You know him as a swashbuckling, giant-nosed lover immortalised in a play... but did you know he wrote one of the earliest sci-fi novels?
Long before Edmond Rostand immortalized him, the real Cyrano de Bergerac was a freethinking philosopher and soldier who turned his sharp wit from the battlefield to the cosmos.
Two centuries before the genre had a name, Histoire comique des États et Empires de la Lune told the story of a man who rose up to the moon using bottles of dew, then a series of explosions, reaching it after accidentally landing in Canada on his first attempt. On the moon, he meets a race of creatures so far in advance of our own that they think he is a kind of bird, incapable of genuine speech or thought. He is trained to tumble and pull faces for a paying crowd like a captured monkey, while the local scholars argue about whether he is a man, ape, or ostrich.
He then meets Godwin’s Domingo Gonsales, and the Daemon of Socrates, a spirit who lived inside philosophers and prophets across the centuries. With this spirit, he explores lunar society, where the young outrank the old, a well-argued opinion beats a noble title, and conversation runs half in music and half in the shiver of naked limbs.
Lunar philosophers argue with him over the idea of a true vacuum, atoms, germ theory, and imagination-based medicine. He also describes what we now know as audiobooks, in the form of tiny mechanical devices that when wound read chapters of books out loud.
Brimming with satire, philosophical daring, and breathtaking imagination, A Voyage to the Moon is a must-read for fans of early sci-fi and anyone curious to meet the brilliant mind behind the legend of Cyrano.
