“Somnium” by Johannes Kepler is a nice easy read. It’s short, and it’s about dreams and a place called Volva and about the way the world of Volva works.

Im Jahre 1609 schrieb Johannes Kepler eine kurze Erzählung über den Mond, in der ein Dämon erklärt, auf welche Weise Dämonen Menschen zum Mond bringen und mit welchen astronomischen Verhältnissen dort zu rechnen ist. Diese Erzählung wird hin und wieder zu den ersten phantastischen Erzählungen überhaupt gerechnet und deshalb wollte ich dieses Buch lesen.

Die Erzählung selbst umfasst nur etwa 20 Seiten, die von Kepler selbst um ca. 80 Seiten Fußnoten ergänzt wurden. Im Buch kommt dazu noch ein weiterer Anhang von Johannes Kepler, sowie noch einmal mehr als 100 Seiten, in denen Beatrix Langner die Erzählung und ihre Wirkungsgeschichte historisch einordnet, sowie auf Leben und Werk Johannes Keplers eingeht. Es ist also schon ein erstaunliches Verhältnis von Originaltext zu Ergänzungen. Hinzu kommt noch, dass die Erzählung über weite Strecken dazu dient, dem Leser astronomische Gegebenheiten zu erläutern: ich fand allerdings schon faszinierend, wie Kepler sich überlegt, wie die Mondbewohner die Erde (“Volva” genannt) sehen, wie Sonnen- und Erdfinsternisse. Hier spielt er eigentlich seine astronomischen Modelle durch und erläutert sie anhand des Mondes. An dieser Stelle wäre mir übrigens lieber gewesen, statt der Keplerschen Fussnoten, moderne Erläuterungen direkt im Text zu haben, damit das Gelesene besser eingeordnet werden kann. Man kann die Erzählung durchaus als phantastisch bezeichnet, sie endet allerdings etwas abrupt, es gibt keine Handlung im eigentlichen Sinne und (natürlich) ist auch alles nur geträumt, für mich ist sie ein astronomischer Lehrtext.

Dies ist etwas Schönes für Leser, die an Astronomie und Johannes Kepler sehr interessiert sind.

Supposed to be the earliest work of science fiction, this short story written in Latin about 1627 was heavily annotated with astronomical calculations. And this edition had notes on the notes to explain the notes. But what was so strange is how much Kepler, whom history considers a true scientist in astronomy, credited so much of what we would call philosophy or metaphysics for his work. It was a very strange, mystical story, but very enlightening about the history of scientific discoveries.

The Goodreads rating system is not really equipped to handle the complexities of capturing my response to this book, so let me add a few additional ratings: Story (2/5); Pacing (2/5) Novelty or audacity based on contemporary peers (5/5); Perceived effect on subsequent literature (5/5).

Authors like Asimov and Sagan, Carl have allegedly referred to Somnium as the first work of Science Fiction. That's pretty high praise, but I can't really argue with their conclusion. Kepler goes into obsessive detail about astronomy from a lunar perspective, including how Earth would look from the moon, how the occlusion of the sun would appear from a lunar perspective, how days and seasons would function if one lived on the moon, the motion of the moon in relation to Earth and the sun, etc.

Somnium was published posthumously by Kepler's family, and it makes one wonder whether it was a guilty pleasure kept private by the author to avoid embarrassment and humiliation from his peers, or whether he would have refined the work and published it with pride. The ending is incredibly abrupt, and Kepler's notes on the text are obsessive and dense enough to comprise four times the length of the story itself.

The writing is certainly tedious and dated enough to dissuade many, but lovers of history or science fiction should find a great deal of satisfaction in experiencing perhaps the first attempt at using fiction to illustrate scientific principles.

I chose a sloppy printing, full of errors and difficult to read; might try to find a better one.

Gelesen für die Uni :/

Johannes Kepler was one of the most important figures in modern science. This German mathematician & astronomer is best known for formulating the laws of planetary motion. What is less known is that he also wrote a fictional novel, called Somnium or The Dream, in which he describes an imaginary trip to the moon.

I hesitate to call the book science fiction, as it is contained in a dream-frame, but it's without doubt proto-science fiction. The story begins with Kepler falling asleep in his reading-chair, and dreaming about an Icelandic boy whose mother is a witch. Through a series of events the boy ends up i Denmark as a student of astronomy with Tycho Brahe (like Kepler himself), and returns to Iceland, where his mother rejoices in his knowledge of the universe. She calls upon a daemon, who teaches the boy about the moon, how the spirits travel between the Earth and the moon, and how they could take him there, and proceeds to describe the topography, temperature, flora and fauna of the moon. Then Kepler awakes from his dream.

Kepler never published his novel, in fear of smearing the reputation of his mother, who was imprisoned and accused of witchcraft.

Most of this short book is a technical exposé over the movements of the Earth and the moon, and what the Earth and the sun would look like from the moon under different circumstances. But at the end Kepler briefly goes on to describe a world with oceans and porous caves, inhabited by giant creatures, some of which live under water and some on the surface, and seek refuge from the scorching sun during the day.

