Round the Moon
Translation edition: Ward Lock Co
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This book offers a thrilling blend of hard science and imaginative adventure, capturing the timeless human drive to explore the unknown.
Edition details
Book Summary
Three adventurers—Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan—are launched from Earth in a projectile aimed at the Moon. Their journey is marked by scientific discovery, near-disasters, and philosophical debates, ultimately leading to an unexpected orbit and a dramatic return to Earth.
The sequel to *From the Earth to the Moon* follows the three travelers as they endure the shock of launch, narrowly avoid an asteroid, and experience weightlessness at the neutral point of gravity. Their trajectory is altered by a passing asteroid, causing them to orbit the Moon rather than land. They observe lunar features, debate the Moon's habitability, and face the terror of a 354-hour lunar night. After realizing they are on a return course, they use rockets at the neutral point to alter their path, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Rescued by the Susquehanna, they return to a hero's welcome, their observations published and celebrated by the Gun Club.
Reading guide
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Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
- Breaking point
- Aftermath
- Closing
Michel Ardan
Ardan is the expedition's amateur, the one passenger who joined by charm and nerve rather than credentials, and he knows it. Where Barbicane calculates and Nicholl doubts, Ardan jokes — striking a match on his boot sole, christening the bullet a travelling prison he'd gladly lease for a century, naming the dogs after the first couple. His levity is not stupidity; it is a way of holding three men together in a sealed room with no exit. Without his audacity, the voyage would be an experiment; with it, it becomes an adventure.
Impey Barbicane
Barbicane commands the expedition with the composure of a countinghouse clerk, settling accounts with Nicholl mid-voyage and checking his chronometer against Murchison's to the tenth of a second. His authority rests on precision, not warmth, and the contrast with Ardan's chatter defines the bullet's social weather. He is the scientific instinct of the enterprise — the reason the shot was fired at all — and the reason it might actually arrive. Every early crisis is measured against his calm.
Captain Nicholl
Nicholl boarded the projectile as Barbicane's adversary and remains its most methodical passenger, sealing the plates, timing the departure, demanding a written receipt for money exchanged in a vessel that may never return. His skepticism is not hostility so much as a need for proof, and it makes him the counterweight to both Barbicane's confidence and Ardan's improvisation. In the early arc he is the man who checks the bolts — the reason the others can afford to dream.
J. T. Maston
Maston stays behind while his friends ride the bullet, and his vigil at the great reflector becomes the Earthbound half of the story. He argues with Belfast like a man possessed, insists he can see Ardan's face at a port-light, and leans so far over the tube that his steel hook alone saves him from a 280-foot drop. His fierce, unshakable conviction that the travellers live keeps the rescue effort alive — and gives the narrative its anxious, hopeful pulse.
Diana
Dog belonging to the travelers, accidentally launched into space with them.
Captain Blomsberry
Commander of the Susquehanna, assists in the recovery of the projectile.
Scientific Exploration and Discovery
The entire narrative is driven by the scientific ambition to reach the moon, with detailed discussions of astronomy, physics, and geology, as the characters observe and analyze the lunar surface, its formation, and its potential for life.
Human Audacity and Ingenuity
The project to send a projectile to the moon represents the boldness of human ambition and technical problem-solving, as the Gun Club members overcome immense engineering challenges through calculation, innovation, and sheer will.
The Sublime and the Unknown
The journey into space confronts the travelers with the vast, silent, and often terrifying unknown, from the absolute darkness of lunar nights to the desolate, alien landscapes, evoking both wonder and existential unease.
Life, Death, and Extinction
The book repeatedly questions whether the moon is or was inhabited, explores the death of the dog Satellite, and discusses the eventual cooling and uninhabitability of both the moon and Earth, framing life as fragile and temporary in the cosmos.