Beyond the Earth

In 1903, a deaf provincial schoolteacher worked out the equation that would take us to the Moon. In 1920, he wrote a novel about it.

Six scientists - a Russian, an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, an American, and an Italian - have withdrawn from the world to a castle in the Himalayas. There they build a rocket. What follows is the first flight beyond the atmosphere, the first walk in open space, the first garden grown in orbit, and the first footprints on the Moon.

Tsiolkovsky set his story in the year 2017. Writing decades before any of it happened, he described the airlock, the tethered spacewalk, the pressure suit, the multistage rocket, and the spinning station that manufactures its own gravity - not as fantasy, but as engineering whose arithmetic he had already done.

Beyond the Earth is the founding novel of Russian Cosmism and one of the most quietly prophetic books in the history of science fiction: part adventure, part lecture hall, part hymn to a future among the stars.