Somnium: The Dream: Or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy

Written by Johannes Kepler

Narrated by Charles Featherstone

The Renaissance gave us a lot of things, including the earliest science fiction that relates to modern science. The book would now be called hard sci fi, as it leans heavily into the known orbital mechanics of the moon.

From the wiki: Somnium (Latin for "The Dream") — full title: Somnium, seu opus posthumum De astronomia lunari — is a novel written in Latin in 1608 by Johannes Kepler. It was first published in 1634 by Kepler's son, Ludwig Kepler, several years after the death of his father. In the narrative, an Icelandic boy and his witch mother learn of an island named Levania (the Moon) from a daemon. Somnium presents a detailed imaginative description of how the Earth might look when viewed from the Moon, and is considered the first serious scientific treatise on lunar astronomy. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov have referred to it as one of the earliest works of science fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brimir & Blainn
• Release date: Oct 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798868624025