From the Earth to the Moon

After the American Civil War, the members of the Baltimore Gun Club, artillery experts with nothing left to shoot at, decide to fire a shell at the Moon. Their president, Impey Barbicane, plans an enormous cannon, cast in the ground in Florida, and the whole world follows the project. Then a daring Frenchman, Michel Ardan, asks to travel inside the shell, and Barbicane and his rival, Captain Nicholl, join him. This edition contains both novels: the sequel, Round the Moon, follows the three men as they circle the Moon, see the dark side and try to find their way home.

Jules Verne published the first book in 1865 and its sequel in 1870, filled with careful calculations of speed and distance. A century later the Apollo astronauts noted the parallels: three men, a launch from Florida and a landing in the Pacific. For Verne's other great journeys, read Around the World in Eighty Days.

Jules Verne (1828–1905) grew up in the port city of Nantes, watching ships leave for distant lands. Sent to Paris to study law, he wrote for the theatre instead, until the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel accepted Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863 and signed him for a series of 'extraordinary voyages' that lasted the rest of his life.

In more than sixty novels he took readers under the sea, to the Moon and around the world, mixing adventure with real science and geography. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days made him one of the most translated authors in history and inspired generations of scientists and explorers.