Journey in Other Worlds [Paperback]

John Jacob Astor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2001

Astor’s novel, with descriptions of an antigravity device, aeroplanes, television and space travel was widely read and became a bestseller on publication in 1894. Set in the year 2000, the book is a futuristic novel of three utopias: a Christian heaven on Saturn; an Eden-like new world on Jupiter; and a technologically-oriented, businessman's paradise on Earth.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

What did our ancestors dream of when they gazed up at the stars and looked beyond the present? Wildly imaginative but grounded in reasoned scientific speculation, A Journey in Other Worlds races far ahead of the nineteenth century to imagine what life would be like in the year 2000. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Earth is effectively a corporate technocracy, with big businesses using incredible advances in science to improve life on the planet as a whole. Seeking other planets habitable for the growing human population, the spaceship Callisto, powered by an antigravitational force known as apergy, embarks on a momentous tour of the solar system. Jupiter proves to be a wilderness paradise, full of threatening beasts and landscapes of inspired beauty, where the explorers must fight for their lives. Dangers less tangible but equally deadly await the Callisto crew on Saturn, which yields profound secrets about their fate and the ultimate destiny of man! kind.

Thoughtful, adventurous, and replete with a dazzling array of futuristic devices, A Journey in Other Worlds is a classic, unforgettable story of utopias and humankind’s restless exploration of the stars. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

John Jacob Astor (1864-1912), the great-grandson of the famous fur trader and financier of the same name, was one of the wealthiest men on earth, with assets somewhere around $100 million (compared to J.P. Morgan, who had amassed a fortune of only $30 million). Astor was an inventor (of a bicycle brake, a storage battery, an internal combustion engine, a flying machine, a machine for removing surface dirt from roads, and an improved marine turbine engine) and also founder of the Astoria (later the Waldorf Astoria) Hotel in New York City. His pneumatic walkway invention won a prize at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and he was one of the first Americans to own a motor car. One of his dreams was to find a way to create rain by pumping warm air from the surface of the earth into the upper atmosphere. His fascination with science led him to begin writing his only novel, A Journey In Other Worlds when he was only 28 years old, and spent over two years writing it. He served in the Spanish-American War, and lost his life in the Titanic disaster, leading his wife to a lifeboat but returning himself to the sinking ship.

Product Details

• Paperback: 508 pages
• Publisher: Fredonia Books (NL) (December 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1589636171
• ISBN-13: 978-1589636170
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,514,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Compare to Bellamy's "Looking Backward", November 30, 2003

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) (Paperback)

You may want to compare this to Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward", which was published in the 1890s. Both books looked forward a hundred years to 2000. Each author gave his vision of the future. Astor imbues this book with a somewhat polemical slant. [As indeed did Bellamy in his.] The result is a book that may not be the most gripping of reading by current standards, but which still gives insight into a mindset of that era.

The contrast between the two books is reflected in Astor being a successful inventor. No doubt this gave him a very rosy tinged worldview, unlike Bellamy's socialist leanings. And that is the value of these two books considered as a pair. One uses the dominant value system of its time, the agressive capitalism, and the other speaks forth from the resultant opposite.

Interesting to see Steve Stirling edit this book. He has done good research for his science fiction novels, and perhaps that led him to this, long obscure text.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Journey In Other Worlds, November 19, 2011

By 

Robert O. Adair (Indianapolis, IN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) (Paperback)

A wonderful 19th century science fiction classic, well reasoned and very imaginative. The Bison Frontiers of Imagination Series has done a marvelous job of reprinting science fiction and fantasy classics, many from the 19th century which most people are not aware of. Prior to the advent of Amazing Stories (1926) there was a lot of Science Fiction published in general fiction magazines and books. but not in specialized magazines. Despite scattered, earlier antecedents, science fiction really took shape in the 19th century. It was a confluence of many types of writing: the adventure story, romantic fiction, social satire and the Utopia and dystopian writing of the past such as Thomas More's Utopia. Consequently it was often short on action and superficial as to character. Similarly its audience was usually very much interested in scientific speculation such as how could we actually figure out a way to get to another planet. This could interrupt whatever action or plot there was for many pages of flat out scientific discussion, something which put off the general reader and confounded literary critics who knew nothing of science and interpreted ten pages of basic principles of Chemistry and Physics as some sort of goofyism.

We can see this in John Jacob Astor's classic. He was a man with a good Liberal Arts education who was also a successful inventor ( a moving walkway, road building equipment, an internal combustion engine, a bicycle brake, etc.). Col. John Jacob Astor IV (1864-1912) had seen military service in the Spanish American War. He was the author of this successful heroic fiction as well as having met his end in a truly heroic manner, standing quietly, unflinchingly on the deck of the sinking Titanic, watching his wife whom he had helped into the lifeboat, sailing away.

This epic adventure, the first best selling American science fiction novel, takes you on a journey through the solar system, including Jupiter and Saturn, employing the first use of anti-gravity in science fiction. It contains all sorts of scientific speculation about the growth of corporate technocracy using all sorts of advances in science to improve life on earth.

There is a rather long introduction by S. M. Stirling, helpful in many ways and employing his own 21st century parochialism. Stiriling is confounded by Astor's use "in other worlds" not "to other worlds" This, of course, is English, something not taught in contemporary American schools. Back in civilized times, universities taught Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic. In The Lord's prayer (KJV 1611), we have "in earth as it is in heaven", this is a parallelism, the realm of earth, the realm of heaven. We may, indeed be said to be "on a planet" but in Astor's story, Juputer is not just a physical planet but a "realm' which is what makes it interesting! Munro's A Trip to Venus reflects the same usage. Stirling also seems to lack historical sense, not understanding that the scientific landscape is constantly changing. This is what I find interesting and transporting in these older stories. Much of the science in these old stories is outdated, like the evolution myth is today, but the worlds of imagination and sense of wonder is delightful!

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars They used to think like that? Wow, June 17, 2011

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wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) (Paperback)

As fiction, I can't really recommend this story. As a psychological time-capsule, though, this offers plenty to think about. It starts with a project to change the tilt of the Earth's axis, to make our plane a fairer place to live. This goes along with plans to melt the polar ice caps and such, a straight extrapolation from a world that had yet to grasp "unintended consequences" or ecological impact. The scientific blatherings about the wonders of this glorious year 2000 come largely from Dr. Cortland, LL. D. I can only wonder why someone with a law degree was chosen to bloviate on mysterious sources of energy and pretty much anything else that came to mind - like how modern science could be used to explain Biblical miracles.

Then, they're off to Jupiter and its moons, all of which have environments rather like a Victorian garden. You know, a comfortable temperature, breathable air, recognizable (and edible) flora and fauna, and the rest. Our little band's chief scientific instrument seems to be a large-bore rifle with explosive bullets, which they wield with merry abandon. They bring down a mastodon (great sport, you know) and cut a few choice steaks from it before leaving the remaining tons of corpse to rot. I guess that's how the big game hunters of bygone years did things.

The next abrupt change occurs just after midpoint in this book, when our intrepid explorers land on Saturn, which turns out to be an important bit of real estate in the hierarchy between Christian heaven and hell. At this point, the simmering religious awareness of earlier chapters springs to the fore, turning the rest of the book into a peculiar theological tract. This interested me as a snapshot of the author's zeitgeist, but also as it foreshadows better-reasoned successors, like C.S. Lewis's space trilogy.

Although interesting as an artifact of its era and as an early step on the path that science fiction has taken since, I found this ultimately forgettable.

-- wiredweird