-order intelligences. As we move further out the axis the speed limit increases until the speed of light is no barrier. Not since William Gibson gave us the fully realized world of cyberspace in Neuromancer has anyone given us so rich a diet of new ideas: Imagine a universe where the laws of physics vary along the axis of the great wheel of the Milky Way galaxy.

A fire upon the deep