The Consolidator Or, Memoirs Of Sundry Transactions From The World In The Moon

Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year among many others, is not generally recognised for his science fiction, but in fact he wrote one of the most peculiar of early voyages to the Moon. The vehicle is a winged chariot powered by fuel and fire in a manner that makes it sound strangely like a combustion engine of some sort, but the fact that the number of feathers on the wings matched the number of seats in parliament demonstrates that the whole thing is meant more satirically than scientifically. Once on the Moon the traveller discovers a host of marvels, ranging from a seat that can read thoughts to a glass through which could be observed all the happenings back on Earth. But what we really get is a rather vicious satire on the Royal Society (all learned men are described as idiots) that is similar in many ways to the flying island of Laputa in Swift's Gulliver's Travels which came out some 20 years later. Why it's on the list: Defoe was something of a rabble rouser, notorious for his controversial conservative ideas, and he would use the Moon as a platform from which to lash out at what he saw as the idiocies of his day not just in this novel but in a whole series of pamphlets and essays written around the same time. This is an important, if now little known, episode in the history of Moon literature.