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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
In John Jacob Astor's 'A Journey to Other Worlds', readers are taken on a fascinating expedition through space to explore other planets and encounter various civilizations. With a mix of science fiction and social commentary, the book delves into themes of technology, society, and the unknown. Astor's literary style is both imaginative and thought-provoking, capturing the curiosity of readers as they navigate through intricate worlds and engage with complex ideas. Written in the late 19th century, the book reflects the societal changes and scientific advancements of the time, making it a valuable piece of literature in the context of science fiction history. Astor's incorporation of futuristic inventions and societal critiques adds depth to the narrative, creating a captivating read for those interested in both science fiction and social commentary. 'A Journey to Other Worlds' is a compelling work that pushes the boundaries of imagination and challenges readers to think beyond the confines of Earth, making it a must-read for fans of speculative fiction and those intrigued by the possibilities of the universe. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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A Journey to Other Worlds
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Table of Contents
Introduction
At the twilight between gilded ambition and cosmic wonder, a handful of Americans hurl themselves into the heavens to test whether progress can master creation itself. John Jacob Astor’s interplanetary romance captures an era that believed technology could dissolve distance, tame nature, and reorder society. Yet beneath the shining brass of invention lies a restless question that runs through the book: what kind of future do we build when power outruns wisdom? The voyage outward is also a probing inward, measuring human aspiration against cosmic scale. Read as prophecy, parable, or travelogue, it remains a daring chart of imagination at full throttle.
A Journey in Other Worlds, published in 1894, is the singular science-fiction novel by John Jacob Astor IV, an American entrepreneur and inventor writing at the high tide of the Gilded Age. Emerging when electricity, industrial expansion, and astronomical discovery quickened public curiosity, the book belongs to the tradition of the scientific romance. Astor situates his narrative in a near-future world and builds from what his contemporaries regarded as plausible science. The result is a bold premise: Americans, equipped with a new force that counters gravity, undertake a planned expedition beyond Earth, seeking knowledge among the giant planets.
The central setup is straightforward and compelling. In a future organized by engineering confidence and institutional discipline, explorers assemble a craft designed to rise from Earth and traverse the solar system by harnessing a repulsive energy. Their itinerary aims toward Jupiter and Saturn, bodies that fascinated nineteenth-century readers with their size, moons, and rings. The mission’s purpose is scientific observation and philosophical inquiry rather than conquest. Astor invites readers to consider how familiar methods—surveying, cataloging, debating—respond when alien landscapes expand the scale of evidence. The plot’s momentum springs less from peril than from discovery, and from the ideas discoveries provoke.
The novel holds classic status for its position in early American interplanetary fiction. Where European authors had popularized the scientific romance, Astor’s book demonstrates how U.S. writers adapted the form to national preoccupations with invention, enterprise, and expansion. It is not merely a period curiosity; it is a document of the American imagination testing its limits. Historians of science fiction often note its ambitious scope and its effort to secure space travel within a chain of reasoned steps. In treating other worlds as reachable destinations, it helped normalize a cosmic horizon for popular narrative.
Astor’s method blends technical speculation with descriptive grandeur and philosophical conversation. He imagines instruments, procedures, and protocols; then he pauses to paint vast scenes and to weigh their meaning. The style resembles a guided tour through a museum of the possible, where each exhibit prompts a dialogue about progress, morality, and destiny. That combination—exposition, tableau, reflection—became a recognizable grammar for later planetary tales. The book’s confidence in systematic explanation gives it a lucid, almost reportorial clarity, while the panoramas retain the wonder that early readers associated with telescopes and observatories opening the sky to lay audiences.
Among its striking features is a vision of the year 2000 shaped by the late nineteenth century’s optimism. Astor extrapolates from contemporary engineering to imagine new transit, communications, and energy projects on Earth that make space travel thinkable. He does not dwell on mysticism alone or machinery alone; he stages their conversation inside a future that feels planned, budgeted, and executed. This balance—practical logistics alongside metaphysical curiosity—lets the book treat exploration as a national project and a human vocation. The imagined future is speculative yet orderly, reflecting the managerial spirit then celebrated in American public life.
