A Voyage to the Moon

Among the very first works of science fiction, this 1657 novel asks a question that still startles: what if the Moon is a world, and Earth its dim counterpart? Cyrano de Bergerac's narrator embarks on a fantastical journey propelled by dew and philosophical audacity, arriving on a lunar landscape where he becomes the monster. His very existence shocks the paradisiacal inhabitants, who view him as a grotesque malfunction of nature, a walking heresy. Condemned by the Moon's ecclesiastical courts for his heretical opinions, he discovers that the certitudes humanity holds sacred, religious, scientific, anthropocentric, appear trivial from a cosmic distance. The real joke runs deeper: from the Moon, Earth is the Moon, and everything we believe about our centrality collapses into vanity. This is libertine literature at its most audacious, a scathing attack on the institutions and smug certainties of 17th-century France that somehow feels urgent centuries later. For anyone curious about where science fiction began, or who delights in satirical daring that punches through time, this is the source.