The World in the Moon: Cyrano de Bergerac’s Comical Voyage

About this book

On the Moon he finds the Garden of Eden, giant Moon-people who walk on all fours and take him for a little animal, and the Spirit of Socrates, who becomes his guide. He is shown at fairs, kept in the Queen's menagerie with another stranded Earthling — Godwin's little Spaniard, Domingo Gonsales — and put on trial for insisting that his own Earth is the real world and theirs only a moon. He sees towns on wheels that sail across the plains, and books with neither pages nor letters that you wind up like a watch and listen to.

The real Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) — not only the long-nosed hero of Rostand's play — was a soldier, poet and free-thinker. His voyage was published after his death, with the boldest passages cut, and is often named among the forerunners of Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Voltaire's Micromegas.

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of the English edition, London 1659 (translated by Thomas St Serf from the French of 1657). A complete, sentence-by-sentence text, not a summary or a retelling. The original has no chapters; our section headings make it easy to follow.

What is inside

• the whole story in thirteen parts, plus St Serf's dedication to the Scottish regiments in France
• the 1659 frontispiece: Cyrano with his vials of dew rising towards the Moon
• the two names printed in musical notes (the nobles of the Moon speak in music), shown as in the 1659 edition
• nine colour illustrations in the manner of 17th-century painting and engraving (created with AI tools)
• 132 footnotes on the same page: people, places and allusions explained, and where the English translator differs from the French
• a preface: the real Cyrano, the censored first edition, St Serf's translation, the meeting with Godwin's Gonsales and the book's influence
• Commentary at the end: each part in plain words and what modern science says — rockets, the Earth's rotation, exoplanets, the vacuum, atoms, the microbiome, audiobooks, the Apollo missions

Who it is for

Readers of classic science fiction and satire, from Godwin to Swift, Voltaire and Jules Verne; anyone curious about the Moon, space travel and the history of science; a thoughtful gift for an astronomy lover.

A historical source: Cyrano writes as a man of the seventeenth century, with the knowledge, beliefs and jokes of his time, kept as in the original. The notes and commentary explain what we know today.