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By the Light of the Moon: Science Fiction's 17th-Century Roots

© Christopher B. Jones

One of the greatest and most influential literary forms of the twentieth century has been science fiction. What we recognize as SF has been around now for just over 100 years; the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne being some of the earliest.

But when we look back farther, what do we find? Many, such as myself, group Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in with the genre. There are no spaceships in it—or little green men—but the exploration into the mind is one that is of great importance to modern SF. This takes us back more than 180 years. Is that about as far as we can go?

Well, you might be surprised just how deep the roots of SF run. When it was announced that Kirk Johnson of Suite101's Garden Design topic would be hosting an event centered around the seventeenth century, I decided to take on the challenge of finding some way to work my topic in there. So I set off to begin my research.

What did I find? I found SF roots running far back through the annals of time—so deep that even I was surprised.

If we want to trace things back to the first author to write about interstellar travel and life on other worlds, then we have to aim our phone booth at ancient Greece where we can pick up a copy Lucian's True History, hot off the proverbial press. Here is a story in which Greek travelers are carried to the moon by wind and waterspouts. There they find a war underway between the King of the Moon and the King of the Sun. What are they fighting over? Colonization of Jupiter, of course. In the end a peace treaty ends the war and stipulates that the two sides will share a colony on Venus (the Morning Star).

But we only really need to go back to the seventeenth century.

A time of great voyages and exploration, the seventeenth century fed the imaginations of writers with the hunger to discover places unknown. This must be the explanation for the proliferation of stories about moon voyages during the 1600s. Everyone, it seems, got in on the act; offerings came from Kircher,

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