Carl Ignaz Geiger 44 min read

Weary of Europe's childish craze for balloons and airships, an earth-dweller undertakes the real thing, a voyage to the planet Mars, and a satirical look at its society.

Carl Ignaz Geiger's 1790 German novel is a remarkably early work of interplanetary fiction and social satire. Witty, visionary, historically important. Read it for a genuine eighteenth-century voyage to Mars, a founding ancestor of the whole tradition of the interplanetary tale, in German.

In its time

Published in 1790, during the Pre-1800, voyages to the moon, subterranean worlds, and philosophical utopias, the deep roots of the imaginative tradition, from kepler and cyrano to the enlightenment.

Reading it

44 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).