De la Terre a la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes) by Jules Verne.

A character from The Voyage and Adventure of Captain Hatteras expressed a thought about reaching the center of the Earth, and a hero of Five Weeks in a Balloon imagined the possibility of flying to the Moon. Jules Verne could implement his total passion for science in 1864 in the book The Journey to the Center of the Earth, which used the theory of hollow earth for a plot. I wasn’t a believer in its goodness after experiencing the Frenchman’s demonstrated nuances in previous novels, and I found out a preposterous conclusion in that characters use lava for raising up to the surface. I took up From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes, which was Verne’s following book written in 1865, due to it became legendary for depicting flying to Earth’s satellite via a projectile shot from an artillery gun and I wanted to receive a corroboration about Verne’s attitude toward the United States.

First strokes already humiliate and mock Americans. A cruel nation who obsessed with inventions of big artillery cannons and having no care for any human live, only for statistics on how many were killed and lost limbs by their devices. It is always a creation of a weapon for slaying more people. The author believes all Americans are militarists, and through this book claims that any ordinary man can become a top officer. This nation is heartless, as the Frenchman depicts it through members of his fiction gun club who wanted to check a power of their new weapon on people and horses but concluded that only animals will agree to this test. Verne was already known for writing such nonsense.

Hate for Americans reads in sentence after sentence. The writer considers all of them as frivolous and presents them as far from intellectual. As well, this nationality easily becomes aggressive by perceiving that a phrase (a title of stage’s play in this book) is actually a contempt for their view.

However, in one place would be wrong, according to that time, to blame Jules Verne for showing Americans as expansionists, as this book’s plot is about a leader of the gun club wants to make the Moon as a territory of the United States. From the Earth to the Moon could be read in one day, whereas Chapter Fourth was the last for me. It was impossible to be serious science fiction, though it was noticeable with learning from the previous writer’s composition. I already didn’t take the storyline earnestly, but I couldn’t read after that the shot should happen at the appearing perigee of the Moon, which happens with a big interval of years, as the next one, as the plot’s scientists claim, will 18 years later if they miss the nearest one. As I did in research, the whole book about preparation, as it was finding financing, which shouldn’t be a trouble in composition’s logic, but Verne could create difficulties from nothing, as I noticed in the previous novels.

The Frenchman expectedly inserts facts without sophistication. He mentions that a gleeful stance about flying to the Moon spread through the whole the United States of America, but there he says its territory is bigger than France in ten times. A man who did learning, but, as it reveals, he didn’t make research about the Civil War in his future 1887 book North against South.

Two books continuing adventures of gun club couldn’t be worthy for taking after that, as speaking about most of Jules Verne’s novels. I did look into depiction of the sequel’s storyline Around the Moon, finding out that characters who flying in the projectile see an asteroid several hundred yards away, and it will be grabbed by Earth’s gravity and transformed into another moon. There can insert the already noticed before that Jules Verne was a B-rated science fiction writer.