This short comic tale follows visitors from Sirius and Saturn on a journey to Earth. The giant travelers use a diamond as a microscope to study the tiny humans.
25 pages 28 min reading time
One of the earliest works of science fiction, and one of the best known short satires of the French Enlightenment (the 1700s movement that championed reason and science).
Imagines how small and silly human pride looks to beings thousands of times larger, who are amazed that such tiny creatures can think at all.
Mocks philosophers who claim to know the purpose of everything, setting their confident theories against what can actually be measured and observed.
Helped create the story of alien visitors who judge humanity from the outside, a pattern later used by many science fiction writers.
Its play with size and scale follows in the path of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" and remains a classic example of using a change of size to make readers see themselves differently.
Inspired by a real expedition
The tiny humans the giants meet are scientists sailing home from a real 1736 trip to measure Earth's shape near the Arctic.
An early draft for a prince
Voltaire likely began it in 1739 as a tale sent to Frederick, the future king of Prussia.
A famous scientist mocked
The chatty traveler from Saturn is widely seen as a teasing portrait of French science writer Bernard de Fontenelle.
Voltaire 1752