Cyrano de Bergerac 2 hr 20 min read

A seventeenth-century Frenchman rides to the Moon and finds a world that turns every earthly certainty on its head.

Cyrano de Bergerac's wildly inventive 1657 satire ('The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon') sends its narrator lunar-ward by increasingly absurd means to a society that inverts human custom, religion, and reason. One of the true ancestors of science fiction, centuries ahead of its time in wit and audacity. Read it for a founding classic of the imaginary voyage, gleefully skewering everything under the sun.

In its time

Published in 1657, during the Pre-1800, voyages to the moon, subterranean worlds, and philosophical utopias, the deep roots of the imaginative tradition, from kepler and cyrano to the enlightenment.

Reading it

2 hr 20 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).