Across the Zodiac

Greg, Percy. Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record. London: Trübner and Co., 1880.[1] For reprints, one translation, and reviews, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of March 2026, here.[2]

According to JJ Pierce, discussing "Victorian Mars and Venus," Across the Zodiac "was the first major science fiction work to contribute to this tradition." The contribution includes space flight in a vessel called the Astronaut, powered by "a force called apergy" to what we'd call a Martian civilization "older but not wiser than our own" but which has "retained their technology: electric lights and appliances, motion pictures, dictation machines, and even [...] advanced sewage treatment plants for the production of fertilizer. Dirigibles, electric cars and submarines are part of the transportation system that binds the world together, and there are, of course, the canals" (Imagination and Evolution: A Truer History of Science Fiction p. 265).

So see for a civilization on Mars so humanoid that the novel's Terran protagonist can marry a Martian woman, a civilization with high tech but, from the point of view of the author, low politics and morality: "On Mars, as he feared might occur on Earth" political conflict resulted in "universal suffrage, which in turn leads to atheistic communism and ultimately to chaos. Against this arises a scientific elite, which restores order and imposes a rigidly materialistic cultural orthodoxy" (Pierce p. 265).

RDE, finishing, with thanks to JJP, 17Mar26