A Flight to the Moon; or, The Vision of Randalthus

Published originally in 1813, which predates Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by five years, this is arguably the first modern science fiction novel—worthwhile to sci-fi aficionados as an important milestone in the history of the genre.

Randalthus, the hero, during an evening walk, sits down by a river and is pondering the moon when an angelic being arrives in a “milk white cloud,” an illuminated bubble in which he is transported to the Earth’s satellite.  There he meets human beings living in a state of Eden-like innocence and harmony, provoking a discussion between Randalthus and the Lunarians about the foibles, sins, wars, and general self-destructiveness of Earthlings.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too? Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.