Before You Begin

Before you begin.

On a November morning in 1900, an American liner in mid-Atlantic is overtaken by something no one has ever seen: a vessel of metal and glass, flying. Aboard her is Lord Redgrave, an English lord who has built the impossible — a ship that sails the gulfs between the worlds — and he has come to carry off the woman he loves. With his bride Zaidie and his faithful old engineer, he sets the Astronef toward the stars, and the honeymoon begins: a cruise, world by world, across the whole Solar System.

George Griffith was one of the great pioneers of scientific romance, and in 1901, years before rockets, he sent his lovers to the Moon, to warlike Mars, to an Eden upon Venus, to Jupiter still burning in its making and the crystal cities of Ganymede, and out to the rings of Saturn — and home again past the birth of a new star. It is Victorian wonder at its most generous: each world a marvel, each landfall a fresh astonishment, the cosmos itself unrolled like a map for two travellers in love.

Read it for the sheer delight of the voyage — the brass-and-glass ship, the winged people of the Morning Star, the sages of the crystal cities, and the great dark between the worlds ablaze with stars.

This illustrated edition opens with a gallery of the travellers and the peoples they meet, an atlas of the worlds, and the great scenes of the voyage; and as you read, the journey unfolds in six visual movements — recap plates you unlock world by world, each gathering together the cruise so far. Turn the page, and cast off with the Astronef.