Daniel Defoe 3 hr 37 min read

Translated, we are told, from the Lunar Language: memoirs of the strange transactions of the world in the Moon, where a satirist finds a fun-house mirror for the follies of Earth.

Daniel Defoe's 1705 work is an early, influential satirical lunar voyage and proto-SF classic. Witty, allusive, historically vital. Read it for a founding text of the imaginary-voyage tradition, the author of Robinson Crusoe using a marvelous machine and a Moon-world to skewer the politics and religion of his age.

In its time

Published in 1705, 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

3 hr 37 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).