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"The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall"
"The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall"
Short story by Edgar Allan Poe
Text available at Wikisource
Original title	Hans Phaall -- A Tale
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction, hoax
Publication
Publisher	Southern Literary Messenger
Media type	Print (periodical)
Publication date	June 1835

"The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in the June 1835 issue of the monthly magazine Southern Literary Messenger as "Hans Phaall -- A Tale", intended by Poe to be a hoax.^[1]

The story is regarded as one of the early examples of the modern science fiction genre.^[2]^[3]^[4] The story traces the journey of a voyage to the moon.

Poe planned to continue the hoax in further installments, but was pre-empted by the Great Moon Hoax which started in the August 25, 1835 issue of the New York Sun daily newspaper. Poe later wrote that the satirical tone of the story made it easy for readers to see through the supposed hoax.

Plot summary

The story opens with the delivery to a crowd gathered in Rotterdam of a manuscript detailing the journey of a man named Hans Pfaall. The manuscript, which comprises the majority of the story, sets out in detail how Pfaall contrived to reach the Moon by benefit of a revolutionary new balloon and a device which compresses the vacuum of space into breathable air. The journey takes him nineteen days, and the narrative includes descriptions of the Earth from space as well as the descent to its fiery, volcanic satellite. Pfaall withholds most of the information regarding the surface of the Moon and its inhabitants in order to negotiate a pardon from the Burgomaster for several murders he committed as he left Earth (creditors of his who were becoming irksome). After reading the manuscript, the city authorities agree that Pfaall should be pardoned, but the messenger who brought them the text (apparently a resident of the Moon) has vanished and they are unable to restore communication with him.

Inspiraton

Edgar Allan Poe studied at the University of Virginia in 1826 while George Tucker was chairman of the faculty there, and is known to have read Tucker's 1827 novel A Voyage to the Moon and drawn inspiration from it for "Hans Pfaall".^[5]^[6] Harry Harrison and Malcolm Edwards, in the 1979 book Spacecraft in Fact and Fiction, comment that Tucker's story "may [...] have been responsible" for Poe's,^[7] while J. O. Bailey writes that Poe's story "certainly owes a great deal" to Tucker's,^[5] and Adam Roberts goes so far as to say that "Poe plagiarised several pages".^[8] Bailey, in a 1942 article in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America analyzing Poe's sources for several stories including "Hans Pfaall", identifies several parallels between the two stories including references to lightheadedness or loss of consciousness upon experiencing problems with the air supply, mistaking the Moon for Earth following the reversal of gravity (bouleversement) along the journey, and the first-person narrator deferring discussion of scientific discoveries for personal reasons but promising to publish them separately later. Bailey concludes that Poe's sources for the story are varied and complex but that significant amounts of material are traceable to Tucker's book and that this cannot be explained by familiarity with the review of A Voyage to the Moon published in the American Quarterly Review in March 1828 (which had previously been posited as the explanation as Poe had made reference to the review in a note to the 1840 edition of "Hans Pfaall") as some commonalities between Tucker's story and Poe's are not mentioned in the review.^[9]

Literary significance

Poe's story had an influence on, and is referenced in, Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865), which can be seen as a retelling of the story.^[10] Verne acknowledged Poe as the creator of the "scientific novel" when he referred to him as 'le créateur du roman merveilleux scientifique'.

Poe later published a similar hoax, "The Balloon-Hoax", in the New York Sun in 1844.