Francis Godwin 51 min read

Marooned on a mountain peak, the Spaniard Domingo Gonsales harnesses a flock of wild geese to a frame, and is astonished when, at migration time, they carry him up and away to the Moon.

Francis Godwin's 1638 novel is one of the very earliest works of science fiction. Ingenious, charming, historically vital. Read it for a foundational voyage-to-the-Moon tale, a pioneering seventeenth-century flight of imagination, written before Newton, that helped invent the whole tradition of the interplanetary story.

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

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