Voltaire 31 min read

A colossal being from a planet of Sirius, exiled for a heretical book, tours the cosmos with a companion from Saturn, and stoops to examine the microscopic, quarrelsome creatures of tiny Earth.

Voltaire's 1752 'Micromégas' is a foundational work of science fiction and a brilliant philosophical satire, here in French. Witty, cosmic, endlessly clever. Read it for one of the earliest and greatest tales of alien visitors, a sharp Enlightenment meditation on humanity's absurd self-importance.

In its time

Published in 1752, 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

31 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).