Visit to the Moon Book

What do you do if you are one of the wealthiest men in the world and you are bored with your normal day to day activities? If you are John Jacob Astor, you write a book that will share your vision of what life will be like in far away year 2000.

The Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company will be hard at work to correct the tilt of the Earth and therefore provide a more temperate climate, and your three heroes will travel for six whole months in outer space, having grand adventures on both Jupiter and Saturn before returning home.

The book is a museum piece, but I was tickled with it. The science is naturally either outdated or too bizarre to ever have been factual, and the attitudes of the heroes are not exactly pc according to modern day standards, but I can usually overlook that when reading the antiquated books I enjoy. Someday I imagine people will be shocked at the attitudes revealed in our modern books, too.

The fun for me here was the idea of this incredibly wealthy man sitting down to imagine What If.....and then filling pages with his visions. Astor would have been a completely fascinating dinner guest. I would ask him How? and Why? and generally be totally nosy about the book. The fact that he was a passenger on the Titanic and went down with the
ship adds poignancy to the story...I kept wondering if he would have written another book if he had survived.