Trips to other planets had been described before this book, but mostly within a religious or mythological context. This was the first fictional description of the moon from a scientific point of view, which is why it is often called the first sci-fi novel. With exception of the end and the beginning, it's a pretty dry and technical read, interesting mostly as a historical curiosity, perhaps a sci-fi landmark.

First sci fi?

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Dybt interessant at læse en af de allerførste sci-fi-bøger. Værd at læse.

Surprisingly interesting, at least to me. Kepler describes what astronomy would be like as seen from the moon. What would the motion of the Earth, the other planets, the sun and the stars look like from different places on the moon? What would eclipses look like? Would there be seasons? I found it fascinating. I would prefer an animated video, but Kepler apparently didn't know how to make one of those.

As I understand it, he originally presented this work privately to other scientists without a framing story. Years later he added a prelude to put himself at arms length from the heretical ideas that could have got him killed. So he describes it first as a dream, and then even inside the dream it is a second-hand story told by some guy he met who was transported to the moon by a demon. Even so it wasn't published until he was safely dead.

You can call this Science Fiction if you want, but I'm shelving this as Science because the astronomy is the real point. The framing story is irrelevant to the main content.

Friends, do you have a moment to talk about 17th century astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler? He has been wronged by history, and I aim to be the fan girl to set the record straight.

If you learned about early modern science the way I did growing up, you primarily learned about Galileo Galilei and his telescope-aided astronomical discoveries that overturned the geocentric model of the solar system and brought us into a more enlightened age. Then you skipped straight on to Sir Issac Newton to talk about gravity. But neither Galileo's discoveries nor Newton's theory of universal gravitation were possible without Johannes Kepler. Some facts:

- Kepler described the terrain of the moon using a combination of naked-eye observations and pure a priori reasoning before Galileo observed the moon's surface through his telescope, confirming many of Kepler's conclusions. Kepler's ideas about the moon were wildly radical for the time. The "official" view of the universe supported by the Catholic and Lutheran churches described heavenly bodies as perfect spheres embedded in other, perfect crystalline spheres, with Earth at the center. This view of the universe was a priori-ism run amok and leveraged towards maintaining faith, but regardless, describing the moon as a world with imperfections like mountains, and valleys, and, perhaps, oceans and rivers was next to heresy. How is Earth unique in God's creation if the universe is full of innumerable worlds? Yet this is what Kepler proposed before Galileo's confirmation.
- Kepler developed a conception of gravity 80 years before Newton, describing it as a permeating force similar to magnetism. He was also the first person to use "inertia" in its modern sense. This was no small feat. During Kepler's time, Aristotelian-type theories prevailed, enforced by the Catholic and Lutheran churches (which saw Aristotelianism as more compatible with biblical literalism). These theories viewed gravity as the result of matter's propensity to seek its pre-ordained place in the world. It was highly teleological and relied on a fundamentally different conception of space, matter, and force. To break with this view was an act of unspeakable intellectual creativity. And Newton himself rightly credited Kepler for this genius.
- While Galileo usually gets the praise for overturning the geocentric model of the solar system, it was Kepler who did the heavy lifting by calculating the orbit of Mars using Tycho Brahe's painstaking observations. Kepler's entire life's work, including Somnium, probably did more to establish the heliocentric model of the solar system than any number of contributions made by any other person since Copernicus. Why? Because he had the proverbial receipts. His observations and calculations were undeniable. But more than pure empiricism or pure reason, his writing was able to help people imagine other possibilities for the universe.

And here begins my review of Somnium.

This book is the most prescient work of fiction I have ever read. It's wildly creative, and, while fundamentally wrong on some counts (the moon, for instance, is decidedly not inhabited), what's amazing is all the ways in which it's right.

For instance, solar radiation. In Kepler's enumerations of the dangers of a voyage to the moon, he lists solar radiation, a concept that just didn't exist in his time. He reasoned two things: (1) light is always associated with heat and (2) as you gain elevation, the atmosphere thins. He put these two ideas together to realize that if you left Earth's atmosphere, you'd be directly exposed to unmitigated solar radiation, which would at least burn you, if not kill you outright. What's even more fascinating is that he lists cold as another danger. This is deeply counterintuitive if you believe that burns from a source of heat are a danger. Nevertheless, he reasoned that Earth's atmosphere was acting as a blanket retaining ambient heat, so if you loose the conductive capacity of the atmosphere, you lose ambient heat.

