Across The Zodiac [9781962594387]

Overview

THE BOOK THAT INVENTED THE WORD “ASTRONAUT”
Before Burroughs sent John Carter to Mars. Before Wells imagined Martian invaders. In 1880, Percy Greg launched the first spacecraft to the Red Planet—inventing an entire genre, a constructed alien language, and even the word "astronaut" in a single, groundbreaking novel the world forgot.
Now, renowned graphic novelist Giorgio Pontrelli reimagines this lost masterwork for a new generation.
Across the Zodiac follows an unnamed Englishman who builds a spacecraft called the Astronaut and launches himself alone across space, driven by curiosity and intellectual ambition. On Mars, he discovers a technologically advanced but deeply unsettling civilization—governed by authoritarian technocrats who deny the existence of life beyond their own world.
Outwardly rational and orderly, Martian society conceals something darker.
The traveler observes practices of chilling moral coldness—including the euthanasia of children deemed imperfect in the name of social efficiency and genetic purity. He learns the Martian language—one of the earliest constructed alien languages in all of fiction—and becomes entangled in the planet's political and philosophical tensions. He forms deep relationships, including a cross-species romance, and encounters the Children of Light, a mystical order quietly resisting the dominant regime.
Blending adventure, satire, and philosophical inquiry, Greg used Mars to reflect Victorian anxieties about industry, governance, gender, and scientific progress—decades before anyone else dared.
Now Pontrelli's bold, cinematic artwork brings that vision explosively to life.
Through dynamic visual storytelling and modern science fiction sensibilities, this graphic novel adaptation captures both the wonder and the unease of Greg's original—honoring its place as one of the genre's earliest and most daring interplanetary epics.
The origin of science fiction has finally been reimagined.
A collectible edition featuring sprayed edges and meticulously designed premium packaging. Not just a novel—a work of art meant to be held, displayed, and remembered.