A Trip to Venus was written by John Munro and first appeared as “A Message from Mars” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, April 1895). Munro (1849-1930) was a British engineer and educator who wrote popular science books about electricity. He was famous in his lifetime for his A Pocket Book of Electrical Rules and Tables for the Use of Electricians and Engineers (1894), but now is known for A Trip to Venus.

Nasmyth Carmichael is an American physicist and inventor who discovers (he refuses to describe how or where he discovered it) a “new force” which is capable of providing almost unlimited energy and acting as an anti-gravity energy source. Carmichael decides to use it to travel into space. Shooting a ship out of a giant cannon, which Jules Verne used in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) is rejected as insufficient for Carmichael’s needs: the cannon will not create enough muzzle velocity. So Carmichael designs a ship similar to a submarine, although larger, heavier, and boxier, and takes it into the solar system. He takes with him his daughter, Miss Carmichael, Professor Gazen, an astronomer, and the nameless narrator. They go to Venus, which they discover has an atmosphere, vegetation, seas and people surprisingly similar to Earth. The Venusians are “a fine race, tall, handsome, and of white complexion”¹ who are peaceful, serene, and strict vegetarians, with an easily learned language. Their culture is advanced. Venus, in their care, is an idyllic planet. Disease, pain, crime and sin are virtually unknown, and most Venusians live at least one hundred and fifty years. The narrator falls in love with Alumion, the most beautiful of the Venusians and their priestess, and the pair marry, but Gazen and the others carry him off, since he wants to remain on Venus and they want to move on. The group go to Mercury, which has a breathable atmosphere and an array of predatory animals, including a creature similar to a dragon, but no intelligent life. At the end of the book the group has returned to Earth, with the narrator swearing to go back to Venus and live with his Alumion.

As literature A Trip to Venus is poor stuff, clichéd and dull. Much of the novel is devoted to discussions of scientific and astronomical phenomena which will not hold the interest of the modern reader. But it is an interesting precursor to modern hard science fiction: “Hard sf is the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone."² The “new force” is ambiguously described, in much the same way that apergy was in Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880), and the Venusians are typical Victorian aliens, peaceful humanoids advanced to the point of cultural perfection. But in other respects A Trip to Venus is as realistic as Munro could make it. In the novel he devotes some space to describing realistic space travel possibilities. Munro mentions and describes multistage rockets, space stations, the use of parachutes in planetary landings, and multi-generation space travel, although none of these concepts are used in the novel itself. The actual trip through space is as realistically-described as Munro could make it, keeping in mind that he was limited to a late-nineteenth century understanding of space and rocketry. Munro seemed to have intended A Trip to Venus to be not just as realistic as he could manage, but also instructive, which is another of the features of hard science fiction. This approach to writing a novel is typical of a certain type of novel and writer in the nineteenth century, and is used by authors ranging from Herman Melville (in Moby-Dick) to Jules Verne.

Lastly, it is of note that A Trip to Venus makes references to the work of Verne and, more ambiguously, Percy Greg. A Trip to Venus is written in 1895, a long time past the debut of Verne and well into the period when science fiction had cohered into a distinct and recognizable genre. The phrase “science fiction” was not used at this time, of course, not being coined by Hugo Gernsback until 1929, but other phrases were used by readers, writers, editors, publishers, and advertisers: “scientific fiction,” “romance of science,” “imaginative fiction,” and “scientific romance,” among others. (In 1895 “scientific romance” was the nearest thing to an agreed-upon term for science fiction,³ but that term was not all-encompassing of the entire genre the way that “science fiction” would later come to be). By 1895 there was a general awareness on the part of readers et al. that science fiction was something special and different, and that there was something approaching a canon of works in the genre. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that John Munro, in A Trip to Venus, refers to Verne and Greg. One of the best ways to gain acceptance in a genre is to name-drop works from that genre, as a way of displaying one’s knowledge of the genre–and it is clear that Munro, an engineer and educator by trade, wanted A Trip to Venus to be accepted into the genre so that it could fulfill his goal of teaching science fiction readers and writers about the technicalities of space travel.

It’s a shame, then, that Munro was a poor writer of fiction; in more talented hands A Trip to Venus might have become one of the pre-Wells classics of space travel. As it is, A Trip to Venus is no more than a curiosity.

Print: John Munro, A Trip to Venus (Riverdale, CA: Baen Books, 2013). Note: e-book.

¹ John Munro, A Trip to Venus, Project Gutenberg, accessed Feb. 11, 2019, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13716/13716-h/13716-h.htm

² Allan Steele, “Hard Again,” New York Review of Science Fiction 4.10 (June, 1992): 1.

³ See Brian Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985).