The book also participates in a broader lineage of scientific romances that proposed novel forces and vehicles to escape Earth’s pull. Astor’s repulsive energy follows nineteenth-century attempts to explain extraordinary travel with speculative physics, signaling continuity with earlier thought experiments while pushing them toward grander destinations. His planetary vistas resonate with the period’s fascination for astronomy’s new measurements and photographs. Just as important, the narrative’s organized expedition foreshadows later conventions of crew, mission planning, and systematic observation that would become staples of interplanetary storytelling in the twentieth century.
Underneath the spectacle, enduring themes take shape. The explorers’ confidence stirs questions about responsibility: what restraints should govern those who possess unprecedented reach? The American setting foregrounds debates about expansion, stewardship, and national purpose. Astor threads into this frame a serious engagement with spiritual matters, asking how scientific achievement intersects with belief and the moral life. The result is not a sermon but an open inquiry, conducted in motion, in which sublime scenery becomes a mirror. The book’s ethical imagination extends the travel narrative beyond sightseeing, challenging readers to examine the grounds of progress.
Placing the novel in its historical moment clarifies its distinctive tone. Written when corporations, laboratories, and government bureaus were redefining expertise, it treats knowledge as something organized and cumulative. The voice is confident, often didactic, reflecting faith in rational administration. At the same time, the cosmos humbles that confidence, and the text registers awe before scales that dwarf human plans. This tension—between managerial certainty and the immeasurable—gives the journey its drama. The novel crystallizes a mindset that shaped public discourse in the 1890s, revealing both its energy and its blind spots without requiring an external critique.
Readers encountering the book today can appreciate its craft on multiple levels. As a speculative itinerary, it is meticulous about procedures and purposeful about objectives. As a gallery of planetary scenes, it offers disciplined, sometimes startling, attempts to render alien environments using the science available to its day. As a philosophical colloquy, it arranges questions so that exploration becomes a moral test. The absence of contemporary cinematic pacing leaves room for contemplation, allowing the book’s ideas to resonate. Approached with curiosity about its period, the narrative offers a richly layered experience, both historical and imaginative.
Its influence is best understood through the patterns it helped establish. By treating interplanetary travel as a rational, planned venture, the novel anticipates the organizational logic of later space narratives. By entwining technological optimism with searching ethical dialogue, it models a mode of inquiry that would recur throughout twentieth-century science fiction. Scholars often point to it when tracing American contributions to the scientific romance and the emergence of spacefaring as a popular literary subject. In that sense, its classic status rests on its function as a bridge: from terrestrial engineering dreams to a cosmos of narrative possibility.
For contemporary readers, A Journey in Other Worlds endures because its questions remain alive. Private and public spaceflight now share the stage; debates about environmental intervention and global coordination echo the book’s managerial future; and conversations about science and meaning have only deepened. Astor’s vision asks how to pair ingenuity with humility, and how to carry national ambition without losing sight of universal stewardship. Its pages are a reminder that speculative fiction is not escape but rehearsal: a way to imagine futures, test values, and refine aims. The journey outward still beckons, and so does the responsibility it entails.
Synopsis
Set in a confidently imagined early twenty-first century, this late nineteenth-century American speculative novel presents a future shaped by vast engineering, corporate enterprise, and assertive national ambition. The narrative combines forward-looking science with travelogue and philosophical colloquy, charting how new technologies promise to reorder nature and extend human reach. In this envisioned world, discovery is tied to policy and profit, and scientific achievement is treated as both practical craft and moral test. Against that backdrop, a small cadre of explorers prepares to leave Earth, with their technical ingenuity and worldly convictions becoming the lens through which the solar system’s wonders and perils are observed and assessed.
Central to the book’s premise is the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company, an immense enterprise dedicated to adjusting Earth’s axial tilt to stabilize climate and expand habitable lands. The company’s leaders debate feasibility, consequences, and scale, articulating a distinctly industrial approach to planetary management. Among the principal figures are the forceful executive Bearwarden, the scientifically minded Cortlandt, and the youthful, intrepid Ayrault. Their deliberations balance economic promise with environmental risk, and public benefit with private interest. This corporate-scientific setting establishes both the rational method and the rhetorical tone that will guide their later inquiries, as they move from terrestrial engineering to interplanetary exploration.
