Vera History, by Lukian/Lucian of Samosata

A 17th century fictional portrait of Lucian of Samosata.

Mankind has always dreamed of travelling to the Moon, and of travellers from outer space visiting Earth.

The first known story is Vera Historia ("True History" or "A True Story") written by a Syrian, Lukian/Lucian (in a variety of Greek dialects). It was written about AD 180, and describes a voyage to the moon by a ship, which is lifted to the surface of the moon with the aid of a giant whirlwind. [This story is therefore fantasy rather than science fiction, since the main characters do not reach outer space by any kind of mechanical means. Nevertheless, it shows mankind's fascination with space, and its generally accepted belief that there were inhabited worlds besides Earth.

This story is available for free on the Kindle (as is all Lucian's works) or at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10430/pg10430.txt) as a text file.

Lucian of Samosata
Lucian of Samosata (Latin: Lucianus Samosatensis; c. A.D. 125 – after A.D. 180) was an Assyrian rhetorician, and satirist who wrote in the Greek language.

Few details of Lucian's life are known. He claimed to have been born in Samosata, in the former kingdom of Commagene, which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria.

In his works, Lucian refers to himself as a "Syrian", "Assyrian" and "barbarian", perhaps indicating "he was from the Semitic and not the imported Greek population" of Samosata.

Lucian almost certainly did not write all of the more than eighty works that have been attributed to him: declamations, essays both laudatory and sarcastic, satiric epigrams, and comic dialogues and symposia with a satirical cast, studded with quotations in alarming contexts and allusions set in an unusual light, designed to be surprising and provocative.

His name added luster to any entertaining and sarcastic essay: over 150 surviving manuscripts attest to his continued popularity. The first printed edition of a selection of his works was issued at Florence in 1499. His best known works are A True Story (a romance, not "true" at all, which he admits in his introduction to the story), Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead.

Lucian was trained as a rhetorician, a vocation where one pleads in court, composing pleas for others, and teaching the art of pleading. Lucian's practice was to travel about, giving amusing discourses and witty lectures improvised on the spot. He travelled through Ionia and mainland Greece, to Italy and even to Gaul, and became not only famous but also wealthy.

Works
Lucian was one of the first novelists in western civilization. In A True Story, a fictional narrative work written in prose, he parodied some fantastic tales told by Homer in the Odyssey and some feeble fantasies that were popular in his time. He anticipated modern fictional themes like voyages to the moon and Venus, extraterrestrial life and wars between planets, more than a millennium before Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. His novel is widely regarded as an early, if not the earliest science fiction work.

Lucian also wrote a satire called The Passing of Peregrinus, in which the lead character, Peregrinus Proteus, takes advantage of the generosity and gullibility of Christians. This is one of the earliest surviving pagan perceptions of Christianity. His Philopseudes ("Lover of Lies or Cheater") is a frame story which includes the original version of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".

Language
Lucian wrote in the Attic dialect "with a facility almost equal to [that of] Plato." He was able to imitate Herodotus's [Greek historian] Ionic dialect so successfully in his work "The Syrian Goddess" that some scholars refuse to recognize him as the author.

The Plot of A True Story

In True History, Lucian and a company of adventuring heroes sailing westward through the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) are blown off course by a strong wind, and after 79 days come to an island. This island is home to a river of wine filled with fish, and bears a marker indicating that Heracles and Dionysos have traveled to this point, along with normal footprints and giant footprints.

Shortly after leaving the island, they are lifted up by a giant waterspout and deposited on the Moon on the eighth day. There they find themselves embroiled in a full-scale war between the king of the Moon and the king of the Sun over colonisation of the Morning Star, involving armies which boast such exotica as stalk-and-mushroom men, acorn-dogs ("dog-faced men fighting on winged acorns"), and cloud-centaurs. Unusually, the Sun, Moon, stars and planets are portrayed as locales, each with its unique geographic details and inhabitants. The War is finally won by the Sun's armies clouding the moon over. Details of the moon follows, there are no women, and children grow inside the calf of men.

After returning to the Earth, the adventurers become trapped in a giant whale; inside the 200-mile-long animal, there live many groups of people whom they rout in war. They also reach a sea of milk, an island of cheese and the isle of the blessed. There, he meets the heroes of the Trojan War, other mythical men and animals, and even Homer. They find Herodotus being eternally punished for the "lies" he published in his Histories.

After leaving the Island of the Blessed, they deliver a letter to Calypso given to them by Odysseus explaining that he wishes he had stayed with her so he could have lived eternally. They then discover a chasm in the Ocean, but eventually sail around it, discover a far-off continent and decide to explore it. The book ends rather abruptly by Lucian saying that their adventure there will be the subject of following books.