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The Brick Moon and Other Stories

Edward Everett Hale · 1899 · Novel

Setting: 1870

Synopsis

[Comment from Andrew Crumey][1]: > The term "science fiction" hadn't been invented in 1870, when the American magazine Atlantic Monthly published the first part of Edward Everett Hale's delightfully eccentric novella The Brick Moon. Readers lacked a ready-made pigeonhole for it, confronted by a fantasy about a group of visionaries who decide to make a 200-ft wide sphere of house-bricks, paint it white, and launch it into orbit. > Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon had appeared five years earlier, so Hale's work was not unprecendented, but while Verne chose to send his voyagers aloft using a giant cannon, Hale opts for the equally unfeasible but somehow more pleasing solution of a giant flywheel. > Hale gives technical details and calculations to support the plausibility of the venture.

Ideas Explored

Metadata

Source: OpenLibrary

Tags: science fictionspace travelfantasySocial life and customsUnited States in fictionFictionFiction, short stories (single author)Fiction, generalUnited states, social life and customs, fiction

isfdb_id: 187254

openlibrary_id: OL246172W

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