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Interplanetary Voyage

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Interplanetary Voyage (trope)

An Interplanetary Voyage is a specific type of science-fiction story that takes the phrase "getting there is half the fun" very literally. In most cases these stories focus just as much, if not more, on the actual process of traveling in space as they do on the destination itself.

At the beginning of the Science Fiction genre, space travel was a new and novel trope. It wasn't about the destination — the journey alone was interesting enough. There was no Casual Interplanetary Travel (let alone interstellar). We didn't have your fancy Hyper Drive or wormhole networks or your sub-ether anagrammed-tribadist Teslafied radio transmittion contraptions, and we had to walk sixteen miles back and forth through the snow to the launch site. We were lucky if we had a pith helmet! Our science was silly, but it tried to be hard ...for its time (except for Cavorite. That's just magic).

You youngsters with your single-stage rockets and inertialess drives and horseless space shuttles have it easy. Back then, you had to build a balloon filled with evaporating morning dew, or strap on a giant rocket, or get shot out of a bloody cannon at the Man in the Moon and put his eye out. That's how we did it.

Well, that's how the hired help did it.

You could go anywhere your heart desired, as long it was the Moon, Mars, or Venus. Or the Counter-Earth, ruled by the rapacious Hun and the Kounter-Kaiser!

Back then, Men were Men, the Moon Men were Moon Men, or sometimes bats or bugs, Martians were Martians, and the Venusians were jungle-dwelling crab women!

And that's how we liked it, consarnit!

Nowadays, this is largely a Dead Horse Trope outside of parodies or Genre Throwback works. Space travel actually exists now, and even short journeys mostly involve astronauts sitting around in cramped living conditions with little privacy or entertainment options, a far cry from past visions of romantic interplanetary travel. Focusing on the destination rather than the journey allows writers to spend less time on the boring minutiae of space travel and more time building alien worlds. As a result, Interplanetary Voyage stories are strongly associated with science fiction novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and with pulp magazines published during that era.

Nevertheless, some modern writers still play this trope straight as deliberate Zeerust, while others treat it more realistically—works on the harder side of the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness might depict a crewed mission to a planet like Mars or Jupiter using modern or near-future technology as a long and arduous journey, dealing with challenges such as life support, radiation, or equipment failures.

See also Journey to the Sky, its earthly equivalent. Contrast Casual Interplanetary Travel, where travel between planets is so trivial that it is barely touched upon in the story.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Comic Books 

    Comic Strips 
  • Dan Dare is perhaps the example of trying hard to be scientifically accurate space travel (for the 1950s, at least), with (almost all) the stories being limited to travel around a then-realistic version of the solar system using then-realistic spacecraft etc.

    Fan Fiction 
  • The Kerbal Space Program fanfic The Next Frontier involves interstellar travel, and it's definitely not the casual or fast sort. Travel times just between planets vary from a couple of weeks to several months, and the current state of the art in Faster-Than-Light Travel gets about one light-year a month.

