[cpound]

I'm glad to see this on HN. Francis Godwin's story is worth a read for anyone interested in the history of science fiction. The part about using geese to fly to the moon is fun, but it undersells Godwin's scientific imagination. A lot of things happen in the story:

- The narrator asserts his agreement with Copernicus that the Earth rotates on its axis

- The narrator discovers that the force of gravity is less on the Moon than on the Earth, allowing him to leap around and also allowing creatures there to grow very large

- The narrator reasons that gravity is "a secret Property of the Globe of the Earth, or rather something within it, as the Load-stone draweth Iron" (an insight probably inspired by the work of William Gilbert)

- Although science in the modern sense was still being invented, making this "proto" science fiction, the narrator becomes probably the first character to assert his speculative fiction isn't magic ("finding in all my Discourse nothing tending to Magick")

- So when the narrator is given a stone made of "Ebelus" and finds that he can control gravity depending on which way the stone is oriented, that's probably the first appearance of a non-magical anti-gravity technology in fiction

- It's also probably the first proto SF to borrow from linguistics, because the narrator finds that people on the Moon speak using a language based on music and he makes an explicit analogy toward the end with tonal languages such as Mandarin

My feeling is it's also a much more readable piece than de Bergerac's later story, which is inspired by Godwin but adds to it a bunch of dry old 'natural philosophy.'

Anyway, it's available online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Strange_Voyage_and_Advent...

[hyperpallium2]

It's cute to call it "proto" science fiction ("prescience"?), but much of recent science fiction doesn't have much to do with science. Some is engineering or technology fiction.

Technology is old. I think weaving (as in cloth) might be oldest - I don't count dogs, olives or fire as they were domesticated, not created.

[aaronblohowiak]

Blades are the oldest technology we have evidence of, iiuc.

[hyperpallium2]

You're right. Weaves wouldn't leave evidence, though the progression of rock, pointier rock, knapping seems easier than the leap of weaving, anyway - I'd guess it came about 70,000 years ago with the cultural explosion of cognition.

[aaronblohowiak]

Sharp rocks go back 2 million :)

[generalizations]

From what you're describing, it sounds like he basically made two mistakes: he confused gravity with magnetism, and he supposed that space is filled with air.

Without a modern physics education, I wonder how many of us would have done so well.

[ncmncm]

Science, in essentially its modern form and related to it by direct transmission, was invented in the 11th century CE by al-Haytham working in Egypt in service of investigations recorded in his book Optics, that is explicitly acknowledged by the first European proto-scientists as defining conditions for their work.