The Consolidator or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon

by Daniel Defoe

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Genres: British Literature

157 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1705

About the author

Daniel Defoe was an English novelist, journalist, merchant, pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations. He has been seen as one of the earliest proponents of the English novel, and helped to popularise the form in Britain with others such as Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson. Defoe wrote many political tracts, was often in trouble with the authorities, and spent a period in prison. Intellectuals and political leaders paid attention to his fresh ideas and sometimes consulted him.
Defoe was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than three hundred works—books, pamphlets, and journals—on diverse topics, including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural. He was also a pioneer of business journalism and economic journalism.

Reviews

[Marilyn]

(from Wikipedia) There are multiple candidates for first novel in English partly because of ignorance of earlier works, but largely because the term novel can be defined so as to exclude earlier candidates:

Some critics require a novel to be wholly original and so exclude retellings like Le Morte d'Arthur.
Most critics distinguish between an anthology of stories with different protagonists, even if joined by common themes and milieus, and the novel (which forms a connected narrative), and so also exclude Le Morte d'Arthur.
Some critics distinguish between the romance (which has fantastic elements) and the novel (which is wholly realistic) and so yet again exclude Le Morte d'Arthur.
Some critics distinguish between the allegory (in which characters and events have political, religious or other meanings) and the novel (in which characters and events stand only for themselves) and so exclude The Pilgrim's Progress and A Tale of a Tub.
Some critics require a novel to have a certain length, and so exclude Oroonoko, defining it instead as a novella.
Some critics distinguish between the picaresque (which has a loosely connected sequence of episodes) and the novel (which has unity of structure) and so exclude The Unfortunate Traveller.

Due to the influence of Ian Watt's seminal study in literary sociology, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), Watt's candidate, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), gained wide acceptance.

[Jordan Kolby · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the most boring book I've ever read (well...listened to I guess as I used the 'read aloud' setting with the horrible AI voice on Google Books). To give it credit, it was one of the first novels ever written in England, and I did think it cleverly satiricized the political climate at the time of its publication. However, the language was very complicated and a lot of it just went over my head. There was also very little plot. The author rides a machine to the moon.....and spends PAGES UPON PAGES describing the machine in the minutest detail!!!! Overall, it was incredibly dull. Sorry, Defoe.

[H Jesseman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m about three hundred years too late for a deal of the satire but a lot of it does apply just as well to our modern day politicians.

[Joe]

A satirical critical utopia in which Defoe's narrator travels to the moon mostly to get a dispassionate and crushingly granular view of recent and contemporary British political history. The most intriguing parts a occur early on when Defoe tackling epistemological problems through a series of optical inventions ("Engines of Light," "Second-sight glasses" (recalling Zizek's ideology glasses). His figure of a thinking machine is particularly memorable. Defoe admires it; in hindsight it looks like the sort of torture/brainwashing device used in the Clockwork Orange: "The person that is seated here feels some pain in passing some Negative Springs, that are found up, effectually to shut out all Injecting, Disturbing Thoughts; and the better to prepare him for the Operation that is to follow, and this is without doubt a very rational way; for when a Man can absolutely shut out all manner of thinking but what he is upon, he shall think the more Intensly upon the one object before him. // This Operation past, here are certain Screws that draw direct lines from every angle of the engine to the Brain of the Man, and at the same time, other direct Lines to his Eyes; at the other end of which Lines, there are Glasses which convey or reflect the Objects the Person is desirous to think upon." I took a flyer on this book, knowing it might be terrible but hoping it would be an overlooked gem. It's kind of both. And at least I know now that Defoe sucks at satire.