1901 SF. Lord Redgrave has built the first spaceship, and with his new
wife (the daughter of the late inventor) goes on a tour of the solar
system.
And there's really very little personality here at all; Redgrave
is the standard colonial-era action hero, except that he has no
thought of spreading civilisation; rather, he's purely a tourist. His
wife Zaidie (an American) gets to be the emotional one, and sometimes
faint. In a series of six short stories, later fixed up into a short
novel, they visit the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, as well
as a stellar collision that's forming a new planetary system. And of
course they are well-armed.
The defensive armament of the Astronef consisted of four pneumatic
guns, which could be mounted on swivels, two ahead and two astern,
and which carried a shell containing either one of two kinds of
explosives invented by her creator. One was a solid. and burst on
impact with an explosive force equal to about twenty pounds of
dynamite. The other consisted of two liquids separated in the shell,
and these, when mixed by the breaking of the partition, nurse into a
volume of flame which could not be extinguished by any known human
means. It would burn even in a vacuum, since it supplied its own
elements of combustion. The guns would throw these shells to a
distance of about seven terrestrial miles. On the upper deck there
were also stands for a couple of light machine guns, capable of
discharging seven hundred bullets a minute.
The small arms consisted of a couple of heavy, ten-bore, elephant
guns carrying explosive bullets, a dozen rifles and fowling pieces
of different makes of which three, a single and a double-barrelled
rifle and a double-barrelled shot-gun, belonged to her ladyship, as
well as a dainty brace of revolvers, one of half-a-dozen brace of
various calibres which completed the minor armament of the
Astronef.
This is for a crew of three people, the leader of whom has sworn to
see the ship destroyed before it's used as a weapon of war. Yeah.
(Though he's not above a bit of petty electioneering, with a quick
blast at bimetallism.) Of course, it does mean that when a mob of
locals gets unruly they can be effortlessly Maxim-gunned by the dozen,
so that's all right then.
There's a fair bit of Flammarion's aging worlds (all these places have
been inhabited; in some places the inhabitants have died out as they
gradually ran out of heat and air, in others they've regressed, and
Venus being "young" has creatures who don't yet understand sin) and
some attempt to work out just how one can take advantage of the
R.Force (the repelling component of gravity); it can be used for
propulsion, but near planets it's used merely for levitation, because
the propellers can drive one at a perfectly adequate two hundred miles
an hour.
Of course a spaceship working by unknown principles of science still
needs an engine-room telegraph.
Is this the earliest example of planet-of-the-week tourism? I can't
say, though it's the earliest I've met. It's silly, and if you can get
past the attitudes it's fun, and not to be taken at all seriously.
Freely available from Project
Gutenberg and of course
Marcus L. Rowland who has
the original short story versions as well as the fixup novel A
Honeymoon in Space.
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