What Was The First Science-fiction Book?

Posted by Sofia Morgan on April 17th, 2021

Science fiction or Sci-fi, popularly described by the literature of ideas, has a wide range of work under it. Among a whole genre, it is quite hard to find out the first among them. According to many historians and philologists, there has been a work by Johannes Kepler which can be known as the first science fiction book. Somnium (The Dream), written around 1620-30 in Latin is claimed by many to be the first among science fiction books.

The book is a narrative, but despite being one of the first of its kind, it was not published until 1634 by Ludwig Kepler, Johannes’s son. The book roughly describes the movement of earth as observed from the moon by the narrator of the story. The book’s content is also considered as the first scientific treatise on moon.

Somnium steers its readers through a detailed imaginative description of the story of a boy (Duracotus) and his mother who is also a witch. In the story the boy and his mother discover about an island Levania (moon). They travel to the moon with the help of a daemon his mother knows. According to the daemon, humans can be taken to Levania within four hours. They are sedated during the journey and have to keep damp sponges in their nostrils. Upon reaching Levania, they observe several things about the earth from there itself. They also learn that daemons live in the shadows on Levania. All this story is just the narrator’s dream and it all comes to an abrupt end when the narrator wakes up.

The work is an excellent compilation of scientific definitions and discoveries, most of which are known to modern world. This literary work is considered as the first work on lunar discoveries. The book has ended quite suddenly without any trace of what happens to Duracotus and his mother, but that is something that makes fiction books special.