Has it really only been just five short decades since humans landed on the Moon? From one viewpoint, it’s a marvelous achievement. From another viewpoint, a downer—hard-working SF writers can no longer write thrilling tales about being the first man to step onto the Moon1.
Of course, we now know going to the Moon is a trivial matter of harnessing a respectable fraction of the wealthiest nation on the planet’s economy for a decade or so. Old-timey SF authors thought it might be difficult, which is why they often wrote tales in which the first human landed on the Moon long after 1969.
Many such tales were published in the days of yore. Here are several that amused me.
Take the first line of Forbidden Planet’s opening monologue, for example:
In the final decade of the 21st century, men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon.
That “and women” gives the venerable film an out, of course.
Even the 2090s is much sooner than Olaf Stapledon guessed: his Fifth Men conquer space about 400 million years from now.
Still, here and there are moments of optimism. Alfred Bester’s “Adam and No Eve,” for example, depicts an attempt to reach the Moon by a visionary inventor; the mission is greatly complicated by an underappreciated side effect of the propulsion system. Bester does not give an exact date, but internal evidence suggests that his imagined launch date long predated any other fictional mission’s launch date. I’m being mysterious, but that’s because spoiler.
Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon is set in an era when Sputniks are still news and the Russians still have a lead in the space race…or so it seems. Continental Electronic’s top secret blue-sky project hands the U.S. the key to creating a secret base on the dark side of the Moon: a long-range teleporter. In fact, it is something even better than an interplanetary teleporter. It’s a matter duplicator, which means no matter how many brave Americans die up on the Moon, the U.S. can just make more copies. And they need this ability, because the other unexpected lunar development is the existence of an alien artifact that kills every explorer to venture into it…
Richard Lester’s The Mouse on the Moon (adapted from the Leonard Wibberley novel of the same title) is a sequel to the pocket duchy of Grand Fenwick’s success in conquering the U.S. Next step: the conquest of space! As in the film The Mouse that Roared, the expedition begins as Prime Minister Mountjoy’s latest attempt to separate the U.S. from a small share of its vast wealth. The key to the exercise is a faked space program. Mountjoy fails to reckon with the genius of Fenwick’s Professor Kokinz, who delivers a functioning moon rocket, powered by wine. Well, what did you expect? A rocket powered by beer?
(Usually I prefer books over adaptations but in this case the adaptation stars Margaret Rutherford, one of my favourite comic actors.)
Speaking of non-prose SF, Will Eisner’s Denny “The Spirit” Colt spent most of his career on the funny pages fighting lurid but mundane criminals. In the 1952 Outer Space Spirit, Colt and a collection of expendable prisoners are tapped to accompany Professor Skol on a foray to the Moon. Aided by Wally Wood, Eisner produced a work that, while not entirely successful, did manage to convey what a von Braunian Moon expedition armed with technology that’s really not up to the demands being placed on it might be like. Don’t get too attached to the prisoners.
Hugh Walter’s Chris Godfrey of U.N.E.X.A.2 had been getting fired into space with fair regularity but like astronaut Michael Collins, Chris had yet to land on the Moon. Operation Columbus addressed that: Chris and Russian cosmonaut Serge Smyslov head for the Moon’s surface to examine the remains of an alien base that an international team had nuked in Book Two, Domes of Pico. Unfortunately, with the alien threat seemingly negated, the Soviets see no particular reason to permit a Westerner to reach the Moon first or, indeed, to return from it at all….
What are your favorite first-human-on-the-moon stories, novels, films?
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Still lots of time to write about the first woman on the Moon, since humans (of which women are a subset) won’t be going back any time soon. And I suppose that somewhere out there may a Moon Hoaxer furiously writing a story about how their protagonist went to the Moon and proved that Armstrong and the rest did not. If it’s in print already, I don’t want to know. (Although, none of the Apollo astronauts set bare foot on the Moon. There’s still stories in someone having to do a quick march across the Lunar surface stark naked and another in someone who can tolerate Lunar conditions without a space suit.)
