A Journey in Other Worlds (Annotated)

The doctor then spoke:. You know our flowers offer honey, as it were, as bait to insects, that in eating or collecting it they may catch the pollen on their legs and so carry it to other flowers, perhaps of the opposite sex. Here flowers evidently appeal to the sense of hearing instead of taste, and make use of birds, of which there are enormous numbers, instead of winged insects, of which I have seen none, one being perhaps the natural result of the other.

I find the idea of flowers that attract by sound rather than scent to be intriguing. Astor does more than speculate on science in his novel, however; he also lays out a utopian vision of the year that includes dramatic technological change. Remarkably, he accurately envisions a number of technologies that have become very important today. For instance, consider the following modification to ships:. The hollow masts of our ships—to glance at another phase en passant—carry windmills instead of sails, through which the wind performs the work, of storing a great part of the energy required to run them at sea, while they are discharging or loading cargo in port; and it can, of course, work to better advantage while they are stationary than when they are running before it.

Steam-boilers are also placed at the foci of huge concave mirrors, often a hundred feet in diameter, the required heat being supplied by the sun, without smoke, instead of by bulky and dirty coal. Mile after mile Africa has been won for the uses of civilization, till great stretches that were considered impassible are as productive as gardens.

Astor is perhaps a bit too optimistic about future technology: With the threat of global climate change hanging over us today, the idea of deliberately modifying the climate is quite horrifying. On a social and political level, Astor has much less to say.

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Wars are finally abolished due to the development of powerful weapons and the threat of mutually assured destruction as we have noted previously, H. Wells would envision a similar result a few years later. The only significant political change is the entry of Canada and Mexico into the Union! Though it is not described in much detail, the existence of the TASC suggests that Astor envisions corporations playing a much greater role in managing society.

This is not surprising, considering his upper-class background! The entire expedition seems to be less a scientific investigation than an entertaining outing for wealthy vacationers. When they encounter completely strange and mysterious new species, their first instinct is: The explorers encounter disembodied spirits, who reveal secrets of nature and the afterlife. I kind of tuned out at this point: In spite of its limitations, however, the story is a charming one, and the 19th century speculations on science and technology alone are well worth reading.

The tragic death of such a famous figure as Astor on the Titanic spawned many legends about him, most of which are certainly fiction. After that, he is credited with one certain act of kindness, as recounted by survivor Louis Garrett , who was 12 years old at the time of the sinking:. Most of the lifeboats were gone.

The crew was permitting women and children only to board the lifeboats-there were not enough for everyone. We saw women crying, not wanting to leave their husbands; husbands begging their wives and children to hurry and get into the lifeboats. Amid this complete pandemonium and mass hysteria stood my sister and I, two immigrant children, unable to speak English, frightened beyond belief, crying and looking for help. The last lifeboat was being loaded.

A middle-aged gentleman was with his very young, pregnant wife.

He helped her into the lifeboat, then looked back to the deck and saw others wanting to get aboard. He kissed his wife good-bye, and, returning to the deck, grabbed the first person in his path. Fortunately, I was there in the right place at the right time and he put me into the lifeboat. I screamed for my sister who had frozen from fright.

With the help of others, she also was pushed into the lifeboat. Who was the gallant man who performed this kind act? At that time he was 45 years old and his wife, Madeleine, was They were traveling to the United States because they wanted their child to be born there. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity individual or corporate has a copyright on the body of the This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

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To ask other readers questions about A Journey in Other Worlds. Be the first to ask a question about A Journey in Other Worlds. Lists with This Book. No pretty much nothing described is true, but this is actually the part that was more or less interesting to read. Just to see what this man imagined life to be like in our time or well 20 years ago. Then they take off to the space to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter is the planet that is basically in our far past now, dinosaurs, mammoths and giant turtles live there.

This is where I reread the passages because in a way I wanted to get the picture of what is on Jupiter even though it is so hard to read and imagine. Characters, whose names I didn't even bother to remember as it was useless to know who is who, just discuss science and what they see around with each other. And then comes the last part, when they get to Saturn. Now Saturn has spirits on it. This part is a sort of philosophical and theological discussion and self discovery and going through it was especially horrible for me.