Amid this age of ambitious projects, a second technological breakthrough emerges: a controllable antigravitational force, often discussed as apergy, enabling practical space travel. Harnessing this repulsive power alongside precision instruments, the protagonists design and outfit a craft for a long voyage. Their objectives are scientific and national, but also personal, as each seeks knowledge, prestige, or proof of concept. Meticulous preparations follow, from provisioning to experimental protocols, and from navigational plans to contingency measures. The craft becomes a moving laboratory and symbol of modern capability, aligning the book’s speculative physics with its broader claim that disciplined engineering can overcome barriers once considered absolute.
The departure from Earth is described through measured observation rather than romantic spectacle. The travelers methodically negotiate atmosphere and vacuum, regulate forces to maintain habitability, and test their instruments under novel conditions. They chart their course by careful calculation, reduce complex motions to manageable routines, and record what they see in scientific logs. From the vantage of space, Earth’s geography and meteorology present themselves anew, inviting comparisons between human ambition and planetary scale. Communication and recording devices allow them to document the voyage and to maintain a disciplined rhythm of work, turning the passage itself into a proof of the technology’s reliability and range.
Jupiter, their first major destination, confronts them with scale and difficulty beyond Earthly experience. Massive gravity, turbulent weather, and shifting light demand constant adjustments to equipment and method. The explorers test landings and surveys with caution, observing atmospheric phenomena and vast landscapes that suggest complex geological and biological histories. They note the planet’s storms and magnetism, attempt to classify unfamiliar life forms, and wrestle with the limits of inference when direct measurement is hazardous. The account emphasizes procedural rigor, emphasizing how tentative conclusions must be when dealing with enormous forces and fragmentary data gathered under pressing time constraints.
Between fieldwork and navigation, the narrative turns to conversation—discussions of science and society, faith and futurity. The men relate the evidence before them to long-standing questions about progress and purpose, weighing the mastery of natural forces against responsibility for their use. These exchanges do not suspend the action; they shape the course of inquiry, defining what counts as knowledge and what risks are acceptable. The contrast between immediate, physical challenges and reflective, ethical debate underscores the book’s dual character, as a chronicle of exploration and a forum for argument about what ultimately justifies exploration, and how discovery should be integrated into civic life.
Saturn provides a markedly different field of study. The travelers approach its rings and moons with heightened caution, conducting observations of their structure, orbital dynamics, and visual effects. Landings and surveys proceed amid lower gravity and colder temperatures, provoking comparisons with Jupiter’s ferocity and Earth’s familiarity. The ring system becomes a subject of careful speculation, with attention to its appearance, mechanical behavior, and scientific controversies of the era. As on Jupiter, the explorers alternate between empirical measurements and interpretive hypotheses, treating every vista as both a spectacle and a problem, something to be understood within the disciplined frameworks they brought from home.
Exploration on and around Saturn invites broader syntheses of data and theory. The men refine instruments, test the endurance of their vessel and antigravitational controls, and adapt procedures to new terrains and atmospheric conditions. They consider how environment shapes life and character, asking whether different worlds might foster distinct virtues, limitations, or social possibilities. The narrative suggests analogies between planetary order and human order without collapsing one into the other. While episodes of risk and surprise test their resolve, the story maintains its measured tone, presenting fieldwork, inference, and debate as interdependent practices that move them incrementally toward clearer, though never final, understanding.
The book’s enduring significance lies in its articulation of a Gilded Age faith that invention could reorganize both nature and society, along with its insistence that such power provokes ethical reckoning. It fuses speculative physics, future history, and a methodical travel narrative, using interplanetary vistas to frame questions about destiny, governance, and responsibility. By keeping emphasis on procedure and inquiry rather than sensational revelation, the story underscores the idea that exploration’s greatest outcome is a disciplined enlargement of perspective. The ultimate fates and fullest implications are left for readers to discover, but its central claim—that ambition must be matched by conscience—resonates beyond its era.
Historical Context
John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) emerges from the late Gilded Age United States, a nation dominated by industrial capitalism, rapid urbanization, and a confident scientific culture. The setting behind the book is New York–centered finance and property, nationwide railroad networks, and elite social institutions that channeled wealth and influence. Universities, observatories, and a bustling print culture promoted science to a wide public. Protestant moral frameworks, alongside new professional associations and government bureaus, provided institutional ballast. In this world of concentrated fortunes and organized knowledge, technological ambition and managerial order were imagined as the rightful tools to master nature and organize society’s future.
