Academics debate first ever Sci-Fi Story

With Fantasy and Sci-Fi being so popular at the moment, British Universities and Newspapers are really taking an interest in the roots of the genres lately… The most recent project I’ve come across is an attempt by the Cambridge Festival of Ideas to locate the origins of Science Fiction. Well, it would seem that not only are the ancient Greek’s to thank for much of our favourite fantasy tales and creatures, but it could well have been them who wrote the first Science Fiction tale too. The book is called Lucian of Samosata’s True History and it features a trip to the moon, the sun and Venus. Here’s the Press Release from Cambridge Festival:

Dr Justin Meggitt, a Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion and the Origins of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, will give a talk at the Festival this Sunday entitled The final frontier? Space travel in the Roman Empire. The talk is based on a little known book called Lucian of Samosata’s True History, written in the Roman empire in the second century CE. It is considered the world’s first science fiction novel and had a significant effect on the emergence of the genre (and the novel more generally in English) in the seventeenth century.

The book includes a trip to the moon, the sun and Venus, as well as a description of the unusual forms of life that live there and their struggles. On the moon, for example, when the inhabitants grow old and die, they gradually turn into vapour and become one with the atmosphere; only males give birth; they have detachable (and swappable) eyes; the wealthy wear clothes made from glass; they drink liquid air; they can see and hear everything that goes on on Earth using a special looking glass.

Dr Meggitt says: “In one sense it is a work of striking imagination, but it is also a work of satire and parody, which tells us a great deal about the arguments of the day about such things as philosophy, ethnography and history, and ideas that the Romans had about the nature of the cosmos and place of human beings within it.

“It could be said to be in the classic travel narrative tradition that goes back to Homer’s Odyssey, which was composed some thousand years before, but it also has considerable parallels with the most recent science fiction of the present day.”

Dr Meggitt is in the process of writing about the book and his talk at the Festival of Ideas on Sunday reflects that and, more broadly, some of the multidisciplinary teaching on travel at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education where The True History is included in a course entitled ‘Journeys: travelling with prophets, pirates, slaves and saints’.

The Festival of Ideas, which runs from 23 October to 3 November, was the first public engagement initiative by a UK university to bring together an extensive programme of public events exploring the arts, humanities and social sciences. Events are held in lecture halls, theatres, museums and galleries around Cambridge and entry to most is free.

The University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas is sponsored by Barclays, Cambridge University Press and Anglia Ruskin University, who also organise some of the events during the Festival. Event partners include Heffers Classics Festival, University of Cambridge Museums RAND Europe, the Goethe-Institut London and the Junction. The Festival’s media partner is BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and its hospitality partner is Cambridge City Hotel.

*The final frontier? Space travel in the Roman Empire takes place from 3-4pm on 27th October at the Institute of Continuing Education, Madingley Road, Cambridge.

Just a few days later, The Telegraph, a British Newspaper, questioned Margaret Atwood’s theory of this work being the genres starting place, and put together a list of four more early texts that, ‘with time travel, space exploration, futuristic machines and imagined utopias,’ could well stake their claim as the first ever sci-fi novel as an alternative.

True History – Lucian of Samosata, second century AD
A group of adventurers travel to explore lands beyond the known world. After being blown so far off course that they land on the moon, they become caught up in a space war between the lunar people and the armies of the sun. They eventually return to Earth, but their adventures are not over: they journey on through more mysterious islands and mythical realms.

The Ramayana – attributed to Valmiki, between the fifth and fourth centuries BC
This ancient Indian epic poem shares some of its themes with The Iliad (notably, a war fought over the capture of a beautiful woman), but it also includes a fantastical flying machine, the Pushpaka Vimana. The poem has recently been reworked by poet Daljit Nagra, whose version has been nominated for the TS Eliot Prize.

Urashima Tar? – Japanese legend dating from around the eighth century AD
This is the eighth-century story of a fisherman who rescues a turtle and, as a reward, delves under the sea to meet the dragon god. When he resurfaces, he finds that he has been transported 300 years into the future. There are no futuristic machines and no space travel, but this is one of the earliest stories to focus on time travel.

The Republic – Plato, around 380 BC
The seminal philosophical text sets out a vision for an ideal world, with imagined alternative governments. Margaret Atwood has said that she considers it one of the great-great-grandparents of modern utopian science fiction, having strongly influenced Thomas More’s Utopia, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and HG Wells’s The Time Machine.

Book of Revelation – John of Patmos, around 90 AD
Critics and Bible scholars disagree over whether the final book of the Bible is a premonition of the end of the world, a foretelling of the fall of the Roman Empire, or something else altogether. But it does contain vivid and disturbing visions that have allegorical relevance for the time in which it was written, a device that’s often used in sci-fi.

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