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Trueman, Chrysostom

Entry updated 29 July 2023. Tagged: Author.

Pseudonym of UK author H Cowen (?   -?   ) who identified himself, under this pseudonym, as "Editor" of The History of a Voyage to the Moon (1864) [for full title see Checklist], a Proto-SF tale whose author remained unidentified until a copy was auctioned in 2014 at the Swann Galleries of New York, containing "an inscription identifying the author as H Cowen." As of 2023, this or some other similarly inscribed copy had provided further authentication.

The tale itself is divided into two parts. In "The Voyage", the protagonists learn how to create a new Power Source – an Antigravity element capable of propelling the Spaceship they have had constructed by an eccentric Inventor– and travel from Western America near Santa Fe to the Moon where, in part two, "The Ideal Life", they discover a Utopia inhabited by "amnesiac reincarnations of select Earthmen", four feet tall, communitarian, pacific. Transportation is via giant roc-like birds. The protagonists, in strong contrast to the behaviour of most visitors to other worlds in the nineteenth century, neither leave nor destroy the world they have discovered.

The significance of Trueman's tale in the development of nineteenth-century speculative literature has perhaps been overemphasized. Its reiterations of the conventions of the interplanetary Fantastic Voyage are not remarkably innovative, while its depictions of a new Power Source, and of the Spaceship that conveys the protagonists to the Moon, are not markedly more innovative or detailed than those found, highly condensed, in J L Riddell's Orrin Lindsay's Plan of Aerial Navigation, with a Narrative of His Explorations in the Higher Regions of the Atmosphere, and His Wonderful Voyage Round the Moon! (1847 chap), a highly condensed Thought Experiment; or, much more expansively, in Elbert Perce's Gulliver Joi: His Three Voyages; Being an Account of his Marvelous Adventures in Kailoo, Hydrogenia and Ejario (1851). The History of a Voyage to the Moon did soon appear in France as Voyage à la Lune (1865) as by Alexandre Cathelineau [for full title see Checklist], adding plausibility to the suggestion that it may have influenced Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865). [JC]

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