Astor himself was an emblem of this milieu. Born in 1864 into one of America’s richest families, he was a real estate magnate, technophile, and occasional inventor who held patents on mechanical devices. His authorial voice reflects the vantage point of an upper-class New Yorker familiar with grand projects and the language of efficiency. Publishing the novel in 1894, he situated it in a recognizable tradition of “romances of the future,” yet infused it with the certainty that scientific ingenuity and disciplined administration could reshape human life—an outlook resonant with the aspirations and confidence of America’s most powerful circles.
The novel’s faith in limitless mechanical progress belongs to a decade electrified by transformative technologies. The 1880s and early 1890s witnessed the spread of electrical grids following Edison’s 1882 Pearl Street station and, crucially, the triumph of alternating current in the “war of the currents,” highlighted by Westinghouse and Tesla’s lighting of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Ambitious hydroelectric projects at Niagara were nearing fruition by the mid-1890s. Steelmaking, telephony, and precision engineering scaled up. Against this backdrop, envisioning an interplanetary craft did not feel absurd; it extended engineering logic from bridges and dynamos to the heavens.
Transportation and communications had already compressed geography, encouraging still grander projections of mobility. Transcontinental railroads linked the United States coast to coast; standardized time zones, adopted by railroads in 1883, synchronized a continental economy. Telegraphy and undersea cables stitched together international markets. Aviation remained experimental—Otto Lilienthal’s glider flights in the early 1890s and Samuel Langley’s aerodrome research signaled incremental progress—but popular fascination with conquest of the air was intense. Astor’s imaginary vehicle extrapolates from these visible trajectories, extending the logic of steam, electricity, and engineering control from terrestrial transport to astronomical distances.
Contemporary astronomy supplied the celestial canvas on which Astor painted. Giovanni Schiaparelli’s reports of “canali” on Mars (noted from 1877 onward) and the ensuing English-language misinterpretation as “canals” encouraged speculation about extraterrestrial intelligence. New observatories—Lick (opened 1888) and Lowell (established 1894)—pushed planetary observation to the center of public curiosity. Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings were well known, yet their atmospheres and surfaces remained mysterious, inviting imaginative elaboration. In this climate of informed uncertainty, it was plausible to portray other worlds as habitable or at least explorable, with readers eager to test scientific conjecture against narrative possibility.
Astor wrote into the flourishing genre of scientific romance and utopian fiction. Jules Verne had modeled plausible engineering feats, while Camille Flammarion popularized cosmic pluralism. Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880) introduced the fictional antigravity force “apergy,” a concept Astor adoptively reuses. In the United States, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) framed competing social futures. A Journey in Other Worlds straddles these threads—borrowing speculative physics from earlier romances, echoing utopians’ orderly visions, and prefiguring the scientific moral fables that H. G. Wells would soon bring to wider fame.
American geopolitics in the early 1890s sharpened the novel’s frontier ethos. The 1890 Census proclaimed the closing of the Western frontier, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 thesis interpreted expansion as central to national character. Naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 work on sea power influenced an assertive foreign policy. Though the Spanish–American War lay a few years ahead (1898), expansionist sentiment was rising. Astor’s projection of exploration beyond Earth reframes national dynamism as a cosmic frontier, transposing the cultural logic of westward movement and overseas ambition into interplanetary terms.
Industrial consolidation shaped expectations about governance and expertise. The formation of trusts—Standard Oil, and later mammoth combinations in steel—provoked widespread debate and the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), though enforcement was initially modest. This was also the era of the managerial revolution: engineers, accountants, and administrators standardized large systems. Astor’s future society, administered by orderly boards and guided by technical decision-making, mirrors the era’s ideal of rational coordination. The imagined efficiency of interplanetary enterprise maps neatly onto the contemporary fascination with bureaucracy as a tool of progress.
Yet optimism contended with profound instability. The Panic of 1893 triggered a severe depression, bank failures, and mass unemployment. Populist agitation, the Free Silver movement, and Jacob Coxey’s 1894 march on Washington reflected discontent with concentrated wealth and tight-money policies. Utopian and techno-futurist literature offered reassurance that coordinated expertise could neutralize chaos. In Astor’s world, technological command and national purpose promise orderly abundance, implicitly addressing the anxieties of readers navigating downturns and political volatility by offering a blueprint of stability beyond economic cycles.