Other insights? He believed that Earth's atmosphere was being held in place by gravity. He believed that gravity was a force that diminished with distance and was related to the mass of an object. So as you move away from a body with mass, you leave its atmosphere. (He consequently prescribed a breathing aid for interplanetary travelers.) He believed that the tides of Earth's oceans were caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. (He was the first person to discover this... and he was ridiculed. Others argued that if the moon was causing the tides through attraction, why did a high tide occur when the moon was on the opposite side of the planet? Kepler responded that an equal and opposite reaction could be expected, that once the moon passed, the ocean would rebound back from it's unnaturally high position to form a bulge on the back side of the planet due to the inertia of the water itself... he was, of course, proved right.) Kepler also believed that the moon's gravity would need to be taken into account when plotting the course of an interplanetary journey... the very first person to describe interplanetary trajectory calculations. He believed that to escape Earth's gravity, you'd need exceptional thrust (which he described as a cannon a la Jules Verne 200 years later). He noted that the forces caused by such acceleration would wreck havoc on human anatomy, so he prescribed special force-dampening harnesses... and sedatives to control heart rate. He recognized that there would be a hypothetical neutral point in the gravitational pull between the Earth and the moon, so things would float in space. He recognized you'd need breaking thrusters to counter the moon's gravity on a descent to the surface. He understood that gravity would be weaker on the moon and that that would translate into a thinner atmosphere. (He was wrong about the moon having an atmosphere, but so was pretty much everyone before the 20th century. Meanwhile he used his understanding of gravity to shape the type of life he thought might exist on the moon, saying that such life needed to be able to extract oxygen from water to avoid relying on the thin atmosphere and that life would grow very large due to the weak gravity. Moon creatures would also live in caves and canals to avoid exposure to solar radiation and temperature extremes driven by the moon's exceptionally long days and nights.) He was wrong in believing the moon had oceans, but what's interesting is that he realized that Earth's gravitational pull on the moon would result in the earth-side face being more covered in water, explaining the (apparently) large oceans on the earth-side face. He also envisioned what the heavens would look like from the moon, describing how much of the sky would appear to go retrograde as the moon completed its back-side orbit around the earth, and how navigation on the moon's surface could be aided by reference to Earth's fixed position in the sky. The moon's inhabitants meanwhile would have a very different conception of time, given their "days" last a full month in Earth terms.

I truly don't understand how Kepler reasoned all this out. He wasn't building from anything, except maybe Plutarch and a smattering of other ancient Greeks and Romans. It would be like writing about time travel today from nothing more than a handful of philosophy and math classes, and having the theoretical physics of it be conceptually correct, even though it contradicts our current standard model.

Yet, he did. And in describing all of this, Kepler gave people a way of imagining what life would look like from the moon. It helped them see the moon as a place in and of itself, and it helped people understand that our perspective on everything, heavens included, is contingent on our human perspective from Earth. How differently might things look if we were to free ourselves from those constraints?

This is the power of science fiction. Speculation. Shifts in perspective, and though them, new possibilities arising from obscurity. It's powerful. Necessary even. As Thomas Kuhn described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and as Max Jammer has described in his groundbreaking works, all of scientific pursuit is human endeavor, bounded by human phenomenology and human psychology. How then can we break out of old paradigms to explore new possibilities? Though creativity and imagination. Though people uncowed, unconstrained by social norms and, in Kepler's and Galileo's case, by direct threats to life and limb. And literature is a vehicle that can be used to explore controversial ideas in safe, perhaps subversive, ways.

However writing Somnium was not safe for Kepler. The work was written as an allegory in order to make it more palatable, but unfortunately Kepler's imagined journey to the moon was taken with his mother, who he described as a herbalist capable of speaking with the spirits who inhabit the wild northern regions of Iceland.* Accordingly, word-of-mouth accounts of the then-unpublished story were used as evidence in charging Kepler's mother with witchcraft, and she was imprisoned. Kepler spent an entire year painstakingly constructing a legal defense to secure his mother's release, which relied on finding scientific explanations for all the various charges against her (e.g. cows not giving milk, a pain in a child's arm, etc., etc.). Though his mother was released, she ultimately died as a result from her imprisonment.

The price of a dream that would ultimately launch humanity on its first steps to the stars was the life of an innocent woman. It was a price that rocked Kepler to the core.

In reading Kepler's various works, he was never boastful. He was careful, and particularly after the death of his mother, he was always aware of the political and physical dangers of the ideas he proposed. While Galileo writes in grandiose terms, Kepler often comes across world-weary. I believe he was weary of the world that killed his mother. And yet, in spite of everything, what's most moving about Kepler's writing is the pure joy in the beauty of the universe and all its mysteries. Joy and love and boundless possibility.




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* Kepler fuses fantasy and science fiction in this work. He writes that witches, old women accustomed to riding broomsticks over the wild barrens in the depth of night, are the perfect, hardy travelers for a voyage to the moon. He writes that spirits know the way to the moon -- indeed the moon is where spirits live. The way to the moon is through "tunnels of shadow," a very fae turn of phrase, though he literally means that you have to travel in the cone of shadow made by the moon or earth blocking the sun's powerful solar radiation. So you either have to spiral outward from earth, always saying night-side while traveling upwards from earth's surface until you reach the plane on which the moon travels, at which point, if you've plotted your course correctly, the moon will come to meet you once you've gained sufficient elevation OR you have to do the entire journey in the course of an eclipse. Incidentally, this is why eclipses are bad luck: they are opening the shadow tunnels between the earth and the moon, allowing spirits to invade our world.

It's perfect. Just perfect.