John Wilkins 2 hr 13 min read

Marshalling the new astronomy of Galileo and Kepler, a bold young clergyman argues, point by careful point, that the Moon is very probably another habitable world.

John Wilkins's 1638 treatise is a landmark of early scientific speculation. Ingenious, learned, historically vital. Read it for a foundational work at the dawn of science fiction, a serious, imaginative argument for a populated Moon (and the possibility of traveling there), written in the first flush of the telescopic revolution, that helped make space itself thinkable.

In its time

Published in 1638, 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 13 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).