Jul 17, 2015 05:48 AM
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-ear...ce-fiction
EXCERPT: What do we mean when we talk about “science fiction”? Cyborgs and space operas? Terraformed planets with glittering metal skyscrapers—future technologies that reflect back at us what it means to be human? But it would be a mistake to assume that the genre of the future is all robots and lasers—especially when an ancient Roman penned a sci-fi story on a scroll in the 2nd century AD.
Lucian of Samosata’s True History reads like a doomed acid trip. His narrator sets out on a naval voyage from the Pillars of Hercules, which flank the Strait of Gibraltar. One day, at about noon, a whirlwind suddenly strikes his ship. The cyclone spins the ship into the sky, where it sails the cosmos for seven days and nights until it lands on the moon. There, the travelers learn of an intergalactic space battle between the inhabitants of the moon and the Sun over the colonization of the Morning Star, Venus. Our heroes ride to battle on dire fleas and space vultures, spilling so much blood across the sky that it dyes the clouds red. Only when the enemy builds a wall large enough to block the sun’s rays and eclipse the moon is a treaty drawn up. After the protagonist returns to the moon he meets its residents, whose men—there are no women—marry other men and give birth through their calves.
We don’t know whether the ancients were scratching their heads or dutifully crafting a line of miniatures of Lucian’s space aliens, but we do know that Lucian’s little-known fable contains the the trappings of our most modern sci-fi, and that its satire of the nascent natural sciences earns it a place in the storied genre....
EXCERPT: What do we mean when we talk about “science fiction”? Cyborgs and space operas? Terraformed planets with glittering metal skyscrapers—future technologies that reflect back at us what it means to be human? But it would be a mistake to assume that the genre of the future is all robots and lasers—especially when an ancient Roman penned a sci-fi story on a scroll in the 2nd century AD.
Lucian of Samosata’s True History reads like a doomed acid trip. His narrator sets out on a naval voyage from the Pillars of Hercules, which flank the Strait of Gibraltar. One day, at about noon, a whirlwind suddenly strikes his ship. The cyclone spins the ship into the sky, where it sails the cosmos for seven days and nights until it lands on the moon. There, the travelers learn of an intergalactic space battle between the inhabitants of the moon and the Sun over the colonization of the Morning Star, Venus. Our heroes ride to battle on dire fleas and space vultures, spilling so much blood across the sky that it dyes the clouds red. Only when the enemy builds a wall large enough to block the sun’s rays and eclipse the moon is a treaty drawn up. After the protagonist returns to the moon he meets its residents, whose men—there are no women—marry other men and give birth through their calves.
We don’t know whether the ancients were scratching their heads or dutifully crafting a line of miniatures of Lucian’s space aliens, but we do know that Lucian’s little-known fable contains the the trappings of our most modern sci-fi, and that its satire of the nascent natural sciences earns it a place in the storied genre....