Micromegas: A Giant from Sirius Visits Earth

About this book

It is one of the earliest science fiction stories: travel between the stars, inhabitants of other worlds with a thousand senses, and the great idea of scale. The giants wade through the Baltic Sea up to their ankles, use a diamond from a broken necklace as a microscope and discover a ship full of philosophers on the giant's fingernail. Then the humans, mites in the giants' eyes, measure the giants exactly, tell them about their wars over "a heap of mud the size of your heel", and each explains the soul in a different way. Voltaire even guessed that Mars has two moons, 125 years before astronomers found them. And at the end the giant gives the philosophers a book containing the true heart of things. In Paris they open it. The pages are blank.

Voltaire (1694–1778), poet, philosopher, prisoner of the Bastille and the sharpest wit of the Enlightenment, published the tale at the court of Frederick the Great in Potsdam. It is short, funny and still sharp.

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of the London edition of 1752, "Le Micromégas de Mr. de Voltaire". A complete, sentence-by-sentence text, not a summary or a retelling.

What is inside

• all seven chapters of Voltaire's tale, with his chapter headings in full
• 32 footnotes: every person and allusion explained on the same page (Fontenelle, Maupertuis's Lapland expedition, Leeuwenhoek's microscopes, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke...), and where we now know otherwise, the note says what we know today
• seven colour illustrations in the manner of 18th-century engraving and painting, one opening each chapter (created with AI tools)
• a preface: Voltaire's life (the Bastille, England, Cirey, Potsdam, Ferney) and why Micromegas is called one of the first science fiction stories
• a Commentary section at the end: each chapter in plain words and what modern science says: Sirius A and B, Saturn's rings and moons, the moons of Mars, the shape of the Earth, microscopes, our many senses, the scale of the universe, the "pale blue dot"

Who it is for

Readers of classic science fiction and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels; lovers of Voltaire, Candide and French literature; anyone curious about the Enlightenment and the history of ideas about life on other worlds; a witty gift for a science or philosophy lover.

A historical source: Voltaire writes as a man of the eighteenth century, with the knowledge and the humour of his time. The notes and commentary explain what we know today.