True History

Lucian of Samosata c. 175 CE

This comic travel tale follows a sailor and his companions through impossible adventures beyond the known world. On the Moon, they encounter a war between the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun.

68 pages 1h 19m reading time

Often called the first science fiction story, it is one of the most famous comic works to survive from ancient Greece.
Mocks the travel writers and historians of its day by openly admitting that every word of it is a lie, then telling stories wilder than theirs.
Imagines trips to outer space, life on other worlds, and wars between planets, ideas that would not return to fiction for over a thousand years.
Helped inspire later fantastic voyage satires, including Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel" and Swift's "Gulliver's Travels."

Promised a sequel never written

The story ends by promising more adventures in later books, but no sequel was ever written.
Named the liars it mocked

The opening calls out writers like Ctesias and Iambulus, who described made-up lands as real places.
Possibly mocks a lost novel

A ninth-century Greek scholar, Photius, believed it borrowed from a fantasy novel called "Wonders Beyond Thule."
Kept alive as a lesson

Byzantine and later Renaissance teachers prized Lucian's clear Greek, which helped his writings survive through copying.