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.On the contrary, there are many prior works that take protagonists to the Moon or further into the solar system.Both Cicero’s Latin Somnium Scipionis (‘The Dream of Scipio’, 51 BC) and Plutarch’s Greek to kuklô tês selênês (‘The Circle of the Moon’, c.AD 80) site the solar system as a place traversed by virtuous souls after death.Lucian of Samos’s Alêthês Historia (‘The True History’, c.AD 170) includes an episode in which a ship is swept into outer space by a great storm and eventually lands on the Moon, which is shown populated by a series of wonderfully grotesque beings.Jumping ahead somewhat, there is the fat epic-romance Orlando Furioso (‘Mad Roland’, 1534) by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, one episode of which takes a character to the Moon on the back of a hippogriff to recover the lost wits of the story, the pleasant conceit of the poem being that everything lost (including sanity) makes its way to the Moon.the history of sf39The reason why it is distorting to call these works science fiction (although some critics have done so) is not that subsequent science has proven their visions of the cosmos wrong.Science is always proving the visions of SF authors wrong; it was, for instance, a convention of much early twentieth-century SF that beneath the clouds of Venus lay a vast ocean, but the subsequent discovery that in fact Venus is an arid, acidic and superheated planet does not eject those earlier works from the club of SF.The problem with the pre-1600 version of outer space was that it was conceived as a pure and religious realm, a geo-centric series of spheres of which only the lowest (ours) was subject to change, and everything above the level of the Moon was incorruptible, eternal and godly.Not until the great Polish astronomer Copernicus (1473–1543) proposed the heliocentric cosmos did a properly materialist understanding of the solar system percolate through to culture more generally.Johann Kepler (1571–1630) was a Protestant German astronomer who established three important laws of planetary motion.But in addition to his scientific studies, he wrote one work of science fiction, Somnium, sive Astronomia Lunaris (‘A Dream, or Lunar Astronomy’).This work relates, in a dream, a visit to the Moon, the journey accomplished by being carried there by witches, and provides us with an imaginary natural history of the Moon, or ‘Levania’ as its natives call it.From a Moon-based point of view, the dominant object in the sky is the Earth, or ‘Volva’ as the Levanians call it.The Moon’s month-long revolution on its own axis and its monthly orbit of the Earth means, of course, that one lunar hemisphere is always facing the Earth and one facing away.The former hemisphere of Levania is called by its inhabitants Subvolva, or ‘UnderEarth’, and the latter Privolva, or ‘deprived-of-Earth’.Kepler correctly deduces that the consequent changes in lunar temperature are extreme, from the great cold of the fortnight-long Levanian night to the great heat of the fortnight-long day; so hot is the lunar day, indeed, that the inhabitants of that world retire into deep caves and caverns to escape it.Life in Privolva, on the other hand, is described in nightmarish terms:They live an unfixed life, without permanent habitation.They roam in great crowds over the whole globe during one of their days, some onthe history of sf40legs which are longer than are our camels’, others flying through the air, others still in boats follow the fleeing water.(Kepler, Somnium, 46)The narrative is supported by a series of lengthy scientific notes, exhaustively justifying Kepler’s speculations with reference to his scientific observations.With improved astronomical instruments and a properly scientific understanding of the solar system, seventeenth-century science made great advances in understanding the cosmos, and seventeenth-century science fiction became a vigorous new form of writing.Bishop William Godwin’s The Man in the Moone: or, A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger (1638) flies its protagonist moon-wards by, rather improbably, having him harness a number of special geese; but once he gets there, the lunar world and occupants are vividly described.John Wilkins’s Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638) imaginatively extrapolates from scientific data and looks forward to lunar colonies ‘as soon as the art of flying is found out’ [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]