The 21 Balloons

Sherman’s visit to Krakatoa, with its hidden society living in a carefully organized private paradise, both references and influences several books written over the centuries that have similar settings. Utopia, a 1516 book by Thomas More, imagines a distant island populated by a society that functions in a manner that More believed would be ideal. Erewhon, by Samuel Butler, is a satire that proposes a faraway land where many of the Victorian ideals of the English are reversed, and where machines are forbidden because of a fear that they might someday evolve to become conscious and malevolent.

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe describes how a man survives while marooned on an island. A 1726 book by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, counters Defoe’s optimism with the story of an adventurer who is shipwrecked successively on lands occupied by tiny people, giants, and talking horses; each society’s silly practices lampoon the weaknesses of English society. The hero returns home, where he prefers the company of his estate’s horses.

Using faraway islands or distant lands as the settings for imaginary cultures made sense in a time when Europeans hadn’t yet explored the far reaches of the planet to any great extent. By the late 1800s, though, most places were well known, and author Pène du Bois placed his utopian world on an island that blew up and largely disappeared because there is no way to know for sure how, or if, such a society might have lived, other than in the author’s imagination.

Mentioned in The Twenty-One Balloons is the 1872 Jules Verne adventure novel Around the World in Eighty Days, in which the hero, Phileas Fogg, sets off on a trip around the globe. In the book, Fogg doesn’t use a balloon, but the speed of his trip using railways and steamer ships captures the world’s attention. Steam-powered transportation revolutionized travel during the Industrial Revolution, and Professor Sherman manages to beat Fogg’s speed record, if only by accident.