In the first issue of Amazing Stories, from all the way back in 1926, we have the first half of a lesser-known novel by Jules Verne! Originally published in 1877, it's called Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac, and it's the story of a French military officer working in northern Africa who, in the middle of preparing for a duel over a woman, is knocked over by an ear-shattering explosion!
He, as well as a sizeable chunk of the Mediterranean coast, has been captured by a comet that hit Earth with a glancing blow and continued off on its irregular orbit.
The resulting story is very different in tone from the other Verne stories that I've read, and it seems like Verne was getting tired of the gentlemanly explorer, and instead decided to do something a little irreverent, with mixed results. This book came after his best-known hits, after all.
The tone reminds me... not of Don Quixote exactly (especially since I've read almost none of it), but rather the pop culture references to Quixote. Very self-aware and silly.
The first half of the book is quite good. Hector and his orderly, Ben Zoof, explore the small chunk of land they're on, observe the different gravity and temperature, find that all the nearby towns have been replaced with extensions of the Mediterranean Sea, and so on. The man whom Hector was to duel shows up, and he's a Russian officer with a military yacht. They circumnavigate the surface of the comet and find Gibraltar about where they expected to find Greece.
They find some messages-not-in-bottles and learn somebody is doing astronomical measurements. Hector and Ben actually think that they're still on the Earth, but after some kind of catastrophe, for a large chunk of the book.
Unfortunately, the second half of the book takes the already leisurely pace and slows it to a painful crawl. As the comet gets further and further from the sun, the characters are forced to take refuge in deep caves, kept warm by volcanic activity. The comedy goes from light-hearted, even-handed, and silly to dreary, one-sided, and mean-spirited. We get an unnecessarily detailed discussion of basic orbital mechanics, but the end result is the impression that Verne drew an ellipse on a diagram of the Solar system and said, "There's my story."
It felt like an episode of The Magic School Bus to me, at one point.
The dull second half culminates in a barely-believable ending which would require some things to be very perfectly timed, and for the people left on Earth to be very dim-witted. It falls flat, to put it simply.
It's worth noting that, while this book seems very short due to the roughly 100-page length in Amazing Stories, in fact that magazine uses large paper, small typeface, and narrow margins. It probably took me ten hours to read the whole thing, and I'm a fairly quick reader.
In the end, Off on a Comet makes me wish I had gone back and re-read one of Verne's best hits, instead. Recommended for die-hard Verne completionists only.
Still, if you're interested in giving it a read, you can find the first part here:
https://archive.org/details/AmazingStoriesVolume01Number01/page/n5/mode/2up
and the second part here:
https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v01n02_1926-05/page/n53/mode/2up
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