Man in the Moone

Published in 1638, this astonishing early science fiction novel follows Domingo Gonsales, a Spanish adventurer who discovers he can travel to the moon by harnessing a flight of swans. The journey itself is startlingly prescient: Gonsales describes the silence, the cold, the gradual fading of Earth's features below him in terms that would not feel out of place in a modern astronaut's account. On the moon, he encounters a utopian society of peaceful, enlightened beings living in perfect harmony. Yet Gonsales, petty and self-serving, cannot bear to remain in paradise. He flees back to Earth at the first opportunity, the implications of his failure hovering over the narrative like a quiet indictment. Godwin, writing a century before Swift and two centuries before Verne, crafted something strange and rather wonderful: a story that is part adventure, part philosophical meditation on human nature, and part daring imagination of the cosmos. It endures because it captures something essential about humanity's oldest fantasy, and our strange reluctance to actually achieve it.