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In 1902, George Méliès, an early filmmaker, created the first science fiction blockbuster, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon). In the film, six astronomers build a moon shuttle.1 Their shuttle is shaped like a bullet and is shot out of a giant gun with the assistance of the Marines (a crew of attractive women in scanty sailor outfits).
So, how did these pioneering astronauts power their moon shuttle? With nitrocellulose, a precursor to modern high explosives and a sister compound to dynamite. Nitrocellulose is more commonly known as guncotton or flash paper, a propellant in firearms. The substance was discovered in 1846 by German-Swish chemist Christian Friedrick Schönbein, who accidentally soaked his apron in a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid and, to his immense surprise, produced an apron with the propensity to self-combust. Schönbein, thankfully, survived his epiphany. The material was not widely used until 1865, when British chemist Frederick Augustus Abel pioneered a safe production method. It was rapidly adapted for use in military warheads and firearms. But despite its deadly applications, it retained the innocuous appearance of fluffy wads of white cotton.
The film is loosely based on Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and H.G. Well’s The First Man in the Moon (1901). Verne, a man in the business of science fiction, was closely following the startling creation of this material. Verne’s novel takes place shortly after the American Civil War and tells the story of a Baltimore gun club whose members attempt to build a “space gun,” a gun large enough to shoot a shuttle into space. As propellent, they used a hyped-up version of guncotton. Space rockets didn’t exist yet, and Verne is thinking at the very edge of advancing scientific knowledge. In the film, all the astronomers are wearing wizards’ peaked hats and star-spangled robes, looking more like masters of magic than science.
Nitrocellulose was also the basis for the first motion picture film: nitro-celluloid, celluloid film, or, more commonly, nitrate film. Nitrate film was the first human-made plastic. In 1868, American inventor Wesley Hyatt had the idea to plasticize nitrocellulose with camphor to create a pliable, translucent material. Unfortunately, it was still explosive. High explosives contain their reactive agents in the same molecule, meaning that once nitrate film ignites, it produces its own oxygen and is nearly impossible to put out. In 1896, only a year after the opening of the first movie theater, a large nitrate fire burned in London. A year later, another fire in Paris killed 125 people. Not a good night out. Movie theaters and film archives continued to go off, and today, roughly 90% of all films made prior to 1930 have been lost to the volatility of this material. Parts of A Trip to the Moon are missing, too. So, for good or bad, nitrocellulose was both the plot device and the fiery material of the film itself.
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After their near-instantaneous voyage, the astronomers’ shuttle lands with a wet thwack in the eye of the Man in the Moon. He appears to be made of wax, or perhaps cheese, and oozes a little. The men emerge from their shuttle to view a strange landscape of fluffy peaks and swirls, like a terrain of meringue. They are tired and decide to take a nap (I would, too). The men lay blankets on the moon’s surface and sleep. Above them, a comet zaps by. The Big Dipper rises—with female faces peering at the visitors from the glow of each star—then a sultry Venus. Gentle snowfall wakes them. Freezing, they take shelter in a crater, where they discover a grove of giant mushrooms.
Under the mushrooms, the astronomers encounter moon aliens: Selenites, an insectoid species with huge eyes, antennae, and pincers. The Selenites capture the humans and take them to their palace. One of the astronomers kills the leader of the Selenites, and fearing retribution, the men escape and flee to their shuttle. They push the shuttle off the side of the moon. It falls towards the Earth and lands in an ocean. The astronomers are rescued by a ship (more sailors, less attractive). The film ends with a parade and the unveiling of a statue to honor the astronomers.
The fourteen-minute silent film was a massive success with audiences, an early blockbuster. In Paris, one theater ran it on loop for months. The film was so popular, especially in the United States, that Méliès built his own theater in New York City to personally combat growing film piracy. And what is a blockbuster? A successful, big-budget film. And also, a class of large aerial bombs that literally blow up city blocks. The term arose in World War II as film critics capitalized on audiences’ engagement with the war and its new high explosive weaponry. Meanwhile, films themselves were becoming less explosive: by the 1950s, nitrate film had been replaced with “safety film” made from acetate.
