Across the Zodiac: A Victorian Mars Adventure of Antigravity Travel, Alien Civilization, and Early Science Fiction Satire

Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record is a pioneering work of Victorian scientific romance, recounting a voyage to Mars by means of "apergy," a fictional antigravitational force. Blending adventure narrative, speculative science, ethnographic observation, and social satire, Percy Greg imagines Martian politics, gender relations, language, and domestic life with unusual systematic care. Published in 1880, it stands in the formative context of pre-Wellsian science fiction, anticipating later planetary romances while retaining the argumentative texture of nineteenth-century utopian and anti-utopian prose. Percy Greg was a journalist, essayist, and political thinker whose conservative and philosophical interests strongly shaped the novel's design. His concern with social order, religion, imperial governance, and the perceived instabilities of modern liberal society informs the Martian civilization he constructs. Rather than using space travel merely for spectacle, Greg turns Mars into a comparative arena in which earthly institutions can be judged, defended, or satirically estranged. This book is recommended to readers interested in the origins of science fiction, Victorian intellectual history, and imaginative world-building before the genre had fully named itself. Though its attitudes are distinctly of its age, its ambition and inventiveness remain historically fascinating.