Italic Title: | (see above) --> |
Author: | W. S. Lach-Szyrma |
Country: | England |
Language: | English |
Genre: | Science fiction |
Publisher: | Wyman and Sons |
Publisher2: | Jurassic London |
Pub Date: | 1883 |
Media Type: | |
Pages: | 220 |
Oclc: | 7261871 |
Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds is an 1883 science fiction novel by Wladislaw Somerville Lach-Szyrma, a Polish-English curate, author, and historian.
The book is an expanded version of Lach-Szyrma's earlier work A Voice from Another World, published in 1874. A sequel series, "Letters from the Planets", was published in nine parts between 1887 and 1893 in Cassell's Family Magazine.[1] [2]
Published in 1883, Aleriel is a Victorian novel, which was previously thought to be the first published work to apply the word Martian as a noun (it is now known that the word had been so used as early as 1869[3]): After the protagonist, Aleriel, lands on Mars, he buries his spacecraft in snow, "so that it might not be disturbed by any Martian who might come across it".[4] The novel portrays Venus and Mars as utopias, Jupiter and Saturn as primitive, and the Moon as desolate.[5]
A new edition was published in 2015. It includes the same text and a new introduction by Richard Dunn (Royal Museums Greenwich) and Marek Kukula (Royal Observatory Greenwich).[6]