Antigravity And The Moon

Post-Verne, post-Wells, Robert Heinlein wrote three "first man on the Moon" stories: his Future History version, his Scribner Juvenile version and his film version. Writing later, Poul Anderson and Larry Niven began their future histories with exploration of other parts of the Solar System. Like Wells' Cavor, James Blish's Adolph Haertel discovers antigravity but uses it to bypass the Moon and fly straight to Mars. In Blish's Cities In Flight, observations on the surface of Jupiter are necessary to confirm the Blackett-Dirac equations and thus to discover antigravity which can also be used for faster than light interstellar travel. In Anderson's Satan's World, artificial gravity fields maintain an atmosphere and vegetation on an open part of the Lunar surface.

Speculative fiction is a team effort and what a team: Verne, Wells, Heinlein, Anderson, Niven and Blish. Not an exclusive list, of course, but six big names nevertheless.