A True Story: The First Voyage to the Moon

About this book

Beyond Heracles' Pillars the travellers find a river of wine and vines that are women from the hips up. Then a whirlwind lifts their ship into the sky, and on the eighth day they land on the Moon. King Endymion is at war with Phaethon, king of the Sun, over the colonisation of the Morning Star: Vulture-horsemen, birds with lettuce-leaf wings, fleas the size of twelve elephants, and foot soldiers standing on a spiders' web stretched across the void.

Back on the sea, a giant whale swallows them, ship and all, and whole nations live inside its belly. On the Island of the Blessed they dine with Homer, Odysseus and Pythagoras; they pass the island where liars are punished and the Island of Dreams. Lucian, the second-century satirist, wrote it as a joke against every traveller who lies, from Homer's Odysseus to Herodotus.

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of the Greek edition printed at Haguenau in 1535. Sentence by sentence, not a summary or a retelling. Three pages missing from the scan were translated from the standard Greek text.

What is inside

• both books of A True Story, complete
• the title page of 1535 and the first pages of both books from the same edition
• colour illustrations: the whirlwind and the Vulture-horsemen (created with AI tools)
• 92 short footnotes on the same page: people, myths, Homer's and Herodotus's stories, and what we know today
• a foreword on Lucian and his book; commentary at the end: in plain words, what Lucian parodies and what science says (the Moon, Venus, the blue whale)

Who it is for

Readers of science fiction curious about its roots; lovers of Greek myths, Homer and classical satire; a witty gift for a reader who likes strange old books.

A historical source: Lucian writes as a man of the second century; his gods, his coarse jokes and the horrors of his wars are kept as in the original. The notes and commentary explain what we know today.