E.L. Haines
asked
Hûw Steer:
Can you give us an example of "ancient science-fiction"? Bonus points if it's written/translated in a language I can read :D (i.e., English).
Hûw Steer
Oho, my boy. I can give you *the* example.
Lucian of Samosata was a satirist in the Second Sophistic. He mocked philosophy, he mocked language, he mocked government and politics - but once he mocked historians. He was fed up with the way that certain historians (not that he would ever name Herodotus or Ctesias) invented details about foreign lands they’d never visited wholesale and reaped the credit for being men of learning. They were lying, and getting paid for it.
So Lucian wrote a travel narrative of his own. He called it the ‘True History’. It wasn’t, and he made sure his readers knew it from the start. He takes us out into the unknown ocean, to islands of insidious plants that turn their victims into trees, to the Isles of the Blessed where the heroes dwell, to a city of living lamps in the sky, to a whale that houses whole civilisations in its belly.
Also the Moon. And the Sun. There are giant space spiders too.
But it’s just not a list of marvels. Lucian makes us think. He mirrors his own society in a hundred subtle ways. There are parallels to Roman aggression, to Greek attitudes to gender, and more. Every island Lucian visits is another critical mirror on his society and the world of the Second Sophistic. That’s what good sci-fi should always do - make you *think*.
The ‘True History’ isn’t just a travel narrative. It’s not even just sci-fi. It’s basically second-century Star Trek.
(...and I may have spent far too much of my time at university writing two theses on the subject...)
There’s an English translation on Project Gutenberg IIRC. I prefer the Loeb edition (I think it’s the Harmon translation?), it flows a little better, but whatever you can get hold of!
Lucian of Samosata was a satirist in the Second Sophistic. He mocked philosophy, he mocked language, he mocked government and politics - but once he mocked historians. He was fed up with the way that certain historians (not that he would ever name Herodotus or Ctesias) invented details about foreign lands they’d never visited wholesale and reaped the credit for being men of learning. They were lying, and getting paid for it.
So Lucian wrote a travel narrative of his own. He called it the ‘True History’. It wasn’t, and he made sure his readers knew it from the start. He takes us out into the unknown ocean, to islands of insidious plants that turn their victims into trees, to the Isles of the Blessed where the heroes dwell, to a city of living lamps in the sky, to a whale that houses whole civilisations in its belly.
Also the Moon. And the Sun. There are giant space spiders too.
But it’s just not a list of marvels. Lucian makes us think. He mirrors his own society in a hundred subtle ways. There are parallels to Roman aggression, to Greek attitudes to gender, and more. Every island Lucian visits is another critical mirror on his society and the world of the Second Sophistic. That’s what good sci-fi should always do - make you *think*.
The ‘True History’ isn’t just a travel narrative. It’s not even just sci-fi. It’s basically second-century Star Trek.
(...and I may have spent far too much of my time at university writing two theses on the subject...)
There’s an English translation on Project Gutenberg IIRC. I prefer the Loeb edition (I think it’s the Harmon translation?), it flows a little better, but whatever you can get hold of!
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