Cyrano de Bergerac ~5 hr read

The freethinking hero rigs a machine to carry him to the Moon, and finds there a whole society of philosophical Moon-folk, in one of the earliest and wittiest voyages into space ever written.

Cyrano de Bergerac's 1657 satires are foundational classics of proto-science-fiction. Witty, audacious, immensely influential. Read it for the brilliant, blasphemous space-voyages that helped invent the genre, imaginative flights to the Moon and Sun packed with bold science, free-thinking philosophy, and sharp satire, a founding work that inspired Swift, Voltaire, and centuries of writers to come.

In its time

Published in 1657, 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

~5 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).