Mac Milford's Trip Through the Universe. From the Earth to the Moon or Under the Selenites (1902-1903)

Mac Milford’s Trip Through the Universe. From the Earth to the Moon or Under the Selenites (original: Mac Milfords Reisen im Universum. Von der Terra zur Luna oder Unter den Seleniten. Astronomische Erzählung) was written by Oskar Hoffmann. Hoffmann (1866-1928) was a prolific writer of science fiction in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. He wrote nonfiction and fiction for both adults and juveniles.

Mac Milford is an Scottish astronomer, scientist, and inventor who wants to be the first man not only to travel into space but also to land on the moon. Toward this end he creates three separate methods for space travel--he is aware that space travel is dangerous and develops redundancies for his ship. The first method is the “Atomizer,” a teleporter, which “electrolyzes” organic matter, disintegrates it, and then reconstructs it elsewhere, regardless of distance. But the Atomizer is potentially dangerous, and Milford eventually decides not to use it to get to the moon. He has a “cozier way” to get there: his “Anti-Gravitation Vehicle,” the Sirius. This ship has a hull lined with planks and a keel on the underside of the ship. It has an electric headlight and cross-paned windows, and in most regards is a departure from the Vernean model of airships (see: Robur the Conqueror).

But Milford is not alone in his trip to the moon and is not the first man into space. An American named “Lowell” (implicitly the American astronomer Percival Lowell [1855-1916]), has gone to the moon in a “magnetic dragonflyer.” Milford and Mary follow him, launching the Sirius from a mountaintop. They navigate their way through a swarm of shooting stars and then find a new, small moon, which Milford names “Lilliput.” They land on it and find that it is inhabited by “ape men,” the Darwinian missing link. Milford and Mary leave Lilliput and discover, in space, the remains of a crumpled balloon and its passengers, all dead from the cold and the vacuum. (Milford and Mary are a bit more warmly dressed) The balloon was caught up in the “Anti-Gravitation Cathode” of Sirius and were dragged into space. Further out the Sirius reaches the Lagrange Point, the area between the Earth and the Moon at which the gravity of the Earth and of the moon cancel each other out. The Cathode stops working at the Lagrange Point, and the Sirius is trapped, with the only means of escaping being by venting “precious anti-magnetic fluid.” This cancels out Earth's gravity and allows the Sirius to continue on its way to the moon. There they find a race of beings, the Selenites, who were once at humanity's level of evolutionary development but who degenerated. Unfortunately, Lowell reached the moon before them, fought the Selenites, defeated them and made himself their ruler. Milford and Mary have various adventures before escaping from him and from the Selenites. Milford and Mary find an underground world, with a valley of diamonds, a lake, a crumbling cave, and a forest of giant mushrooms. Eventually Milford and Mary escape from the moon and return to Earth in the Sirius. They land in England, but they are stopped from reporting to the King of England by the police, who do not believe their story of going to the moon and lock them in a sanitarium. Milford and Mary are rescued by Milford's servant, who springs them from the sanitarium with the help of the Sirius.

Mac Milford's Trip Through the Universe is one of the earliest works of modern German science fiction. The tradition of science fiction in Germany goes back at least to Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634), but modern German science fiction begins in 1897 with Kurd Laßwitz (see: Between Two Planets). Mac Milford, though, was not particularly influenced by Laßwitz, instead more or less openly aping Jules Verne’s The First Men in the Moon. However, Verne did not make Milford an eccentric, like Professor Cavor, or even a Romantic misanthrope like Verne’s Captain Nemo (see: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) or Robur (see: Robur the Conqueror). Instead, Milford is an engineer-adventurer in the mode of Nasmyth Carmichael (of John Munro’s A Trip to Venus) and of the heroes of the Edisonades. The figure of the scientist developed in several different directions in American popular science fiction at the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century; there were numerous scientist-adventurers in dime novels and pulps, but there were nearly as many mad scientists and would-be tyrants using advanced technology to attempt to conquer the world. In the German heftromane, or “hero novels,” the German equivalent of pulps—the format in which Mac Milford originally appeared—there was no such binary: the heroic scientist-adventurer was far more common than the mad scientist. The reasons for this were twofold: the heavy influence of the work of Jules Verne, and to appease the unstated demands of the audience:

In the main figure of the secret inventor—an engineer who lives in seclusion, but is a “genius”—who suddenly emerges with a new wonder-weapon to save the nation, a hero was created with whom the politically-underprivileged bourgeoisie of prewar Europe which sought recognition and compensatory satisfaction could identify. This hero was also attractive to the apolitical parts of the working class—all the more so, when alongside the bourgeois main character was a truly talented, honest, diligent and clever tool-maker or foreman, without whom the invention could not be realized.¹

Mac Milford's Trip Through the Universe lacks characterization, thematic subtlety, humor (except of the broadest and most lumbering sort), and a graceful narrative style, but it is an interesting forerunner of twentieth century pulp science fiction, both German and American.

Print: Oskar Hoffmann, Mac Milfords Reisen im Universum. Von der Terra zur Luna oder Unter den Seleniten. Astronomische Erzählung. Roda S.-A.A. Weller & Co, 1902. (There is no English-language translation available).

Roland Innerhoffer, Deutsche Science Fiction, 1870-1914: Rekonstruktion und Analyse der Anfänge einter Gattung. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 1996.

Manfred Nagl, Science Fiction in Deutschland. Untersuchungen zur Genese, Soziographie und Ideologie der phantastischen Massenliteratur. Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 1972.

¹ Manfred Nagl, Science Fiction in Deutschland. Untersuchungen zur Genese, Soziographie und Ideologie der phantastischen Massenliteratur (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 1972), 69.