Published the same year as Jules Verne's classic From the Earth to the Moon and Henri de Parville's An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, Achille Eyraud's Voyage to Venus (1865) was the first novel to describe an interplanetary rocket-powered spaceship. Eyraud supports his design with an elaborate (but ultimately flawed) pseudo-scientific argument and describes its cosmic voyage in a logical manner. Once on Venus, his protagonists discover a utopian society in which the sexes are equal and solar-powered robots toil in the fields.

Voyage to Venus has often been mentioned in many histories of space travel and science fiction, although the difficulty of obtaining the original text until now meant that few have read it. This ground-breaking work is at last available in English in its first annotated translation by award-winning author Brian Stableford.