Charles-François Tiphaigne de La Roche 1 hr 52 min read

A traveler carried to the hidden land of Giphantia beholds its wonders, including a method of fixing images from nature onto canvas in an instant, prophesying photography a lifetime early.

Tiphaigne de La Roche's 1760 fantasy is a remarkable utopian voyage famous for foreseeing photography and other marvels. Visionary, strange, historically astonishing period SF. Read it for an eighteenth-century dream of technologies not yet invented, from a genuine prophet of the fantastic.

In its time

Published in 1760, 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

1 hr 52 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).