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George Tucker (Joseph Atterley), A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians. In the "American American Quarterly Review", Philadelphia, Carey and Lea, March & June 1828, volume III. 9"x6"; viii, 578pp. Paper covered boards. The spine has been entirely replaced or covered by a very old cloth tape repair that is really very basic. There is also a shadow of a removed call number on the spine. The edges of the boards are worn, and there is a fair amount of foxing to the text in the first 80-odd pages or so, which gets less foxy as you move through the book. Fair/Good copy, probably a 3.5/10. It is however intact and still strongly bound.
This is a long NYRB-tpe reviews of one of the very earliest (the second?) USA-composed and -printed travel exploits to the Moon, written by "Joseph Atterley" (George Tucker). The reviewed book itself by Atterley/Tucker was published in 1827.
As a work on interplanetary travel itself, there's not much in between this work and the great classics of the field, like Kepler, Godwin, and Swift.
The Atterley appears on pp 61-88, making it a pretty hefty 12,000 words or so. As you'll see in the expert appraisals of the work below, this is one of the earliest USA-written and produced lunar travels, ever. There's a lot packed into this review, which pretty much goes through the entire book. Interesting that the trip to the Moon lasted three days, and that the propulsion system was some sort of slathery thing called lunarium that was painted on the exterior of the lunar spacecraft?it worked as a repulsive agent to the Earth and attractive to the Moon?how they reversed that for the return trip I do not know. In any event there are different sorts of societies already present on the Moon.
"Voyage to the Moon inhabits an early position in the history of American science fiction literature, being described as "a central precursor" by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and a "prototype" by Peter Leighton in the 1960 book Moon Travellers: A Dream That Is Becoming a Reality, and by some accounts constitutes the country's first science fiction novel. It is sometimes described as the earliest US story of interplanetary travel, though Sam Moskowitz points to George Fowler's 1813 novel A Flight to the Moon; or, The Vision of Randalthus as an earlier example. It also contains what might be the first depiction of artificial enclosures for space farming in fiction."--Wikipedia. (this is also one of the most thorough referenced Wiki entries that I've seen?a top 5% easy.
"It is also one of the earliest examples of attempting to portray space travel realistically in terms of the actual conditions of outer space.The notion that space is a vacuum (or void) was not general knowledge at the time, even among scientists. Keith Deutsch, in the 1980 book Space Travel in Fact and Fiction, credits Tucker's novel with being "the first to describe space as a bitter cold void where unprotected life could not exist". The spacecraft in the book is constructed to be airtight, has an onboard supply of breathable air in the form of tanks, and incorporates thermal insulation against the extreme temperatures of outer space. Inasmuch as it deals with these considerations, Harry Harrison and Malcolm Edwards, in the 1979 book Spacecraft in Fact and Fiction, deem it "the first reasonable spaceship design." Source: Wiki again
See allso: Bleiler, Everett Franklin (1990). "Atterley, Joseph (pseud. of George Tucker 1775?1861)" in "Science-fiction, the Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-fiction Stories from Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930.".
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