A Voyage to the Moon

Cyrano de Bergerac 1657

This comic travel tale follows a man's journey to the Moon and his encounters with its strange inhabitants. There, people walk on all fours and mistake their human visitor for an animal.

132 pages 2h 33m reading time

One of the earliest works of science fiction, and a founding classic of the trip-to-the-Moon story.
Imagines several ways to fly into space, including a machine pushed upward by firecrackers, often seen as the first rocket in fiction.
Uses its upside-down Moon world to mock human pride, arguing that people are not the center of the universe and that the Earth moves around the Sun.
Shaped later satirical voyages to strange lands, and it is widely seen as an influence on Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" and Voltaire's "Micromégas."

Cut by a friend

After Cyrano's death, his friend Henry Le Bret published it with its boldest attacks on religion removed.
Full text found later

Handwritten copies of the uncut version survived and were finally printed in full in the early 1900s.
A sequel left unfinished

Its follow-up, a journey to the Sun, appeared in 1662 and breaks off in the middle of the story.
Revived by a famous play

In Edmond Rostand's 1897 play about Cyrano, the hero boasts of the book's strange ways to reach the Moon.