[2]Not only has Chris not landed on the Moon by the third book, the U.N.E.X.A of the series title does not yet exist.
I am a bit surprised in this era of ebook reprints that nobody has reprinted the UNEXA books.
My favorite is Rocket Ship Galileo and the Arthur Clarke story Venture to the Moon, with its tax dodge subplot.
SF writers often left out the bureaucratic side. Rocket Ship Galileo didn’t have rooms full of engineers and mathematicians making sure things went well. (I’m sure the Nazis did)
Among movies, Haredevil Hare is a standout.
Ian McDonald’s Luna books include several scenes of people running barefoot (in fact naked) through vacuum on the Moon’s surface. It’s portrayed as a rite of passage for crazy young people, and a useful skill in an emergency.
Silly person, women were needed on FORBIDDEN PLANET to look sexy and shriek with terror so some brave guy could save them.
Years ago at a con, some author said that the problem with space in science fiction is that the further we go into space and the more we know about it the further out authors have to move their worlds. Creating cultures on the moon and Mars no longer cuts it.
The Mouse on the Moon film adaptation doesn’t get enough love IMO. Doesn’t help that it isn’t easy to find. I’m also fond of Destination Moon, which tries its darnedest to be scientifically plausible in the face of thick Brooklyn accents
For graphic novels, nothing beats Herge’s own Destination Moon of course.
No landing, but Jules Verne should get a mention for From the Earth to the Moon.
#8 indeed, Verne was my first thought
” Bester does not give an exact date, but internal evidence suggests that his imagined launch date long predated any other fictional mission’s launch date. I’m being mysterious, but that’s because spoiler.”
Heh!
Oh, and James P. Hogan’s _Inherit the Stars_ should get an honorable mention. The book is recent for this list, published 1977, but the mysterious moonwalker likely would be the first SF moon landing.
Unless someone walked on the surface of Dahak before the revolt? (_Mutineer’s Moon_, David Weber)
Lester Del Rey wrote a book, “Rocket Jockey” back in 1952 which opened with the memorable sentence “When Major Armstrong landed on the Moon in 1969…”
Pierre Boulle’s “Garden on the Moon” had an astronaut on a one-way mission to the Moon, with a bummer of an ending. I’d say it was decent from what I remember, which isn’t much other than I didn’t hate it. Unlike…
”The Pilgrim Project” by Hank Searls, about a lone astronaut sent on a rush mission to land in a cobbled together lander made from a Mercury capsule with a lander base. It was made into the movie “Countdown”, which replaced it with a Gemini capsule. Both are dull as dirt (or should that be moondust?).
agreed with Jules Verne![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
_Mutineer’s Moon_ and _Enterprise Stardust_ of course.
Apollo at Go by Jeff Sutton seems likely to be the most accurate fictional account, predicting such things as a landing date in July 1969. But of course he cheated a bit by not writing it until 1963, when the Apollo programme had already begun.
I always enjoy “The Man Who Sold the Moon” as one of Heinlein’s better works. Nowadays I get a chuckle at how he pictured just how corrupt capitalism can be; and yet missed the impersonal darkness of modern late-stage western capitalism entirely.
A Grand Day Out anyone?
18: well, yes. And BBC celebration of the Apollo mooniversary has included a reading of the doings of Professor Cavor and, Mr, um, Bedford? Yes, Bedford.
There’s a lunar outdoor marathon race in flashback in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Hammer of God”; mostly very light space suits I think, but our hero is passed at the finish by a sculpted Grecian form… ah, but, spoiler.
Book: There’s Doctor Dolittle In the Moon, from 1928. It confused me greatly as a five year old (1972/73), because I knew that the moon was nothing like the tropical forest depicted in the story.
Movie: Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbau’s Frau im Mond/Woman in the Moon, from 1929, depicts a manned expedition to the moon, made up of one woman and three men. The depiction of the countdown and some aspects (not all!) of the takeoff are surprisingly prescient.
