Cover: The Conquest of the Moon

There’s a change of policy with the cover art this issue. Sadly the free art on PixaBay has been swamped by AI crap, and there doesn’t appear to be any easy way to filter it out in searches. So instead I am using art from the public domain images collection of the British Library. The plan is to find illustrations from science fiction and fantasy books. I hope you’ll find the results interesting.

This issue’s cover is an internal illustration from a book called The Conquest of the Moon: a story of the Bayouda by André Laurie. The art is by George Roux. The book was originally published in French in 1887 under the title, Les exilés de la Terre, Séléne Company Limited. The English translation, from which the illustration is taken, was published in 1889.

Laurie was a pen name of the Corsican author, Paschal Grousset. He was a contemporary and friend of Jules Verne. Indeed, he wrote the original book that Verne turned into The Begum’s Millions. A committed supporter of the Paris Commune, Grousset wrote that book while living in exile in London.

The devices in the illustration are not radio telescopes, they are giant magnets. In the book, a commercial operation plans to drag the Moon down to the Sahara Desert where it can be mind. Unfortunately for them, they end up being dragged to the Moon instead.

More information about Laurie/Grousset is available at the SF Encyclopedia. The book, The Conquest of the Moon, is available in paperback and ebook editions from British Library.