One tells us of a visit paid by men to the moon, and of
the wonderful things seen, and adventures had, there. Lucian, it is
true, did the same thing eighteen hundred years ago, but he had not the
aid of hints from modern science to guide his speculations and lend
verisimilitude to his narrative.
Another startles us from our sense of planetary security with a
realistic account of the invasion of the earth by the terrible sons of
warlike Mars, seeking to extend their empire by the conquest of foreign
globes.
Sometimes it is a trip from world to world, a kind of celestial pleasure
yachting, with depictions of creatures more wonderful than--
"The anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders"--
that is presented to our imagination; and sometimes we are informed of
the visions beheld by the temporarily disembodied spirits of trance
mediums, or other modern thaumaturgists, flitting about among the
planets.
Then, to vary the theme, we find charming inhabitants of other worlds
represented as coming down to the earth and sojourning for a time on our
dull planet, to the delight of susceptible successors of father Adam,
who become, henceforth, ready to follow their captivating visitors to
the ends of the universe.
In short, writers of fiction have already established interplanetary
communication to their entire satisfaction, thus vastly and indefinitely
enlarging the bounds of romance, and making us so familiar with the
peculiarities of our remarkable brothers and sisters of Mars, Venus,
and the moon, that we can not help feeling, notwithstanding the many
divergences in the descriptions, that we should certainly recognize them
on sight wherever we might meet them.
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