Around the Moon

Lore & Background

The novel follows the Baltimore Gun Club's projectile carrying Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan on a five-day journey to the Moon. Early in the voyage, a bright asteroid passes close by, which the travelers speculate might become a second moon of Earth. The travelers experience various adventures, including disposing of a dog's body, suffering gas intoxication, and briefly believing they will fall back to Earth. The asteroid's gravitational pull deviates their course, causing the projectile to enter lunar orbit instead of landing.

Reader's Guide

Around the Moon is significant as a foundational work of early science fiction, completing the lunar journey begun in From the Earth to the Moon. The novel's depiction of space travel, orbital mechanics, and lunar geography influenced later science fiction and inspired the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès. The story's blend of scientific speculation and adventure helped establish Verne's reputation as a pioneer of the genre. Modern unabridged English translations by Frederick Paul Walter (2010) and David Petault (2024) have made the complete text more accessible to contemporary readers.

Did You Know?

• The novel was originally published in French in 1869 as Autour de la Lune.
• Later English editions sometimes combined it with From the Earth to the Moon under the title From the Earth to the Moon and Around It.
• The novel ends with the travelers in lunar orbit, their fate unresolved; the return to Earth is depicted in the sequel.
• The novel was not the sole basis for the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon; that film is loosely inspired by both From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon.

Publication History and the Translation Problem

Published in French in 1869 under the title Autour de la Lune, this sequel to Jules Verne's 1865 From the Earth to the Moon has traveled through English-language readership in a surprisingly fragmented way. Over the decades the work appeared under at least three different English titles—Round the Moon, Circling the Moon, and All Around the Moon—while later publishers sometimes merged both volumes into a single book called From the Earth to the Moon and Around It. The earliest English rendering, by Lewis Page Mercier and Eleanor E. King in 1873, is known to have excised roughly twenty percent of Verne's original text and introduced numerous errors. Edward Roth's 1876 Philadelphia edition drew sharp criticism from Verne scholars for inserting substantial non-Verne material, yet it also carries the distinction of printing the first corrected equation of motion for lunar travel and the first correct derivation of the escape-velocity formula. The Ward Lock London version of 1877 offered a more complete text but still carried flaws, such as calling the capsule a "bullet." It was not until Frederick Paul Walter's 2010 translation and David Petault's 2024 edition that readers gained access to truly unabridged English versions.

The Voyage and Its Perils

Once the bullet-shaped projectile is launched from the Columbiad space gun, Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan begin a five-day journey that quickly spirals into a cascade of close calls. Minutes into the flight, a small bright asteroid—long since captured by Earth's gravity and effectively serving as a second moon—passes within a few hundred yards of the capsule without striking it. The gravitational tug of that near-miss, however, quietly bends the trajectory in ways the crew does not immediately appreciate. Along the way the trio must eject the corpse of a dog through a porthole, endure bouts of gas-induced intoxication, and wrestle with calculations that briefly convince them they are doomed to fall back to Earth. When the projectile finally enters lunar orbit rather than touching down as planned, the men use opera glasses to chart the surface, pass through the frigid shadow of the northern hemisphere, and gaze upon the vast Tycho crater from the southern side. They debate whether the Moon harbors life and settle on the conclusion that it is barren. Ardan then devises a last-ditch plan to fire the rockets originally meant for a soft landing, but by the time they ignite at the point of neutral gravitational attraction the window has closed, and the capsule is committed to a 260,000-kilometre plunge back toward Earth.

Science at the Heart of the Story

Verne embeds a remarkable amount of orbital mechanics into the narrative. The story's central tension revolves around the gravitational interplay between Earth and Moon: the projectile's intended landing is derailed by the asteroid encounter, and the crew's miscalculations about their trajectory reflect the genuine difficulty of celestial navigation in the pre-computer era. The concept of the "dead point"—the location where lunar and terrestrial gravitational pulls balance—serves as the novel's dramatic fulcrum. Ardan's idea to repurpose the landing rockets for a final push toward the Moon is a clever inversion of the original engineering plan, and its failure at the neutral point underscores how narrow the margins for error truly are. The capsule's return speed of 185,400 kilometres per hour, identical to its launch velocity, reinforces the symmetry of the gravitational system. Perhaps most strikingly, the hollow aluminium shell's positive buoyancy means it surfaces after plunging 6,096 metres into the ocean, a detail that grounds the spectacle in a plausible physical property rather than pure fantasy.

Cultural Legacy and Enduring Reach

Few nineteenth-century science fiction novels have cast as wide a shadow as this one. The most visible echo is Georges Méliès's 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon, which drew directly on the combined narrative of From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel to construct one of cinema's earliest and most iconic space-travel stories. In the literary world, the novel's afterlife has been shaped as much by its translations as by its text: the Smithsonian Institution preserves gallery images from an 1874 edition, and the work circulates freely through public-domain platforms such as Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and LibriVox audiobook recordings. Scholars continue to debate the merits of the various nineteenth-century English versions, and the 2010 Walter and 2024 Petault translations signal that new generations of readers are still discovering the story in fuller form. The novel's place in the broader canon of lunar fiction—spanning from Verne through Wells and beyond—remains a touchstone for discussions of how early speculative writers imagined humanity's first steps beyond the atmosphere.