Christopher Priest

Victorian science fiction soon ceased to be fanciful

Iwan Rhys Morus describes how novelists’ futuristic visions began to be realised by engineers – though the course of invention is more random than he imagines

Illustration for Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, 1865. [Alamy]
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  • How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the Nineteenth-Century Innovators Who Forged the Future

    Iwan Rhys Morus

    Icon, pp. 324, £25

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