As H. G. Wells showed, getting to the moon is dead easy if you have antigravity.
The novel A Voyage to the Moon by George Tucker predates Jules Verne. Tucker imagines using rocks from the Moon as a means to propel a vessel there (moon rocks are attracted to the Moon as Earth rocks are attracted to Earth). The book was adapted to film by Melies.
As far as I remember, 1950s BBC radio’s “Journey into Space”, four guys on a quasi-private venture (they didn’t – mostly – act like government employees), went to the Moon (set in 1965) without television, but did accept radio interviews, at least after the launch. They did have a “televiewer”, exterior camera for closed-circuit viewing. In later missions, now government funded, they went to Mars (launching from an established moon base) and dealt with a plot to take over the world using hypnosis transmitted by television – evidently seen as the real, rising enemy of a radio serial!
@@@@@ 0, James Davis Nicoll
Mountjoy fails to reckon with the genius of Fenwick’s Professor Kokinz, who delivers a functioning moon rocket, powered by wine. Well, what did you expect? A rocket powered by beer?
No, for a beer powered rocket you want The Makeshift Rocket by Poul Anderson. Mind you, the humor is on the level of: “It is not true that all Danes sleep with their bicycles. Fewer than ten percent of them do this.”
Early SF drastically underestimated the technical demands of space technology. I recall one story where the character built a successful moon rocket in his backyard.
The manga/anime Space Brothers (2007, set “tomorrow”) chronicles the mission of the first Japanese man on the moon (one of the titular brothers). Being an extended love letter to the space program, it’s as accurate as it can be, right down to multiple episodes set around NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab.
It also involves a permanent lunar base (under construction) and a desperate rescue mission (as the astronaut’s brother watches helplessly from Mission Control).
I see a lot of old friends, so I won’t mention them.
The UNEXA books were also key to my Misbegotten Yut, as were the Tom Swift, Jr. books (which went to the Moon), various titles from the John C. Winston YA/Juvenile SF Books series (including several by Lester Del Rey).
In addition to any by Clarke, Heinlein, etc., I would also point to THE PILGRIM PROJECT (made into a film, check out the credits sometime–COUNTDOWN in the film version) and one by artist Ludek Pesek, LOG OF A MOON EXPEDITION, which featured a multi-ship expedition to the Moon which gets into trouble when some of their supply vehicles don’t land quite neatly.
Several of the books that I read as a kid were 1950’s era novels and probably lost in history (and my memory). I’ve been able to track down the John C. Winston titles (I also own most of the UNEXA titles in hardcover), and I wish I could remember and track down these. Not accurate, the Suck Fairy would probably visit, but I’d love at least leaf through them.
Not SF, but the “Colliers Space Program” was a key read when I was young.
Films: Just remembered staying up very very very late and sneaking downstairs to watch a movie called MOONFLEET because I was hoping it was about a trip to the Moon, but it turned out to be about pyrates in Merrye Olde Englande.
But recently I bought the DVD of FRAU IN MOND, of which I only knew about through stills. The first bit is skippable, but the rocket launch, etc., it good stuff (even if they walk around the Moon without suits). THINGS TO COME also featured a launch to the Moon with a giant space cannon in the middle of the futuristic city, a voice booms out “Beware the concussion! Beware the concussion!” as the rioting futurians try to stop the launch, you’d think they would have built it a bit away from the city with the thought of protecting non-rioting futurians from that concussion, but…
“harnessing a respectable fraction of the wealthiest nation on the planet’s economy for a decade or so.”
To be specific, at its peak in 1965, 2% of the US economy went on Apollo. That’s a little less than the Vietnam War (peaked at 2.3% in 1968 and of course went on longer) but that represents the fact that the Vietnam War was far more popular with the American public, solid majorities of whom believed that not enough was being spent on it.
