Review: From the Earth to the Moon

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is bizarre, but (mostly) in a good way. The plot is literally that a bunch of dudes are sad because they like to make guns (they're called The Gun Club), but there are no more wars so no one needs guns and now they are bored, so they decide to go to the moon instead. This might sound extreme but this is just how the average man thinks.

There's a lot of tech babble in the book, which I'm assuming is like 56% inaccurate or so. It just seems that most of it cannot be true, even if it was back when it was written. BUt that's to be expected from something that was published well over a hundred years ago. What was more surprising were some of the assumptions in the book, such as people seriously debating whether or not the moon has inhabitants or that surely there was water there. Did people honestly belive that back then?

Other things hold true to this day. My fave is the guy who just happens to do a production of Shakespeare's "Much ado about nothing", and large crowds assuming it's a jab at the main character and violently going to the theater to protest. It seems exactly like the kind of thing that could happen today, and the fact that Americans WERE the first to walk on the moon should prove that a lot of the hysteria from the book were true a hundred years later, and will probably still be true for many hundred years to come.

I did want to know more about the trip in the spaceship, but there's nothing about that in the book. I guess I'll have to read the sequel for that ...

View all my reviews

True story.