Description

Britain has adopted “transportation” into indentured servitude as a criminal punishment in an effort to reduce the vast number of executions by hanging. Initially, convicts are sent to the Americas and Australia until a crisis of cosmic proportion occurs. When the upstart Yankees across the Pond determine, in their insatiable lust for more powerful artillery, to launch a projectile to the moon, they pose no threat to Britain. But when a Frenchman should then ride said projectile and thusly claim the Earth’s great satellite for one or both of Britain’s greatest enemies, action is required: swift and decisive action to establish a new British colony which will require transportation of a great number of indentured subjects.

A tribute and companion to From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, this heretofore untold story of the great space race of 1866 embraces the moon of Verne’s time, inhabited with batmen, unicorns, and other fantastical creatures purportedly seen through the powerful new telescopes of the day. But what of the far side of the moon? There, what resources the Earth’s gravity strips from the near side are magnified by the same: thick, rich atmosphere, water, lush vegetation; all these resources await Great Britain as it contends against its godless foes who embrace the atrocity of self-rule and reject divinely appointed monarchy.

None are more determined or capable of rising to this challenge than Sir Bernard Ravenport, owner of the world’s largest fleet of airships, stationed in Blackmoor, south of London. When Sir Bernard’s junior partner returns from India unknowingly infected with lycanthropy and his surviving victims are sentenced, for disapprobatory public indecency on mornings following a full moon, to lunar transportation, what fate or destiny awaits the British lunar colony as werewolves gain direct access to the very catalyst of their terrible disease?