The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) provided a persuasive visual lexicon for Astor’s imagined future. The exposition’s “White City,” monumental architecture, and comprehensive electrical illumination attested to planned urbanism and the aesthetic of order. The fair showcased engineering wonders—from the Ferris Wheel to cutting-edge machinery—presenting progress as both spectacle and social program. Astor’s novel similarly treats technology as a harmonizing force, enabling large-scale coordination and civic refinement. It echoes the fair’s conviction that disciplined design and modern utilities could purify urban life and, by extension, rationalize civilization’s next steps.
Religious culture also helped shape the book’s tone. Mainline Protestantism remained influential in public life, while the Social Gospel movement (from the 1880s) sought to apply Christian ethics to modern problems. Simultaneously, Spiritualism and Theosophy, popular since the late 19th century, fostered speculation about unseen realms. Late Victorian writers often reconciled scientific enthusiasm with moralizing reflection, imagining progress as ethically guided. Astor’s narrative, blending scientific extrapolation with moral assurance, participates in this wider effort to harmonize faith, virtue, and technological mastery—portraying discovery not only as mechanical conquest but as a stage for ethical development.
A confidence in environmental control suffused elite discourse. Monumental engineering schemes—from the successful Suez Canal (opened 1869) to the ill-fated French effort in Panama during the 1880s—encouraged visions of remaking landscapes. Hydropower development in the 1890s and irrigation advocacy, seen in National Irrigation Congresses beginning in the early 1890s, promoted the idea that water, climate, and terrain could be scientifically managed. Astor’s future, in which vast forces are harnessed to human design, fits this ethos. The planetary voyage scales up such thinking, suggesting that the know-how used for rivers and coasts might ultimately extend to worlds.
The world Astor knew was anchored in New York’s vertical modernity. Steel-frame buildings, elevators, and dense financial districts produced new skylines. Grand hotels and luxury real estate, sectors closely associated with the Astor family, embodied both the comforts and hierarchies of urban capitalism. This environment furnished Astor with examples of complex systems—construction, utilities, logistics—that could be designed and supervised by experts. His ordered projection of the year 2000 turns the city’s managerial feats outward, imagining the same principles governing national infrastructure and, ultimately, the vehicles and protocols of spacefaring.
Popular science institutions mediated between laboratories and lay readers. Scientific American and other periodicals translated advances in physics, astronomy, and engineering into accessible narratives. Public lectures, lyceums, and the Chautauqua movement broadened adult education. Debates over the luminiferous ether, sharpened after the 1887 Michelson–Morley experiment, kept speculative physics in the public eye. Astor’s adoption of a fictional antigravity force channels this culture of explanation and conjecture. His readers were accustomed to bridging the gap between rigorous science and imaginative possibility, meeting bold hypotheses with curiosity rather than skepticism alone.
Racial and national ideologies of the era also formed the interpretive backdrop. Anglo-Saxonist thought and Social Darwinist arguments, promoted by figures like Herbert Spencer and popularized in elite circles, buttressed claims of cultural superiority. Immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe surged in the late 19th century, provoking nativist reactions and exclusionary policies elsewhere, including the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). While Astor’s novel is primarily technocratic and exploratory, its assumption that American institutions should lead the world reflects a broader imperial self-confidence common among U.S. and British elites in the 1890s.
Industrial capitalism’s achievements were shadowed by labor conflict. The Homestead Strike (1892) and the Pullman Strike (1894) dramatized clashes between workers and large corporations, raising questions about authority, welfare, and the human cost of efficiency. Utopian and scientific romances responded variously—some offering collective planning as a cure, others warning of mechanized tyranny. Astor’s work leans toward optimism: meticulous organization and applied science promise harmony rather than domination. That stance implicitly addresses contemporary strife by proposing a future in which technology and enlightened administration coordinate interests before they erupt into conflict.
Intellectually, A Journey in Other Worlds sits at a crossroads between Verne’s meticulous plausibility and Wells’s probing of social consequence. Its planetary itinerary was encouraged by the era’s best telescopes and most speculative planetary hypotheses, while its administrative idealism mirrors the trust age’s reverence for system. The result is a narrative that celebrates disciplined expertise, national purpose, and moral rectitude—hallmarks of late 19th-century American elite ideology—while gesturing toward new cosmic horizons where those values might be tested and affirmed on a grander stage than the continent or the sea lanes alone.
