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H. G Wells had his own ideas
about how to reach the Moon. Since the anti-gravity cavorite in
his novel First Men in the Moon turned out to be a total
fantasy, Wells opted for the more Vernesque space gun in his 1936
sci-fi epic Things to Come. As described by an old man to
his great-granddaughter in the year 2036, the gun worked thus,
It is a gun they
discharge by electricity. It's a lot of guns one inside the other;
each one discharges the next inside. I don't properly
understand that. But the cylinder it shoots out at last,
goes so fast that it goes swish right away from the earth.
What granddad didn't mention is
that the thing was insanely dangerous with a better than even chance
of coming back dead or maimed for life from using it. That isn't
surprising when you look at the take-off seats in the picture below.
Haven't these people heard of headrests?
But that didn't stop the
daughter of the ruler of the world, Oswald Cabal and her fat-headed
boyfriend from volunteering to be the first human beings to be shot
'round the Moon or Cabal from saying "Goodo". Frankly, I don't
know what unnerves me more, the eagerness of Cabal to blast his flesh
and blood into infinity or his daughter's glassy-eyed enthusiasm that
reminds one disturbingly of the more fanatical members of the Communist
Young Pioneers.
Mind you, This space gun thing
wasn't just an exercise in engineering or pure science. According to
Cabal it's the first step in a programme of literally universal
conquest. In his words,
 (Man)
must go on; conquest beyond conquest. This little planet and
its winds and ways, and all the laws of mind and matter that
restrain him. Then the planets about him, and at last out
across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all
the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time; still he will be
beginning... It is that or this? All the universe or
nothing!
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