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg, describing a 1880 trip to Mars.
  • Isaac Asimov:
  • The Conquest of the Moon by Washington Irving, an allegory about the colonization of America.
  • The Consolidator (1705) by Daniel Defoe, a trip to the Moon in a Chinese invention.
  • Stephen King's short story "The Cursed Expedition" is about a trip to a living, carnivorous Venus.
  • Doctor Dolittle in the Moon by Hugh Lofting, where the Doctor flies to the Moon on the back of a giant moth.
  • Doctor Omega (1906) by Arnould Galopin.
  • Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P. Serviss. Not as awesome as the name implies, as Edison commits genocide against the Martians. The message is less Scientific progress is fun! and more do not fuck with Edison.
  • In Les Exilés de la Terre (Exiled from Earth) by Paschal Grousset involves a trip inside of an iron mountain in Sudan that has been converted into a magnetically driven vehicle (1887).
  • The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells (1901).
  • A Flight to the Moon by George Fowler (1813).
  • The Great Romance, a 1881 novel about a trip to Venus.
  • 1905's Gullivar of Mars by Edwin Lester Linden Arnold, using a magic carpet.
  • A Journey In Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (1894) by John Jacob Astor IV, who was also notable as the richest man to die on the RMS Titanic.
  • Journey to Mars and Journey to Venus by Gustavus W. Pope. Venus is covered in dinosaurs.
  • Larry Niven's Known Space short story "Becalmed in Hell" (1965), involving a trip to a hellishly hot Venus. "The Coldest Place" and "The Hole Man" were set on Mercury and Mars, respectively.
  • The Last Hero is a Magitek version, with a group of explorers reaching the Discworld's Moon by means of a giant wooden bird powered by swamp dragons.
  • Heinlein's Luna Cycle of short stories and novels.
  • The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin, (1638) in which a Spaniard takes a swan-powered boat trip to the Moon.
  • The Martian is a very well researched modern take on this trope.
  • Orlando Furioso, loosely based on the era of Charlemagne, has the knight Astolfo fly to the Moon on a hippogriff.
  • Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 Prelude to Space, to the point where the entire story revolves around the launch preparations and the flight itself is almost an afterthought.
  • The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew, a 2009 short story by Catherynne M. Valente has a documentary team fired into space from a giant cannon and exploring Venus via silk balloon.
  • The Backstory of the Red Mars Trilogy has John Boone become a worldwide hero-celebrity because he led the first Mars voyage. The first novel also spends a good amount of time describing the voyage from earth to Mars.
  • Road to Mars: This 2014 collaborative Russian novel was written by 15 authors. It deals with the multinational crew of the spacecraft Ares, sent to explore the red planet as part of a joint American/Russian/European mission with two crewmembers from each of these blocs. They are actually in a race to overtake the Millennium Boat, a Chinese craft sent to the same destination a little earlier with only two crewmembers. Privately, though, some of the crewmembers on both vessels would much rather work together to ensure that everyone got home safely rather than win at any cost. After all, it's just them out there, with no other living soul for millions of miles. There is a supernatural component to the novel, though, which starts to affect the crew of the Ares.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's 1952 juvenile novel The Rolling Stones is an interesting combination of an Interplanetary Voyage story with Casual Interplanetary Travel. On the one hand, the Stone family are an upper-middle-class family (who happen to live on the Moon, in Luna City) who decide to take an extended vacation by buying a (used) space yacht and blasting off to Mars, then the Asteroid Belt, and by the end of the book they're all headed for Titan — all very "casual". On the other hand, much of the story takes place aboard their spaceship, the Rolling Stone, as they travel to Mars and then the Asteroids; and there is a great deal of discussion of rocket propulsion, other issues of space travel (life support — how much food, water, and air "the mythical average man" requires each day, and how much of that can be recycled) and especially of orbital dynamics, all of which is actually still fairly plausible (if dated) "hard" science fiction.
  • Roverandom by Tolkien, about a humorous trip to the Moon taken by his 4-year-old son Michael's lost toy dog.
  • The early The Ship Who... stories, from the '60s, combined an aspect of this with Casual Interstellar Travel — an FTL drive exists but is imperfect and it can take a few weeks for Helva and her brawn to get to a different assignment. She and her first brawn fantasize about being the first to reach the Horsehead Nebula, and after he dies she contemplates setting a course that way and dying on the way.
  • The Ship That Sailed to Mars: Published in 1923, the first third of the book concerns the building of a supernatural craft that can travel between worlds. The middle third details the crew's fantastic voyage from Earth to Mars, including descriptions of all the marvelous "stars" (i.e. planets) the travelers visit and hazards they brave on their journey.
  • The 1903 Polish work The Silver Globe by Jerzy Żuławski.
  • Johannes Kepler's Somnium, where demons take a man to the Moon.
  • Somnium by Juan Maldonado (1541).
  • C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy:
  • The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1786) involves two trips to the Moon.
  • A Trip To Venus by John Munro (1897)
  • True History: The Ur-Example written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD, it is the earliest dateable work of fiction about a voyage to the Moon. The protagonist describes how he and his travelling companions were lifted by a whirlwind and taken to the Moon. He describes the weird and wonderful lifeforms there, the civilisation that flourishes on it, and their war against the forces of the Sun.
  • "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835) by Edgar Allan Poe involves a balloon trip to the Moon.
  • Unveiling a Parallel, an 1893 feminist allegory by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant describing a Martian voyage.
  • Ben Bova's 2000 novel Venus involves a scientifically accurate trip to Venus. Also, the rest of his Grand Tour series.
  • Jules Verne:
    • From the Earth to the Moon (1865), its direct follow up Around the Moon (1869), and their film and opera adaptations. Subverted in that they never actually land on the Moon, they end up stuck in decaying orbit and land back in the Pacific.
    • Off on a Comet aka Hector Servadac (1877) in which a multinational group of characters is swept off Earth by a comet and have to survive dropping temperatures as they travel through the solar system.
  • Voyage by Stephen Baxter is a combination of hard sci-fi interpretations of this and Alternate History tropes.
  • Voyage dans la Lune (1657) by the Real Life Cyrano de Bergerac, where fireworks are used as rockets.
  • A Voyage to the Moon by Aratus (1793)
  • A Voyage to the Moon (1827) by George Tucker.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Away, a 2020 made-for-Netflix series starring Hilary Swank, spends its full ten episodes depicting the three-year voyage of the first crewed mission to Mars. It focuses mainly on technological and medical issues, and interpersonal problems of the small international crew, who have widely varying backgrounds and levels of experience. A secondary plotline involves the politics of the mission, particularly the fact that China has provided the majority of funding, and therefore wants to be seen as "first among equals" in the mission. Some time is also devoted to personal issues of the crew's families back on earth.
  • Season 3 of the hard sci-fi alternate history series For All Mankind is about a space race to Mars between NASA, the Soviets, and the private company Helios. Episode 4 "Happy Valley" solely focuses on the travel between Earth and Mars, being a modern and (relatively) more realistic take on this trope's definition.
  • Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets, a 2004 science-fiction docudrama involving the crewed exploration of several planets in our Solar System in a journey that takes several years and faces hardships like solar radiation exposure.

