Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds

Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds
AuthorW. S. Lach-Szyrma
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience fiction
PublisherWyman and Sons, Jurassic London
Publication date
1883
Publication placeEngland
Media typePrint
Pages220
OCLC7261871

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][4]): 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".[5] The novel portrays Venus and Mars as utopias, Jupiter and Saturn as primitive, and the Moon as desolate.[6]

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).[7]

See also

References

  1. ^ Bleiler, Everett Franklin (1990). "Lach-Szyrma, W[ladislaw] S[omerville] (1841–1915)". Science-fiction, the Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-fiction Stories from Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930 : with Author, Title, and Motif Indexes. Kent State University Press. pp. 416–418. ISBN 978-0-87338-416-2.
  2. ^ "Lach-Szyrma, W S". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Retrieved 2022-02-16.
  3. ^ "Martian". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  4. ^ "Martian". Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. Retrieved 2022-02-16.
  5. ^ Forsyth, Mark H. (16 September 2010). "Wladyslaw Lach-Szyrma and the First Martian". The Inky Fool. Retrieved 3 August 2013.
  6. ^ Crossley, Robert (2011). "Inventing a New Mars". Imagining Mars: A Literary History. Wesleyan University Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-8195-7105-2.
  7. ^ W.S. Lach-Szyrma; Molly Tanzer (2015). Aleriel, A Voyage to Other Worlds. Jurassic London. ISBN 978-0-9928435-7-1.
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