Exploring Somnium — Johannes Kepler

This book contains the original story 'Somnium' or The Dream by Johannes Kepler along with an in-depth analysis of this most extraordinary fantasy stories ever told. Somnium is a unusual mixture of state of the art (circa 1609) mathematics and astronomy, picaresque adventure, and lays claim to being the very first science fiction story - beating Jules Verne by more than two centuries. Originally in Latin the story tells of an astronomy student who learns about voyages to the surface of the moon during a lunar eclipse, propelled by moon-dwelling creatures who can travel between the earth and the moon on the bridge of darkness.This was more than just a tall tale. Not only may it be the earliest example of a hard science fiction story, it's also a remarkable document of a pivotal stage of scientific history. Kepler's descriptions of the lunar landscape and conditions contain elements of a radical new theories of nature that placed the sun - not the earth - at the center of the known universe. In the course of a few decades, the heliocentric model championed by Nicholas Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, and Kepler dislodged the geocentric Ptolemaic model of the heavens and challenged the authority of powerful Catholic and Protestant churchmen. Kepler's analysis of the motions of the planets around the sun inspired Isaac Newton's work on gravity, and were a step towards the modern understanding of the universe.