De la terre à la lune

The novel inaugurates a rigorously scientific approach to fiction narrating expeditions to our satellite. As early as 1875, From the Earth to the Moon was adapted as an operetta by the undisputed master of the genre, Jacques Offenbach. H. G. Wells's treatment of lunar travel (The First Men in the Moon, 1901) still owes a considerable debt to Verne, even if the British author's conspicuously unscientific traits have often been noted: cavorite, his anti-gravitational substance,  is a fiction that serves merely as one device that allowed him to focus on what is discovered upon the Moon itself rather than the journey. At the dawn of the century, Méliès drew in part on Verne's novel for the very first fiction film in the history of cinema, the celebrated A Trip to the Moon. After this pioneer of the seventh art, it was a master of the ninth who built the myth of his character Tintin upon Verne's own heroes, devoting two albums to the subject of Lunar travel: Destination Moon, concerned with the preparations for the voyage (as in Verne's first volume) and Explorers on the Moon, narrating the journey through space, as in Around the Moon.

Though the lunar voyage had been imagined since Dante, Cyrano de Bergerac, and a host of illustrious writers in earlier centuries, From the Earth to the Moon created a new realist genre that proved remarkably prophetic of the space exploration of the 1960s:

"The first attempt to reach the moon by truly scientific means in modern times was made in Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon (De la Terre à la Lune), published in 1865. The book contains some descriptions that amazingly parallel twentieth-century actual moon flights. Just like astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders of the historic Apollo 8 flight of 1968, the first men to orbit around the moon, Jules Verne's moon travelers Impey Barbicane, the president of the Gun Club of Baltimore, his adversary Captain Nicholl and the French journal-list Michel Ardan (an anagram for Verne's friend Nadar) took off from Florida, and like the real astronauts they landed on return in the ocean. The elaborate preparations for the moon journey closely resemble the actual start of the rockets of today, although Verne uses, instead of a rocket, a gun 900 feet in length."  (Franz Rottensteiner, The Science Fiction Book.)

It is precisely this proximity to the reality of lunar travel that makes the novel an essential text, and the origin of many a prestigious vocation: the Russians Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergei Korolev, the American Robert Goddard, and Germans Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun all traced the origins of their passion to Verne's novels. Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong likewise counted them among their earliest inspirations. In 1999, the European astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré carried aboard the Mir space station a copy of From the Earth to the Moon, which completed three thousand orbits of the Earth at his side.