From the Earth to the Moon

A Baltimore gun club, bored after the American Civil War, resolves to fire a projectile at the moon, and most of the novel is the project: the ballistics, the funding, the choice of a launch site in Florida for its latitude, the casting of an enormous cannon, and the late decision to put people inside the shell. Verne does the arithmetic on the page. It is less a story than a feasibility study with characters, and that is why engineers keep reading it.

Context: a16z cite this one specifically for its “fairly accurate orbital calculations,” part of their case that Verne “researched everything obsessively.” The coincidences with the actual Apollo programme — a Florida launch, a three-man crew, an ocean splashdown — are the reason this book is quoted at every space-company all-hands.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — where this is listed, in the classics tier.
• Jules Verne — the author.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days — the other three Verne titles on the list.
• The Martian — the modern version of the same trick: fiction whose tension is entirely engineering, which Kyle has read.
• Science Fiction — the genre.