Science fiction · Humor
From the Earth to the Moon
A club of bored cannon-makers decides to fire a giant shell at the Moon, and then someone volunteers to ride inside it.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
A gun club with nothing to shoot
The American Civil War is over, and the members of the Baltimore Gun Club, men who have lost arms, legs and bits of skull to their own inventions, are bored. Their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes a project worthy of them: a cannon big enough to fire a shell at the Moon. The country goes wild, money pours in from around the world, a rival bets against every stage, and then a telegram arrives from a Frenchman, Michel Ardan, who wants to travel inside the shell. Jules Verne published the novel in 1865, a century before Apollo, and some of his guesses, including a launch site in Florida, look uncanny now.
Why it works for learners
It’s a comedy, and the jokes are mostly about people: committees, newspapers, national pride, men who can’t resist a bet. That kind of humor survives translation and simplification well. The book is also full of numbers: distances, weights, speeds, costs and dates. If numbers are a weak spot in your new language, few novels give you more practice in context. Chapters are short, and many are built around a single public event (a meeting, a vote, the casting of the giant gun), which keeps the structure clear.
Which level to start at
B1 is the best start. An A2 edition tells the story, but much of the fun is in Verne’s mock-serious explanations and the speeches, which need a little more room. From B2 you can enjoy the satire properly, especially the public meeting where Ardan answers every objection the crowd throws at him.
Read next
- The First Men in the Moon, Wells’s very different Moon voyage
- Around the World in Eighty Days, another Verne wager
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, American engineering let loose on the impossible
