IN AND OUT OF THE EAGLE 14

The very first Dan Dare story had no individual title, but when Titan Books reprinted it in 2004 they called it Voyage to Venus. In 2008 Orion Publishing produced an audio dramatisation of the first half of the story and gave it this title and then in 2012, Michael Shipway’s electronic music album inspired by the story took the title too. By 2016, when B7 Audio Productions dramatised several Dan Dare adventures, Voyage to Venus was the automatic title for the first adventure. Although it took fifty four years for this title to formally appear, it seems an appropriate one. Frank Hampson, like many of Eagle’s other contributors, favoured alliterative titles, giving us Marooned on Mercury, Reign of the Robots and Safari in Space, not to mention Dan Dare himself. Voyage to Venus was previously used as the title of the second book of C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy about Earth, Mars and Venus. As in Dan Dare this title was added later. First published in 1943, Lewis’ book was originally called Perelandra, which was the story’s name for the planet, but it was altered to Voyage to Venus when published in paperback in 1953. C.S. Lewis was one of several notable theologians who contributed articles for Marcus Morris’ Anvil magazine in the late 1940s and not surprisingly his book has strong religious connotations. The plot concerns the hero from Earth trying to prevent the fall of man (as described in the Book of Genesis) from being repeated on Venus. Lewis went on to write the famous Narnia series of children’s books, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950.

The original Voyage to Venus was Achille Eyraud’s 1865 book, published the same year as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Eyraud’s book is the first to describe rocket powered interplanetary travel. However, despite its prophetic importance, it has only been available in an English edition since 2011.