As an ardent Science Fiction fan, I enjoy watching great SF films as well as reading thrilling SF stories. Among my favourite films and books are Star Wars (Ep. IV-VI), The Matrix (Part 1) or Tron (the 1982 film), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert's Dune and Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. There are certainly more books and films on my list of favourites and I am constantly finding new things to read and watch to satisfy my inquiring mind (simultaneously I have to find a new bookshelf to store all my stuff).
Today I want to introduce you to a short but fascinating text which is – unjustly – often overlooked and little read today, although I think it is one of the key texts in the history of SF: Somnium by German astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630).
Kepler started writing his first draft of Somnium when he was a student enrolled at Tübigen University working on his dissertation. Kepler was interested in answering the following question: "How would the phenomena occurring in the heavens appear to an observer stationed on the moon?" In other words, Kepler was sure that an observer on the moon would find the planet's movements as clearly visible as the moon's activity is to the earth's inhabitants, therefore a person on the moon would be able to see the Earth moving. For Kepler's contemporaries, that was some highly revolutionary stuff! People still believed in the geocentric model, meaning they believed the Earth was the centre of the universe. With Copernicanism, however, the Earth ceased to be the center, a thought that was certainly not accepted by everyone.
Somnium was not published until four years after Kepler's death by his son Ludwig. The relatively short text centers around the story of Duracotus, the protagonist, whose life has similarities to Kepler's, his mother and their journey to the moon. This legendary text is accompanied by more than 200 footnotes which had been added by Kepler himself, providing detailed explanations of theories by Galileo, Tyho Brahe and himself. Some of the notes explain how gravity works, others illustrate what the lunar geography looks like and how its inhabitants would be. Overall, Somnium combines autobiographical and scientific facts with a legend. As Carl Sagan so wonderfully puts it, Kepler was the first who combined a bold imagination with precise measurements in his work to step out into the cosmos. In Somnium Duracotus uses his mother's spells to leave the Earth to travel to the moon, but what he really believed was that one day mankind would be able to launch into space. And that's what SF is about: speculations of a future world.
If you want to find out more about Somnium, I highly recommend watching this short video where Carl Sagan talks about Kepler's life and his work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k5LiDihh00
Here is a link to an article on Somnium by Gale E. Christianson:
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/8/christianson8art.htm
If you are interested in the history of SF in general, I can recommend reading The History of Science Ficion by Adams Roberts.
And if you want to read the “real” text of
Somnium, which I hope you do, there is a very good and pretty new edition available which also includes detailed background information:
Rosen, Edward (ed.). Kepler's somnium : the dream, or posthumous work on lunar astronomy. Mineola, NY : Dover Publ. 2003.
I hope I have sparked your interest in Kepler's
Somnium! Please feel free to comment, I am curious to know what you think about
Somnium and if you have any other great SF books to recommend. Thanks!
May the force be with you!
Judith
PS. This image is taken from nasaimages.org, a great site which offers public access to NASA's images, videos and audio collections.
NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org
