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-foot-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 unprecedented, but while Verne chose to sent his voyagers aloft using a giant cannon, Hale opts for the equally unfeasible but somehow more pleasing solution of a giant flywheel.
Andrew Crumey, "The Brick Moon," theguardian.com, May 14, 2011
Jules Verne's From The Earth to the Moon had appeared five years earlier, so Hale's work was not unprecedented, but while Verne chose to sent his voyagers aloft using a giant cannon, Hale opts for the equally unfeasible but somehow more pleasing solution of a giant flywheel.
Andrew Crumey, "The Brick Moon," theguardian.com, May 14, 2011
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