Not my topic, not something I care about being on Saturn or in outer space, dense writing and even my interest in what a wealthy man from over years ago thought could help here. Now I am finally done. It is still 2 stars because reading such an old book with ideas about the future is always exciting even if for a very tiny bit. I am happy for him he got to write it and even that I got to read it, but I sure won't do it twice. I really enjoy reading old futuristic stories and seeing what people got right and how they got things wrong--and also reminding myself that all of our favorite hard scifi will one day sound as dated as this book does, and wondering what people will be able to infer about us from the values we project on our visions of the future.

The perspective of this book is so very 19th century, rich, white, American, well-educated. It has manifest destiny written all over it. All of the countries of the Ame I really enjoy reading old futuristic stories and seeing what people got right and how they got things wrong--and also reminding myself that all of our favorite hard scifi will one day sound as dated as this book does, and wondering what people will be able to infer about us from the values we project on our visions of the future.

All of the countries of the Americas have become part of the United States, because of course, what else would they do? Non-white peoples outside of Europe have slowly died out making room for the white people yes, really , and next humanity will expand to other planets, perhaps even other stars! They discover later that there are other intelligent people in the universe, but fear not, only humans have souls. And though the protagonists undertake a mission to Jupiter, do not mistake it for a scientific mission, they are on safari. Despite all that, it's also interesting what he gets right.

Toward the beginning are a couple chapters of the history of the 20th century, which get a lot of the details wrong but the overall picture isn't all that far off. For instance, he predicts a cold war between France and Germany leading to the rapid development and science and technology; both sides create weapons so powerful that they could never be used, preventing what was apparently already referred to as the Great War. The rapid advance in technology also led to many innovations like automobiles, freeways, and suburbs.

A Journey in Other Worlds. a Romance of the Future

The science is also dated, of course. This is pre-plate techtonics, and the reigning view of the way celestial bodies work is they start out molten like the sun, then gradually cool and shrink, with the shrinkage creating mountain ranges. Smaller planets cool faster, so Mars is already dead. The very large planets are still warm, which keeps them inhabitable despite being further from the sun.

Once the planets cool, life proceeds in nearly the same way as on Earth; since Jupiter cooled enough to support life much later, it's in an earlier stage of evolution, corresponding to the Devonian period on Earth though not exactly, I don't think the devonian had dinosaurs with plants and animals recognizable from Earth's geological record. Saturn is slightly more "advanced", as it's smaller than Jupiter. So of course there were erupting volcanoes all over the place back then. That covers parts 1 and 2. Part 3 veers away from the science into the metaphysical, and I didn't enjoy it very much.

Part of Christian doctrine is that once you die, all the good and bad that you've done are tallied up and you can't change your condition with respect to God any more after that. I've never liked that doctrine, and part 3 expounds on it at length. Welcome to the future! Welcome to a world where the infallible progress of science and the boundless benevolence of American ingenuity will lead to the straightening of the Earth's axis, bringing about an endless spring for everyone! Well, that's the risk all science fiction writers run in predicting the future - trying to look clever but ending up looking like a fool.

Astor, writing in , does that a lot here. Take the discovery of 'apergy', a force akin but Welcome to the future! Take the discovery of 'apergy', a force akin but opposite to gravity: What made it such a slog to read was the slavish regard afforded to any and every use of science, alongside the fact that in place of decent dialogue the characters merely spout scientific facts to each other in the driest, most tiresome fashion. Then, laughably - incongruous even, considering the loftily learned tone of the author - when they journey to Jupiter it turns out to be little different from Earth at the time of the dinosaurs, with vast rivers and valleys, inhabited by oversized lizards and insects more at home in a Ray Harryhausen movie than a serious work of extrapolated science.

A Conan Doyle fantasy and a scientific lecture are all very well in themselves, but probably best not to merge the two if you want to retain an audience's attention. As the pages clogged with an endless litany of boring facts, the voyage of discovery became little more than a jolly hunting party. Astor was one of the richest men in the world in his time, so it's credit to him that he cared enough about anything but indulging himself to be so informed and enamored of science. He truly believed human invention was coming close to faultlessness, and therefore close to God.

His faith was such that he couldn't wait to buy a ticket for the maiden voyage of the Titantic. Okay, so the first thing to say is that this needs to be treated as either fantasy, or science fiction dealing with exploration outside the Solar System despite the adventures supposedly being on Jupiter, Saturn and Mars.

