Science Fiction History: 1880 Across the Zodiac in a Spaceship

About the 1880 sci-fi novel Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg, perhaps the first sci-fi novel to use spaceships.

--1880. It was said of Percy Greg's Across the Zodiac that "it is possibly the 1st interplanetary journey to be made by spaceship." (Readers familiar with the field will have noticed, however, that it was not the last.) Electricity worked the antigravity device and recycled the ship's air. Mars, the ship's destination, had an "advanced race" practicing polygamy and atheism; the Martians also had dirigibles, poison-gas guns, electric tractors, 3-D talkies, and the duodecimal system. However, they did not have resistance to a disease of earthly origin "contracted from rose-seeds," so the hero left in a hurry. But Mars had already become a favorite setting for extraterrestrial fictional adventures, ousting even the moon.