Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds is an 1883 science fiction novel by Wladislaw Somerville Lach-Szyrma, a Polish-English curate, author, and historian.
The book is an expanded version of Lach-Szyrma's earlier work A Voice from Another World, published in 1874.
A sequel series, "Letters from the Planets", was published in nine parts between 1887 and 1893 in Cassell's Family Magazine.
[1][2] Published in 1883, Aleriel is a Victorian novel, which was previously thought to be the first published work to apply the word Martian as a noun (it is now known that the word had been so used as early as 1869[3][4]): After the protagonist, Aleriel, lands on Mars, he buries his spacecraft in snow, "so that it might not be disturbed by any Martian who might come across it".
[5] The novel portrays Venus and Mars as utopias, Jupiter and Saturn as primitive, and the Moon as desolate.