I’m sharing something I learned this week for Sci-Friday – a scifi connection to the Titanic. You may not know about it, either – let’s discuss! First off, here’s more info on John Jacob Astor IV and his scifi novel ‘A Journey in Other Worlds‘ published back in 1894:
“The book offers a fictional account of life in the year 2000. It contains abundant speculation about technological invention, including descriptions of a worldwide telephone network, solar power, air travel, space travel to the planets Saturn and Jupiter, and terraforming engineering projects — damming the Arctic Ocean, and an adjustment of the axial tilt of the Earth (Terra) by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company.
The future United States is a multi-continental superpower. European nations have been taken over by socialist governments, which have sold most of their African colonies to the U.S., while Canada, Mexico, and the countries of South America have requested annexation. Space travel is achieved through apergy, an anti-gravitational energy force.
Jupiter proves to be a jungle world, with flesh-eating plants, vampire bats, giant snakes and mastodons, and flying lizards. The Americans discover a wealth of exploitable resources: iron, silver, gold, lead, copper, coal, and oil.
Saturn, in contrast, is an ancient world of silent spirits. These beings provide the explorers with foresight of their own deaths. One of the spirits, a deceased bishop, tells the voyagers about the icy world Cassandra, which orbits the Sun beyond Neptune and is home to the souls of unworthy Earthlings.”
It’s interesting to read about this – Astor’s scifi story predates Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars by 17 years. In fact, many scifi novels of that era influence our science fiction today. Across the Zodiac (1880) is an early science fiction novel, said to be the progenitor of the sword-and-planet genre. For that novel, Greg created what may have been the first artistic language that was described with linguistic and grammatical terminology. It also contained what is possibly the first instance in the English language of the word “astronaut“.
But why would a wealthy magnate like Astor write anything, much less a scifi novel? Astor’s passing on the Titanic was the subject of many apocryphal stories and my Google-fu hasn’t come up with much information. I’d welcome any insight from a historian about the life and times of John Jacob Astor IV.
So yes – the Titanic has a fascinating connection with scifi! I hope you enjoyed this historical scifi discussion. Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!