Author Biography
John Jacob Astor (1860s–1912) was an American businessman, inventor, and author whose life bridged the Gilded Age and the early twentieth century. Best known publicly for his leadership in luxury real estate and hotels, and historically for his death in the Titanic disaster, he also occupies a distinctive place in literary history as the author of a futurist novel that reflected the era’s technological optimism. His sole major work of fiction, A Journey in Other Worlds, situates him among late nineteenth‑century writers who used imaginative narratives to explore science, industry, and progress, offering a window onto the aspirations and anxieties of modernity’s dawn.
Raised in a milieu of wealth, travel, and engineering curiosity, Astor received an elite preparatory education that emphasized classical studies alongside mathematics and the applied sciences. Beyond formal schooling, he cultivated a sustained interest in mechanics, transportation, and electrical innovation, following contemporary scientific periodicals and public lectures that popularized new discoveries. His literary sensibility was shaped by the “scientific romance” tradition then associated with authors such as Jules Verne, as well as American utopian and reformist writing of the period. These currents—technological enthusiasm, moral didacticism, and world‑building ambition—converged in the speculative framework he later brought to print.
Astor’s professional career developed chiefly in real estate and hospitality, where he financed and managed prominent projects in New York City during a time of rapid urban expansion. He helped establish landmark hotels that became emblematic of luxury and modern convenience, and he pursued mechanical tinkering and patent work as a private avocation. During the Spanish–American War, he supported a volunteer artillery unit and briefly served in a military capacity, an experience that reinforced his engagement with logistics and technology. This blend of commercial leadership, engineering curiosity, and exposure to emergent machines provided the practical backdrop to his foray into speculative fiction.
Published in 1894, A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future projects a late‑twentieth‑century Earth transformed by large-scale engineering, coordinated industry, and organized scientific endeavor. The narrative follows explorers who venture beyond Earth with the aid of advanced propulsion, encountering new environments and moral questions posed by technological reach. Astor uses travel episodes to survey imagined energy systems, transportation networks, and social arrangements, framing them as both adventure and thought experiment. The book’s tone combines didactic exposition with wonder, aligning it with contemporary “scientific romances” that sought to popularize science while speculating about humanity’s material and ethical horizons.
Contemporary reaction to the novel registered its audacity and topical detail more than its literary polish. Reviewers and later scholars often read it as a document of Gilded Age techno‑utopianism—confident in industry, investment, and expert management—tempered by spiritual and philosophical musings that were also current at the fin de siècle. While it never entered the canonical center of science fiction, it has retained value for historians of the genre as an artifact of its transition period, illustrating how a businessman‑inventor construed the future through the lenses of engineering feasibility, administrative order, and the moral responsibilities of expansion.
Astor’s later years were dominated by continued oversight of hotel and real estate ventures and by occasional technological projects, including improvements to comfort and safety in modern buildings. He remained a public figure identified with urban luxury and with the conveniences of electrified living that his properties showcased. His wide travels—by rail and steamship—kept him close to the global circuits of commerce and innovation that informed his futurist imagination. In 1912, his life ended in the North Atlantic aboard the Titanic, an event that cemented his public profile while inevitably overshadowing the quieter literary ambition represented by his earlier novel.
Astor’s legacy persists on two intertwined fronts. In business history, his properties helped define a standard of metropolitan luxury, and his ventures embodied the confidence of American modernity at the turn of the century. In literary culture, A Journey in Other Worlds remains a touchstone for understanding pre‑“Golden Age” science fiction in the United States, notable for its faith in technology and for the questions it poses about power, stewardship, and destiny. Reissued and discussed in historical surveys of the genre, the book continues to illuminate how speculative narratives can both celebrate and interrogate the promises of progress.