It is interesting to see what he thought the world would be like in AD. All in all, though, it was a bit of a struggle, and the last third to way too much into Christian theology without much story. Oct 25, Geoff rated it it was ok. I could not finish the book, as I lost interest.

It started off exciting, and I liked that it tried to use hard science for the time period. So I started off enjoying the book, but it jumped around, and the hard science explanations of this sci-fi tale started to get tedious. And this book started running longer than I would have liked. So, after sitting on my shelf abandoned for months, I decided to give up. It gets two stars as it is different, and that was an experience, so I was glad I tri I could not finish the book, as I lost interest. It gets two stars as it is different, and that was an experience, so I was glad I tried the book.

But unfortunately I could not finish it. May 17, Rena Searles rated it it was ok. Had a real hard time staying awake through this one. A futuristic fantasy of the first voyage into space and the exploration of Jupiter. So much detail, both scientific and philosophical, was difficult to navigate the long stretches of explanations. Some entertaining bits and comical visioning Mar 07, Marsha rated it liked it. Much less science in this fiction than, say, Jules Verne or H.

Apr 18, M.

A Journey in Other Worlds

He is known as the most high-profile victim of the Titanic disaster that happened years ago last week. Philanthropist, businessman and part of the American high society of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John Jacob Astor IV published this futuristic tale in about a journey around our solar system and man's attempts to colonise his neighbours. I am absolutely astounded by the vision of the future that he created and the technologies he envisaged would exist in the year He couldn't expect to get everything right.

He imagined the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn to be worlds with solid surfaces upon which life was abundant and ripe for terraforming for human colonisation. In he had no way of knowing otherwise and in a world of pre-Einstein physics, naturally a lot he got wrong about the physical world. He also imagined a world still dependent on coal, the growth of electricity and a form of energy based on the premise of anti-gravity called "apergy". Canada, Mexico and several other nations had chosen to join the USA. Most other dialects are dying or dead in a world where the English language reigns supreme.

In this world, no Great War would ever take place. I'm sure he would have seen the irony that he would be proven wrong just two years after his death. The writing style is a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. Lengthy chapters written in a documentary format as though in a history book are given over to explaining how this world came to be. It takes a while for the story proper to get going and the interludes feel jarring as the story halts for a lengthy exposition. In the final quarter there is a lot of pseudoreligious commentary that sometimes borders on platitude.

Couple this with the imperialistic and exploitative free market approach of the protagonists and it sometimes makes uncomfortable reading.

A Journey in Other Worlds. a Romance of the Future by John Jacob Astor

The religious philosophising in particular, though made integral to the nature of the story as the characters go on personal journeys, becomes wearisome. But this was the product of its time not written by a radical like H. Wells but a member of high society in a free market world of American Exceptionalism and Christian imperialism. Because of the age of the text, you just go with it when he discusses landing on the surface of Jupiter and Saturn and the lifeforms they discover there.

He imagines biological life and an ecosystem much like our own and though you might chuckle at first, you soon settle in. It is little more than a minor irritation that the lifeforms are much like we have on Earth but with singing carnivorous flowers and other oddities it does make the environment alien enough. It is a book that feels very much of its time even though you might feel pleasantly surprised at some of the technology he imagines scarily accurate as pointed out above and uncomfortable that the journeys are effectively game shoots for the elite.

It would have been more enjoyable had he stuck to the technology and left the propaganda aside. I would recommend this if you are interested in Victorian sci fi and are already bored to death with the big names. However, it is never going to be considered a great American novel, except perhaps, by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. See more of my book reviews at my blog A Journey in Other Worlds is a science fiction book published in and available these days in Kindle format, and describes a space journey taking place in the year It is definitely of the old science fiction school in which the appeal of the book was reckoned to be in the lavish detail supplied of future inventions and society.

They sh A Journey in Other Worlds is a science fiction book published in and available these days in Kindle format, and describes a space journey taking place in the year They share the same tendency for male protagonists, supported by supremely beautiful and talented women who remain faithfully at home while their men go out and face danger. They also both posit a world where white American society and to a lesser degree English culture have dominated the world and other races and ethnicities have been absorbed or marginalised.

Astor, an extremely rich man who died on the Titanic, was himself something of an inventor, and clearly took great delight in long descriptions of the engineering feats of the future.