    Pinball 
  • Pin*Bot: This game requires the player to advance across the Solar System, from Pluto to the Sun.

    Radio 
  • Journey into Space:
    • In Journey to the Moon / Operation Luna, Jet, Lemmy, Doc and Mitch travel from the Earth to The Moon in 1965.
    • In both The Red Planet and The World in Peril, the crew journey from The Moon to Mars, first in 1971 and then again in 1972.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The Space 1889 RPG took this trope and ran with it, featuring Victorian-era space colonies — colonies, as in "Age of European Colonialism" — on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.

    Video Games 
  • Orbiter
  • Kerbal Space Program is essentially an Interplanetary Voyage Simulator. It uses a physics engine to simulate realistic-but-simplified orbital mechanics and gives you essentially the same limitations that NASA has now (or might have 20 Minutes into the Future), but once you're aloft, you can explore the solar system to your heart's desire (and the limits of your fuel tanks) and even run across a few anomalies along the lines of 2001 (though they don't actually do anything).
  • Voyage: Inspired by Jules Verne, being inspired by, of course, Jules Verne's story From the Earth to the Moon, involves Michel Ardan crash-landing on the Moon and encountering Selenites.

    Web Comics 
  • The comic Narbonic ran a special Sunday feature spread out over a couple years, with a Victorian-era Mad Scientist Helen Narbon and her minion Dave Davenport taking a rocket to other planets and encountering spacefaring Venusians and Martians. And even the Victorian-era Helen can't escape the influence of her mother.
  • Most of the run of Moony the Moon Man (the comic is no longer available online, sadly) was taken up with the titular little green Moon man's attempts to build a spaceship to get to Earth, because he was lonely.

    Western Animation 

    Other 
  • Although actual space travel wasn't involved, the infamous "Moon Hoax" article series in the New York Sun used a super-telescope and elements of this trope to boost circulation in the mid-1800s.

    Real Life 
  • The Apollo program, which probably turned the original conception of this into a Dead Horse Trope.
  • As of The New '20s, no human has ever gone beyond The Moon (except when orbiting it or flying by it without escaping Earth's gravity). However, several engineering concepts and proposals for human missions to Mars have existed since the 1950s, such as the NASA Design Reference Missions. SpaceX is currently planning to send people to Mars using their reusable rocket system known as "Starship." Missions to other destinations have occasionally been considered, such as HAVOC (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) and HOPE (Human Outer Planet Exploration), a crewed mission to Jupiter's moon Callisto.

 
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Video Example(s):

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Hitting the Moon in the Eye

A spaceship lands in the moon's eye

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