#28 – I think you got the numbers mixed up a bit. The suggested total ( not annual!)cost of Apollo is $28bn in an era when the US gdp was around $1000bn. Clearly the spending wasn’t evenly spread out but over the approx decade involved that would average less than 0.3%.
@26: have you read Clarke’s “Venture to the Moon” serial? I’m just wondering if their solution to a badly landed robot supply-ship was borrowed by Ludek Pesek. Unfair, perhaps.
29: take it up with CBS and the Planetary Society.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-how-much-did-it-cost/
@24:
The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, perhaps? While not the Moon, the Mushroom Planet was a moon.
@@@@@ 27, FredKieche
Films: Just remembered staying up very very very late and sneaking downstairs to watch a movie called MOONFLEET because I was hoping it was about a trip to the Moon, but it turned out to be about pyrates in Merrye Olde Englande.
That was in the days of Wooden Ships and Iron Men.
So it was a movie about Iron Pyrates, right?
@@@@@ 32, Andy Love
The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, perhaps? While not the Moon, the Mushroom Planet was a moon.
No, just some short story that looked sillier and sillier as the Space Race progressed.
I know it wasn’t about the Mushroom Planet book because I never read it.
What can I say? Nobody can read all the classics.
@17
“The Man Who Sold the Moon” is notable in my opinion for getting the details of a chemical powered rocket to the moon presciently correct.
There a discussion in the story about how many stages to have and what payload was possible.
It ends up being one man, instead of three, but the number of stages was pretty much dead on. I think the book has 5 instead of Saturn/Apollo’s 4, but if one counts the LEM, Saturn actually had 5 stages.
I’m not sure about the date. I’ve always been a little hazy about where in time various parts of Heinlein’s “future history” goes.
@30 — Clarke predated Ludek Pesek by more than a decade. The Pesek book barely squeaked out ahead of the actual lunar landing, even by the time it was written it was clear that neither the US or the USSR would be sending massive multi-ship expeditions to the Moon.
Sign me up for The Man Who Sold the Moon too (despite the absence of Space Nazis). I’ve also watched Destination Moon, and enjoyed it, but anyone raised on modern cinema will probably find it slow.
The german SF series Perry Rhodan started its first Installment (September 1961) with the first moon landing on June 20th, 1971.
The rocket was based on the Nova Design instead of Saturn.
A few people walk naked on the Moon in Varley’s Steel Beach. Probably a bad idea. We imagine it as like walking on beach sand, but Lunar regolith grains are dangerously jagged.
I want my moon boots to be molded so that I leave naked-looking tracks.
Tekalynn (20): Be fair, we’ve only seen a few little bits of the Moon, there may be great swatches of tropical forest in the unexplored parts! — Is there a word for the error represented by “desert planets” and “jungle planets”?
‘Single biome world’s.
I find it not too implausible to have a planet that’s all desert. Just get rid of the atmosphere first, yes?
@39: Since TV Tropes went with “Single-Biome Planet” instead of something zingier, the latter probably doesn’t exist, somehow, but only specifically because they used “Planetville” for something slightly different.
@40: In about one billion years, I gather the sun will be a little warmer and the Earth will still have an atmosphere but no water except water vapour. Remembering we’re mostly made of water… Is Venus technically a desert planet already?
@12 “Rocket Jockey” has Major Armstrong landing on the Moon in 1964. Close but no cigar. Armstrong achieved the rank of Lieutenant a a US Navy pilot.
Any other stories predict the name of the first man on the Moon?
“Decidedly not cheese” headed the newsletter for this article, and immediately my thoughts turned to Wallace & Gromit, where the moon, as it turns out, is indeed made of cheese.
Is Venus technically a desert planet already?
The definition of a desert is less than a certain amount of annual rainfall. In which case yes, because the surface of Venus doesn’t get any rain at all. More interesting: is Titan a desert planet? It has rain, but not of water…
“creating a secret base on the dark side of the Moon”
—Now, now, Mr. Nicholl, please be more careful. Luna has a *far* side, but no (permanently) *dark* side.