Voyages to the Moon and the Sun

What happens when you reach the moon, only to discover that Earth is the strange one? Cyrano de Bergerac's 1657 masterpiece answers this by sending its narrator on the most audacious journey in pre-modern literature: to worlds where human certitudes become cosmic jokes. The narrator arrives on the Moon expecting paradise. Instead, he finds himself the monster. The Selenites regard him with the same revulsion he might feel encountering something truly alien. Their society, their logic, their values all operate by different rules, and from their vantage point, everything he held sacred, his religion, his science, his certainties, appears as bizarre as a chimera. He is tried for heresy. He escapes, journeys onward to the Sun, and encounters stranger civilizations still. This is not utopian fantasy but its darker cousin: the anti-utopia, the voyage that destabilizes rather than consoles. Bergerac, the real-life poet and dramatist behind the famous nose, uses interplanetary travel as a weapon against the institutions and orthodoxies of 17th-century France. The result is the earliest great work of science fiction, a scathing satirical attack that would influence Voltaire, Swift, and eventually Jules Verne. It remains startlingly modern in its insistence that perspective is everything, and that the monster always sees itself as the hero.