Verne gave From the Earth to the Moon a longer name than the one on your cover. The full French title is De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes.
Direct trip in ninety-seven hours twenty minutes. Verne put the flight time on the cover, which is a fair warning about what follows. The arithmetic is the subject, and he wanted it known that he had done it.
On April 1, 2026, a hundred and sixty-one years after he published it, four people left Florida in a cone-shaped capsule, looped behind the far side of the moon on a free-return trajectory and came down in the sea.
That is the plot of this novel and its sequel, and it is also what Artemis II did.
Fiction by René Rehn
What It Is
1865 · plus a sequel in 1870 that you need
The American Civil War ends and the Baltimore Gun Club, a society of artillery enthusiasts, find their skills surplus to requirements.
Verne wrote that while the war was still being fought, and the opening chapters are the blackest comedy in his catalog: a room full of men maimed by their own ordnance, mourning the peace.
Their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes a use for their talents. He had begun to wonder, he says, whether a sufficiently large cannon might put a projectile on the moon.
Then the book becomes an engineering project. Funding, site selection, metallurgy, excavation, and a rival called Nicholl who bets against every stage of it.
The numbers are not gestured at, which is the thing people miss about this book. The Columbiad is a shaft nearly three hundred meters deep with a bore of about two and three quarter meters, charged with something like a hundred and twenty tonnes of guncotton, intended to put the projectile out at sixteen and a half kilometers per second. Verne worked all of that out, published it, and expected to be checked.
And a French adventurer, Michel Ardan, wires from across the Atlantic to say that the projectile should be a cylinder topped by a cone rather than a sphere, and that he intends to ride in it.
The crew of three arrives by way of a quarrel. Nicholl and Barbicane are on the point of fighting a duel, and Ardan stops it by proposing that all three of them go instead, which is a better solution to a dispute than anything in nineteenth-century fiction.
You Cannot Read It on Its Own
This is the practical thing to know before buying, and most editions do not make it clear.
The 1865 novel ends with the projectile missing the moon and being swept into orbit, and with nobody knowing whether the three men inside are alive.
That is the end of the book. There is no resolution.
Verne published the sequel five years later, Autour de la Lune, usually Around the Moon and sometimes Round the Moon, and it covers the flight itself and the return.
The two were later issued together under a combined title that runs to nearly twenty words.
Buy an edition with both. A volume containing only the first novel is a book with no third act.
What Artemis II Did, and What Verne Had Already Written Down
Artemis II launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026 and came down in the Pacific, southwest of San Diego, nine days later. It was the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since 1972.
Set it against an 1865 novel and a sequel from 1870.
Florida. Verne put the cannon at Tampa Town, and his reasoning was the reasoning NASA still uses: launch as close to the equator as you can and take the speed boost from the Earth’s rotation. Kennedy is about a hundred and thirty miles up the same coast.
Free return. Both the novel and the mission send a crew around the far side of the moon on a trajectory that brings them home without needing to stop.
The capsule shape. A cone atop a cylinder, at Ardan’s insistence. Orion is a cone.
Splashdown. Verne’s sequel brings them down in the sea at a stated latitude and longitude. Every American capsule since has done the same, including this one.
The name. Verne’s cannon is the Columbiad. Apollo 11’s command module was Columbia.
And one that does not hold. Verne flew three men and Artemis II flew four: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, the last of them Canadian. The crew-of-three correspondence is real for Apollo and is not real for this one, and a page that quietly dropped the fourth astronaut to keep the pattern tidy would be doing exactly what Verne was not doing.
He also got the fundamental premise wrong. The acceleration from a cannon would have killed the crew in the barrel. Verne knew there was a problem and solved it in the book with water buffers, which would not have worked either.
The point is not that he was right. It is that he was doing the same arithmetic, with the same constraints, in the same order.
Which Edition
Unusually for Verne, this one is in good hands.
The one to buy is new. MIT Press published From the Earth to the Moon: Annotated for Our Spacefaring Age on June 30, 2026, edited by Anastasia Klimchynskaya, using Walter James Miller’s translation, three hundred and thirty-four pages. An annotated edition of this particular novel, three months after Artemis II flew, is about as well timed as publishing gets, and Miller is the right translator for it.
Check before you buy whether it carries the sequel, because the two-book problem above applies to it as much as to anything else.
Behind it there are two modern unabridged translations: Miller’s from 1978, and Frederick Paul Walter’s from 2010.
Miller is the man who first compared the standard Victorian English Verne against the French and found it wanting, so his editions are restorations rather than reprints. Walter’s sits inside Amazing Journeys, a five-novel omnibus done entirely in his versions, which is the better buy if you want more than one of them.
Either is fine. Avoid anything with no translator named.
And It Produced the First Science Fiction Film
Georges Méliès took it, along with H. G. Wells, and made Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902.
Which is the shot of a rocket in the moon’s eye that everybody has seen and almost nobody can place.
Where to Go Next
Why so much of Verne reads badly in English, and whose name to look for on a title page, is covered on my Jules Verne books guide. The one where the publisher censored the hero has its page in my Twenty Thousand Leagues guide, and the wider shelf is ranked on the French novels list.
