Nope.. can't do it, i can't give this 2 stars. Part of me wants to, it has some interesting sci-fi elements and alien critters but its just too awful.
It's very dry and boring most of the time with an overly scientific style that also reacts very badly with the story, which is so unscientific. When its not being mind numbingly boring the characterization seems to be from a really bad pulp.
Then there's the religious stuff which manages to be both terrible on its own and still as dull as the science.
It has been quite some time since i've had such a painful reading experience, despite minor points of interest, such as one of the characters turning into Patrick Swayze (Ghost), this is a truly terrible book.
Go read 'A Honeymoon in Space by George Griffith' instead. ( )

I really enjoy reading old futuristic stories and seeing what people got right and how they got things wrong--and also reminding myself that all of our favorite hard scifi will one day sound as dated as this book does, and wondering what people will be able to infer about us from the values we project on our visions of the future.

The perspective of this book is so very 19th century, rich, white, American, well-educated. It has manifest destiny written all over it. All of the countries of the Americas have become part of the United States, because of course, what else would they do? Non-white peoples outside of Europe have slowly died out making room for the white people (yes, really), and next humanity will expand to other planets, perhaps even other stars! (They discover later that there are other intelligent people in the universe, but fear not, only humans have souls.) And though the protagonists undertake a mission to Jupiter, do not mistake it for a scientific mission, they are on safari.

Despite all that, it's also interesting what he gets right. Toward the beginning are a couple chapters of the history of the 20th century, which get a lot of the details wrong but the overall picture isn't all that far off. For instance, he predicts a cold war between France and Germany leading to the rapid development and science and technology; both sides create weapons so powerful that they could never be used, preventing what was apparently already referred to as the Great War. The rapid advance in technology also led to many innovations like automobiles, freeways, and suburbs.

The science is also dated, of course. This is pre-plate techtonics, and the reigning view of the way celestial bodies work is they start out molten like the sun, then gradually cool and shrink, with the shrinkage creating mountain ranges. Smaller planets cool faster, so Mars is already dead. The very large planets are still warm, which keeps them inhabitable despite being further from the sun. Once the planets cool, life proceeds in nearly the same way as on Earth; since Jupiter cooled enough to support life much later, it's in an earlier stage of evolution, corresponding to the Devonian period on Earth (though not exactly, I don't think the devonian had dinosaurs) with plants and animals recognizable from Earth's geological record. Saturn is slightly more "advanced", as it's smaller than Jupiter.

(Side note: at this point I realized why landscapes of dinosaurs always have erupting volcanoes in the background--not just because one may have killed them, but also because according to the pre-plate techtonics theory of geology the earth was actually more volcanic back then, and has cooled and become less active over time. So of course there were erupting volcanoes all over the place back then.)

That covers parts 1 and 2. Part 3 veers away from the science into the metaphysical, and I didn't enjoy it very much. Part of Christian doctrine is that once you die, all the good and bad that you've done are tallied up and you can't change your condition with respect to God any more after that. I've never liked that doctrine, and part 3 expounds on it at length. ( )

I’ve been downloading a number of free (because the copyright has expired) books to my Kindle (so I can read in the dark walking home from Starbucks); my tastes are for science fiction and adventure, so I have a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sax Rohmer and so forth. I generally go with whatever Amazon recommends based on previous books- pot luck IOW. Thus I loaded A Journey To Other Worlds without any idea what it was about; it turned out to be fairly interesting (not actually good, but interesting).


For one thing, the author is John Jacob Astor IV – the guy who went down on the Titanic. It’s a “future history”; the action is set in 2000 although the book was written in 1894. The USA of 2000 is definitely a utopia; one of the protagonists is the president of a company which is in the process of tilting the Earth’s axis to the vertical – to “equalize the seasons” – by pumping water back and forth between the dammed-up Arctic Ocean and Antarctic. There’s an “As You Know Bob” speech at the beginning, where the progress of the US in the 20th century is outlined – all of the Western Hemisphere is now part of the US (voluntarily; Canada and the Latin American countries petitioned for statehood when they saw how wonderful it was). Travel is by maglev rail, aircraft, high speed automobile, and hovercraft (Astor’s hovercraft are called “sea spiders” and work by blowing compressed air out the “legs”). Power comes from windmills and solar (collected for steam; no photovoltaics). And “apergy” – antigravity - has just been discovered.


Thus our heroes set off to explore the solar system in the Callisto, powered by apergy. Their first destination is Jupiter, which turns out to have a solid surface (the Great Red Spot is caused by a patch of vegetation). Jupiter is inhabited by a variety of prehistoric life, which the three travelers immediately start killing – almost as soon as they set foot out the hatch of the Callisto. After much sporting mayhem against anything they see (including a mastodon, some big amphibians, dragon-like things, and giant ants), and the conclusion that Jupiter will have lots of developable resources, they reboard their spaceship and set off for Saturn, which turns out to be – Heaven. That’s right; after you die and if you’ve been good, you end up on Saturn. The heroes don’t’ seem terribly nonplussed by this; in fact they even take some pot shots at one of the souls of the departed just to see what happens. (The soul is a little annoyed but not hurt). They meet a philosophical soul (a former Episcopal bishop), who discourses at length on the workings of the Universe. It turns out Hell is on another as-yet-unknown giant planet, Cassandra, outside the orbit of Neptune (no Pluto in 1894, of course). The helpful soul notes that all the other stars in the Universe also have planets and life, including sentient life – but Earth is the only one with souls that survive after death. Then back to Earth (with a plan to explore Venus next, which was perhaps to be a sequel, never completed).


As implied, rather uneven. Some of Astor’s thoughts seem to be prescient (although to be fair if I’d read the book in the 1960s it would have seemed to be silly to be using windmills and solar instead of nuclear power. Astor also missed radio; the travelers communicate with Earth by signal light). The theology is a little boring, and the fact that the explorers gun down every living thing (and even try for nonliving things) seems kind of creepy. A curiosity; worth it as a Kindle freebie.
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Historically important, but dull story of visiting the planets

Read in 1894 Britoish ed. (Longmans, Green & Co., 476 pp.) ( )