Strange new frontiers

A pseudonymous production attributed to "The Inhabitant," the work is dedicated to Keats (an excuse to shoehorn two lugubrious poems of unknown provenance), and, for good measure, kicks off with an all-caps declaration of insane gusto:

I

WILL

TELL YOU

A TALE WILDER

THAN POET EVER DREAMED!

YEA, STRANGER THAN

THE VISION OF

THE MADDEST

PROPHET!

So: What is it?

The setup appears simple enough: In 1950 -- seven decades from the tale's actual composition -- the engineering wizard John Hope volunteers to take a "sleeping draught"-cum-elixir of life prepared by his friend, John Malcolm Weir. (Hope also has a middle name; alas, the author gives us three different versions.) When he awakes, a sleek denizen of the future explains to him that the calendar stands at 2143, a time when people "can read well each other's thoughts, conversing for hours, without a word." (Today we can detect a secret precedent to Orwellian thoughtcrime in the fact that Hope is advised to "Think nothing you would be ashamed to put into words and acts . . . for, though your friends may be now on the other side of the world, they may afterwards catch the imprint of your thoughts.")

Later, this first host greets him with the words/thought: "Ah, I see what you are thinking of!" Some of the book's otherworldly texture stems from the frequent rendering of communication as a silent transaction -- like turning the volume down on an action movie.

Hope quickly falls in love with one of these exceptional specimens, Edith Weir (a however-many-generation descendant of his great friend), and he gets involved with an all-male interplanetary voyaging party that includes the telekinetically inclined Moxton, who is also related to a friend from 1950. Intent on "bringing another planet under the sway of human intellect" -- colonization, in softer phrasing -- the men steer their craft past the moon and toward Venus.

The spaceship, the Star Climber, is immediately and unforgettably evoked: "Fancy a humming bird five hundred feet long of burnished silver steel." Its complicated maneuverings provide the main source of tension in a story otherwise free of overt conflict. The description of Venus and its (fictional) satellite, and of the abundant extraterrestrial flora and fauna, is one of the chief delights of "The Great Romance." From the surface of Venus' moon, they can observe the huge mother planet "hanging above us, as though it might suddenly fall and crush us into oblivion . . . covering a third of the sky." In the waters of the planet proper, there are Darwin-friendly "fish with fins like hands . . . on which we did not doubt they could walk when in a shallower water." Later the party comes across a "land of frogs and toads" and a region in which "the reign of the fungus" dominates. Certain interactions between voyagers and the new vegetation have a barely suppressed sexual component:

"One large flower-like thing, like a thick-lipped convolvulus, had attracted us, and Moxton thrust his stick into it. Its anthers closed immediately on it, then its thick leaves folded down with a wonderful grip."

The native humanoids ("Venuses") encountered are both disorienting and appealing ("fine bodies covered with a down -- neither of bird nor animal -- soft and dark"), and the note of imprecision is both mysterious and a little daffy:

"Strange beings! how shall I describe them? with no likeness to humanity except that they stood on two legs; with arms yet not arms; faces human, yet how unlike!"