Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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The Moon Voyage by Jules Verne
As I’m sure you’re aware, De la Terre à la Lune supposedly inspired the famous, entertainingly bonkers Georges Méliès film Le Voyage Dans La Lune, which apparently began the great cinematic tradition of completely ignoring the source material upon which films are based. It has a moon in it, and a gun-launched space vehicle, but there the similarities end.Verne’s light-hearted vision of lunar exploration is much closer to the reality than H. G. Wells’s take on a moonshot, which relied on the hypothetical antigravity material Cavorite. Whilst it is not really possible to use a huge gun to propel a projectile to the moon without turning any passengers into astronaut soup, the principles of ballistics employed by Verne are much closer to the methods of rocketry used in real space-flight than Wells’s nebulous physics-defying alloy. Verne’s story also concludes that whilst the moon may have once been inhabited, it is now devoid of life, whereas The First Men In The Moon details the fantastic Selenite beings inhabiting the interior of the satellite. All in all, Verne’s much earlier speculations on the subject of exploring our nearest neighbour were nearer the mark. (more…)