A Journey to Other Worlds
Preface
The protracted struggle between science and the classics appears to be drawing to a close, with victory about to perch on the banner of science, as a perusal of almost any university or college catalogue shows. While a limited knowledge of both Greek and Latin is important for the correct use of our own language, the amount till recently required, in my judgment, has been absurdly out of proportion to the intrinsic value of these branches, or perhaps more correctly roots, of study. The classics have been thoroughly and painfully threshed out, and it seems impossible that anything new can be unearthed. We may equal the performances of the past, but there is no opportunity to surpass them or produce anything original. Even the much-vaunted "mental training" argument is beginning to pall; for would not anything equally difficult give as good developing results, while by learning a live matter we kill two birds with one stone? There can be no question that there are many forces and influences in Nature whose existence we as yet little more than suspect. How much more interesting it would be if, instead of reiterating our past achievements, the magazines and literature of the period should devote their consideration to what we do NOT know! It is only through investigation and research that inventions come; we may not find what we are in search of, but may discover something of perhaps greater moment. It is probable that the principal glories of the future will be found in as yet but little trodden paths, and as Prof. Cortlandt justly says at the close of his history, "Next to religion, we have most to hope from science."
Book I.
Chapter I. Jupiter
Jupiter--the magnificent planet with a diameter of 86,500 miles, having 119 times the surface and 1,300 times the volume of the earth--lay beneath them.
They had often seen it in the terrestrial sky, emitting its strong, steady ray, and had thought of that far-away planet, about which till recently so little had been known, and a burning desire had possessed them to go to it and explore its mysteries. Now, thanks to APERGY[1], the force whose existence the ancients suspected, but of which they knew so little, all things were possible.
Ayrault manipulated the silk-covered glass handles, and the Callisto moved on slowly in comparison with its recent speed, and all remained glued to their telescopes as they peered through the rushing clouds, now forming and now dissolving before their eyes. What transports of delight, what ecstatic bliss, was theirs! Men had discovered and mastered the secret of apergy, and now, "little lower than the angels," they could soar through space, leaving even planets and comets behind.
"Is it not strange," said Dr. Cortlandt, "that though it has been known for over a century that bodies charged with unlike electricities attract one another, and those charged with like repel, no one thought of utilizing the counterpart of gravitation? In the nineteenth century, savants and Indian jugglers performed experiments with their disciples and masses of inert matter, by causing them to remain without visible support at some distance from the ground; and while many of these, of course, were quacks, some were on the right track, though they did not push their research."
President Bearwarden and Ayrault assented. They were steering for an apparently hard part of the planet's surface, about a degree and a half north of its equator.
"Since Jupiter's axis is almost at right angles to the plane of its orbit," said the doctor, "being inclined only about one degree and a half, instead of twenty-three and a half, as was the earth's till nearly so recently, it will be possible for us to have any climate we wish, from constantly warm at the equator to constantly cool or cold as we approach the poles, without being troubled by extremes of winter and summer."
Until the Callisto entered the planet's atmosphere, its five moons appeared like silver shields against the black sky, but now things were looking more terrestrial, and they began to feel at home. Bearwarden put down his note-book, and Ayrault returned a photograph to his pocket, while all three gazed at their new abode. Beneath them was a vast continent variegated by chains of lakes and rivers stretching away in all directions except toward the equator, where lay a placid ocean as far as their telescopes could pierce. To the eastward were towering and massive mountains, and along the southern border of the continent smoking volcanoes, while toward the west they saw forests, gently rolling plains, and table-lands that would have satisfied a poet or set an agriculturist's heart at rest. "How I should like to mine those hills for copper, or drain the swamps to the south!" exclaimed Col. Bearwarden. "The Lake Superior mines and the reclamation of the Florida Everglades would be nothing to this."
"Any inhabitants we may find here have so much land at their disposal that they will not need to drain swamps on account of pressure of population for some time," put in the doctor.
"I hope we may find some four-legged inhabitants," said Ayrault, thinking of their explosive magazine rifles[1q]. "If Jupiter is passing through its Jurassic or Mesozoic period, there must be any amount of some kind of game." Just then a quiver shook the Callisto, and glancing to the right they noticed one of the volcanoes in violent eruption. Smoke filled the air in clouds, hot stones and then floods of lava poured from the crater, while even the walls of the hermetically sealed Callisto could not arrest the thunderous crashes that made the interior of the car resound.
"Had we not better move on?" said Bearwarden, and accordingly they went toward the woods they had first seen. Finding a firm strip of land between the forest and an arm of the sea, they gently grounded the Callisto, and not being altogether sure how the atmosphere of their new abode would suit terrestrial lungs, or what its pressure to the square inch might be, they cautiously opened a port-hole a crack, retaining their hold upon it with its screw. Instantly there was a rush and a whistling sound as of escaping steam, while in a few moments their barometer stood at thirty-six inches, whereupon they closed the opening.
