To Venus in Five Seconds

To Venus in Five Seconds: An Account of the Strange Disappearance of Thomas Plummer, Pillmaker is a science fiction satire written by Fred T. Jane, the author of the original Jane's Fighting Ships and the founder of what would in time become the Jane's Information Group. Published in 1897, the novel pokes fun at several of the main subgenres of speculative fiction that had become popular in the final years of the nineteenth century.

In one aspect of his multifarious career, Jane spent much of the 1890s illustrating popular novels of speculative fiction, including Edgar Fawcett's Hartmann the Anarchist (1893) and books by George Griffith. When he turned to writing his own novels, Jane parodied the types of fiction he illustrated—what were then called "scientific romances," and the novels of future war that were such a characteristic feature of popular literature in Britain in the decades before World War I—books like Griffth's The Angel of the Revolution (1893) and Olga Romanov (1894). The title of Jane's book both pokes fun and alludes to other works of romances of travel like Jules Verne's From The Earth To The Moon, Direct Course In 97 Hours 20 Minutes (1865), Around The Moon (1870), Around The World In Eighty Days (1873), and their imitations.

The hero of Jane's story is a superb physical specimen of English manhood named Thomas Plummer. He is being sent to medical school by his father, a medical entrepreneur (pill manufacturer)—despite the fact that the younger Plummer is, well, not very bright. At medical school Plummer meets a young, dark-skinned woman called Miss Zumeena. The young woman invites him to tea, which takes place in her summer house (which is oddly full of machinery). A few seconds later, she informs the young Englishman that he is now on Venus. The machinery in Zumeena's gazbo operates a matter transmitter that allows almost instantaneous transport between the two planets.