Edward Everett Hale ~6 hr read

A group of friends conceive a scheme to launch a great sphere of brick into orbit as a navigational aid, and accidentally hurl it aloft with people still aboard.

Edward Everett Hale's 1869 story is a landmark of early SF, the first fictional depiction of an artificial satellite. Charming, prophetic, historically vital. Read it for the story that imagined the space station decades before spaceflight, an inadvertently inhabited brick moon circling the Earth, told with genial Yankee wit.

In its time

Published in 1869, during the 1860s, verne launches the voyages extraordinaires.

Reading it

~6 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).