abstract
| - Rollo Lenox Smeaton Aubrey, Earl of Redgrave, Baron Smeaton in the Peerage of England, and Viscount Aubrey in the Peerage of Ireland - known to most as Lord Redgrave and to his wife as Lenox -, is an English nobleman and adventurer who built a functional spaceship called the Astronef to travel the solar system, visiting several planets with his wife Lilla Zaidie and their loyal navigator Andrew Murgatroyd in the year 1900. Their first stop is the moon, where they dress in spacesuits and explore the remains of a long-dead city and a strange subterranean realm. They later pay visits to Mars (also a dying world, but still civilized), Venus (a paradisiacal land inhabited by peaceful flying humanoids which communicate by song), Callisto (a dead world covered in ice), Ganymede (similar to Callisto, but still inhabited by a dying civilization similar to Mars) and Saturn (an untamed world of gaseous oceans filled with whale-sized predatory jellyfish). While Lord Redgrave did build the Astronef, he didn't invent its technology. The ship's inventor was actually Zaidie's father, the late Prof. Rennick, who, before he died, made Redgrave promise that if it came to it he would rather destroy the Astronef than allow her to be used as an instrument for war.
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