Could one use guncotton to push a shuttle into space? No, but space guns are an actual thing. In the 1960s, the joint US-Canada Project HARP used a giant gun to shoot a projectile into suborbital space. The technology is also known as a Verne gun, after the author.
You can watch A Trip to the Moon in its remaining fragments here with an English translation of Méliès original script and narrated stills of the missing final scenes. Enjoy!
On My Bookshelf
Keeping with the sci-fi theme, I’m currently re-reading Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, in preparation for the author’s latest short story collection, Lake of Souls. The first book in the series, Ancilary Justice, is the only book to clean-sweep win the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and the Arthur C. Clark Award for best novel.
For me, the draw of Leckie’s worlds is that they are recognizably human but culturally and socially alien. This implies a more profound truth about being human. Across the millennia of hominin evolution and cultural development, modern humans and our early ancestors are more similar than we are different—but the differences can be a real whopper. Now push that out into future millenia. The Radch characters are mostly human, but many live in an empire that doesn’t have a concept of liberal individualism or a gender binary. In Leckie’s far future, empire endures, but the gender binary does not. Everyone is the same gender, and the author uses “she” pronouns for all the characters: everyone is a “she,” all parents are “mothers,” all siblings are “sisters,” and so on.2
In my reading experience, many sci-fi authors commit the anthropological error of assuming that the author’s current culture will also exist in some far future on another planet. This is just implausible. Why would aliens have an American concept of gender when this isn’t even true for all humans? Why would they get married or measure kinship the way that Americans do? Why would they wear makeup or drink milk or tie their shoelaces in little bows? I imagine that physicists read space operas and wince at the technobabble science, and biologists read them and wince at the implausible evolution…well, anthropologists wince at the cultural centrism. There was a linguistic anthropologist in my department who couldn’t make it through China Mieville’s Embassytown because of the misuse of the Sapir-Worff hypothesis. Writing well about culture is in our blind spot; it’s a part of being human that makes writing good sci-fi hard.
As a small child, I wanted to grow up and be a xeno-anthropologist. I wanted to study human difference on the largest possible scale. I imagined myself teaching androids, AIs, and aliens about human cultures, or humans about alien cultures.3 Now, as an adult, I find it odd that people will ravenously read the latest sci-fi, while having zero curiosity about the culture of their neighbors across the street. We are all strange new worlds to each other.
A moon shuttle, not a moon rocket. This is a distinction that I have just now learned. Rockets have their own propulsion, whereas shuttles may not. In a rocket engine, fuel combustion under pressure propels the rocket forward. Some rockets are entirely engine, as in a firework. Shuttles often lack engines and require an external means of propulsion. Another distinction: A shuttle carries people (it “shuttles” people), whereas a rocket is more likely to carry scientific instruments or nothing at all except itself.
This isn’t as alien as it may appear to native English speakers. Many languages do not use gender pronouns, and many have different pronouns than the ones represented in the English language. In Laos, where I did fieldwork, the Lao language uses gender-neutral pronouns. Lao culture does recognize gender differences, but it does not have a native concept of the gender binary. Social roles are less likely to be split by gender, and there’s less policing about how “men” and “women” should dress, look, talk, etc. Names are gender-neutral. Some roles are gender-marked (like “mother” or “father”), but it is possible to have entire conversations without revealing the gender of the people being discussed. One way of describing Lao gender is as a pair of shoes: yes, there are two shoes, a right and a left, but the shoes are more similar than they are different.
I realize that it is now, in fact, possible to train androids to be more human, but the current situation is not the stuff of my childhood fantasies. I imagined it more like an equal exchange, where the androids were already people but of another sort, and together, everyone created a shared society that honored each other’s differences. Yeah, I know. Instead, what we’ve got is a techno-elite who trains robot-slave AIs to reinforce social hierarchies, supposedly to prevent a feared future where the AIs rule the universe as evil despots.