A Journey in Other Worlds

A Journey in Other Worlds

Author	John Jacob Astor IV
Illustrator	Dan Beard
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction Speculative fiction Utopian fiction
Publisher	D. Appleton & Co.
Publication date	1894
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	476 pp.

A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future is a science fiction novel by John Jacob Astor IV, published in 1894. ^[1]

Overview

The Callisto was going straight up.

The book offers a fictional account of life in the year 2000. It contains abundant speculation about technological invention, including descriptions of a worldwide telephone network, solar power, air travel, space travel to the planets Saturn and Jupiter, and terraforming engineering projects — damming the Arctic Ocean, and an adjustment of the axial tilt of the Earth (Terra) by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company.

The future United States is a multi-continental superpower. European nations have been taken over by socialist governments, which have sold most of their African colonies to the U.S., while Canada, Mexico, and the countries of South America have requested annexation. Space travel is achieved through apergy, an anti-gravitational energy force.

A Battle Royal on Jupiter.

Jupiter proves to be a jungle world, with flesh-eating plants, vampire bats, giant snakes and mastodons, and flying lizards. The Americans discover a wealth of exploitable resources: iron, silver, gold, lead, copper, coal, and oil.

Saturn, in contrast, is an ancient world of silent spirits. These beings provide the explorers with foresight of their own deaths. One of the spirits, a deceased bishop, tells the voyagers about the icy world Cassandra, which orbits the Sun beyond Neptune and is home to the souls of unworthy Earthlings.

Other editions

A paperback edition of A Journey in Other Worlds was issued in 2003. ^[2]

See also

• Novels portal

• Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy Greg
• Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century (1874) by Andrew Blair
• The Great Romance (1881) by Anonymous
• Journey to Mars (1894) by Gustavus W. Pope
• Journey to Venus (1895) by Gustavus W. Pope
• A Prophetic Romance (1896) by John McCoy
• A Honeymoon in Space (1901) by George Griffith

References

1. Pfaelzer, Jean (1984). The Utopian Novel in America 1886–1896: The Politics of Form. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 108–11. ISBN   0-8229-5413-3.
2. Astor, John Jacob, IV (2003). A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future. Lincoln, NE: Bison Frontiers of Imagination Series, Bison Books. ISBN   0-8032-5949-2.

Further reading

• Bailey, James Osler (1972) [1947]. "Chapter Four: To the Islands of the Blest: Scientific Fiction, 1871–1894—C. The Wonderful Journey—3. To Other Planets". Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction. Greenwood Press. pp. 69–70. ISBN   978-0-8371-6323-9.
• Bleiler, Everett Franklin (1990). "Astor, John Jacob [IV], (1864–1912)". Science-fiction, the Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-fiction Stories from Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930: with Author, Title, and Motif Indexes . With the assistance of Richard J. Bleiler. Kent State University Press. pp. 23–24. ISBN   978-0-87338-416-2.
• Clute, John (2024). "Astor, John Jacob". In Clute, John; Langford, David; Sleight, Graham (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (4th ed.). Retrieved 2024-12-04.
• Green, Adam (2014-07-10). "A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (1894)". The Public Domain Review . Archived from the original on 2024-10-04. Retrieved 2024-12-21.
• Green, Roger Lancelyn (1975) [1958]. "Worlds Beyond Mars". Into Other Worlds: Space-Flight in Fiction, from Lucian to Lewis. Arno Press. pp. 155–161. ISBN   978-0-405-06329-9.
• Guthke, Karl Siegfried (1990). "Novels at the Turn of the Century: The End of the World—the Future of Mankind". The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. pp. 369–370. ISBN   978-0-8014-1680-4.
• Roberts, Adam (2016). "SF 1850–1900: Mobility and Mobilisation". The History of Science Fiction. Palgrave Histories of Literature (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. p. 165. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-56957-8_7. ISBN   978-1-137-56957-8. OCLC   956382503.
• Seed, David (2011). "Voyages into Space". Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. OUP Oxford. p. 10. ISBN   978-0-19-162010-2.
• Shroyer, Frederick (1979). "A Journey in Other Worlds". In Magill, Frank N. (ed.). Survey of Science Fiction Literature: Five Hundred 2,000-Word Essay Reviews of World-Famous Science Fiction Novels With 2,500 Bibliographical References. Vol. 3: Imp – Nin. Salem Press. pp. 1098–1101. ISBN   978-0-89356-194-9.

External links

• A Journey in Other Worlds at Project Gutenberg
• A Journey in Other Worlds public domain audiobook at LibriVox