"I fancy," said Dr. Cortlandt, "we had better wait now till we become accustomed to this pressure. I do not believe it will go much higher, for the window made but little resistance when we shut it."
Finding they were not inconvenienced by a pressure but little greater than that of a deep coal-mine, they again opened the port, whereupon their barometer showed a further rise to forty-two, and then remained stationary. Finding also that the chemical composition of the air suited them, and that they had no difficulty in breathing, the pressure being the same as that sustained by a diver in fourteen feet of water, they opened a door and emerged. They knew fairly well what to expect, and were not disturbed by their new conditions. Though they had apparently gained a good deal in weight as a result of their ethereal journey, this did not incommode them; for though Jupiter's volume is thirteen hundred times that of the earth, on account of its lesser specific gravity, it has but three hundred times the mass--i. e., it would weigh but three hundred times as much. Further, although a cubic foot of water or anything else weighs 2.5 as much as on earth, objects near the equator, on account of Jupiter's rapid rotation, weigh one fifth less than they do at the poles, by reason of the centrifugal force. Influenced by this fact, and also because they were 483,000,000 miles from the sun, instead of 92,000,000 as on earth, they had steered for the northern limit of Jupiter's tropics. And, in addition to this, they could easily apply the apergetic power in any degree to themselves when beyond the limits of the Callisto, and so be attracted to any extent, from twice the pull they receive from gravitation on earth to almost nothing.
Bearwarden and Ayrault shouldered their rifles, while Dr. Cortlandt took a repeating shot-gun with No. 4 shot, and, having also some hunting-knives and a sextant, all three set out in a northwesterly direction. The ground was rather soft, and a warm vapor seemed to rise from it. To the east the sky was veiled by dense clouds of smoke from the towering volcanoes, while on their left the forest seemed to extend without limit. Clumps of huge ferns were scattered about, and the ground was covered with curious tracks.
"Jupiter is evidently passing through a Carboniferous or Devonian period such as existed on earth, though, if consistent with its size, it should be on a vastly larger scale," said the doctor. "I never believed in the theory," he continued, "that the larger the planet the smaller should be its inhabitants, and always considered it a makeshift, put forward in the absence of definite knowledge, the idea being apparently that the weight of very large creatures would be too great for their strength. Of the fact that mastodons and creatures far larger than any now living on earth existed there, we have absolute proof, though gravitation must have been practically the same then as now."
Just here they came upon a number of huge bones, evidently the remains of some saurian, and many times the size of a grown crocodile. On passing a growth of most luxuriant vegetation, they saw a half-dozen sacklike objects, and drawing nearer noticed that the tops began to swell, and at the same time became lighter in colour. Just as the doctor was about to investigate one of them with his duck-shot, the enormously inflated tops of the creatures collapsed with a loud report, and the entire group soared away. When about to alight, forty yards off, they distended membranous folds in the manner of wings, which checked their descent, and on touching the ground remained where they were without rebound.
"We expected to find all kinds of reptiles and birds," exclaimed the doctor. "But I do not know how we should class those creatures. They seem to have pneumatic feet and legs, for their motion was certainly not produced like that of frogs."
When the party came up with them the heads again began to swell.
"I will perforate the air-chamber of one," said Col. Bearwarden, withdrawing the explosive cartridge from the barrel of his rifle and substituting one with a solid ball. "This will doubtless disable one so that we can examine it."
Just as they were about to rise, he shot the largest through the neck. All but the wounded one, soared off, while Bearwarden, Ayrault, and Cortlandt approached to examine it more closely.
"You see," said Cortlandt, "this vertebrate--for that is as definitely as we can yet describe it--forces a great pressure of air into its head and neck, which, by the action of valves, it must allow to rush into its very rudimentary lower extremities, distending them with such violence that the body is shot upward and forward. You may have noticed the tightly inflated portion underneath as they left the ground."
While speaking he had moved rather near, when suddenly a partially concealed mouth opened, showing the unmistakable tongue and fangs of a serpent. It emitted a hissing sound, and the small eyes gleamed maliciously.
"Do you believe it is a poisonous species?" asked Ayrault.
