Lucian of Samosata’s A True Story is often called the earliest surviving tale to imagine a voyage to the Moon, alien societies, and a war in space. It’s also a sharp parody of tall-travel stories and claims to “truth.” Reading it as early science fiction doesn’t miss the joke; it shows how a second-century writer uses impossible machines and encounters to ask plain questions about credibility, evidence, and wonder.
Who was Lucian, and why write a “true” pack of lies?
Lucian was a Syrian-born Greek prose writer active in the second century AD, during the high Roman Empire. Trained in rhetoric, he became known for dialogues that puncture pretension—the boastful historian, the wonder-monger, the philosopher who builds castles in the air. In A True Story he starts by admitting that everything to come is false. That isn’t a gimmick; it’s the method. He spoofs authors like Ctesias, Iambulus, and Herodotus who told marvels as sober history. By piling up impossibilities, he teaches readers to question sources, weigh claims, and enjoy invention without being fooled. (For a readable English text with classic 1894 art, see Francis Hickes’s translation on Project Gutenberg.)
What kind of book is A True Story?
It’s a short, two-book tale that mixes travel narrative, fantasy set pieces, send-ups of philosophers, and what we now call science-fiction ideas. The crew sails beyond the Pillars of Heracles and meets the absurd at once: an island with a river of wine, trees shaped like women, and a gale that throws them into the sky. Lucian tells you straight that it’s nonsense—and then commits to it with so much practical detail (distances, supplies, battle orders) that your mind keeps trying to make it add up. That’s the joke, and the fun.
The Moon chapter: a war over the Morning Star
A violent whirlwind lifts the ship and drops the sailors on a pale, dustless plain. They’ve reached the Moon, where they are drafted into Endymion’s army. Endymion, king of the Moon, is at war with Phaethon, king of the Sun, over who will colonize the Morning Star (Lucifer). The episode is packed with troop types and gear, named with mock-serious detail:
- Hippogypians, riders on giant vultures, each wing feather longer than a ship’s mast.
- Flea cavalry, mounted on fleas the size of many elephants.
- Spiders of “mighty bigness”, ordered to spin a web between the Moon and the Morning Star so infantry can form ranks on silk stretched through space.
The Sun-king fields his own odd corps. The battle reads like a pageant where figures of speech come to life. The turning point is tactical: the Sun’s forces cloud the Moon, choking off light and morale, until both sides agree to a truce. Terms are set; captives are exchanged; the web dissolves. Long before telescopes, Lucian stages a militarized space scene with logistics and strategy. The delight isn’t only the spectacle. It’s also philosophy: why do humans dress conquest in noble talk, and why does colonization sound “natural” until you move it to the heavens?
Life on the Moon: bodies, births, and social satire
After the armistice, the visitors tour Moon society. Lucian writes in the voice of a travel reporter—“as if” he were recording real customs. The Moonites are all male; reproduction happens without women. In one tradition, men gestate children in the calf of the leg—a grotesque, funny riff on old ideas about seed, nurture, and paternity. Food, clothing, and daily life flip Greek habits just enough to feel absurd and revealing. He isn’t giving a guide to lunar biology. He’s using a strange setting to make everyday life look strange. If a visitor described us with the same straight face, how normal would our routines look?
Back to Earth: the whale-city and other impossibilities
Homeward bound, the crew is swallowed by a whale so vast that a whole country exists in its belly—forests, meadows, tribes of fish-people, even politics. The travelers fight a war, burn a path, and escape by propping open the jaws with a colossal stake. The scale is ridiculous on purpose. It lets Lucian parody ethnography and colonial adventure at once: the visitors march into a “new world,” declare victory, impose their will, leave chaos, and row on to the next “discovery.”
Soon they glide into a Sea of Milk, where an island of pressed cheese rises out of the white. Vines grow on that island, but their grapes yield only milk. A sanctuary bears an inscription to Galatea. Lucian’s deadpan piles up: measurements of the island, the taste of the milk, the temple’s dedication. The effect is comic and technical at once. You learn to track cause and effect in a world that has rules—just different ones. (Hickes’s translation keeps this dry precision.)
Islands of the Blessed—and the sting in the joke
The sailors reach the Island of the Blessed, a classical paradise where Homer, Pythagoras, and heroes of the Trojan War live in ease. Wine flows from cups that grow on trees; the seasons never change; only the west wind blows. Even here the satire bites. Herodotus and Ctesias, famous for embroidered marvels, are punished among the liars in the underworld; Socrates is nearly expelled from the feast if he can’t quit his irony. The jab is fond but sharp: literary authority often hides credulity, and our “immortals” are rarely as tidy as we pretend.
Dreams, truth, and the art of “lying honestly”
The book includes a visit to the Isle of Dreams, where Sleep rules and the city has a Temple of Night, a Well of Care, and twin shrines to Truth and Falsehood. The layout is playful and symbolic: gates of horn and ivory recall Odysseus’s test for true and false dreams. There’s even a market square where Antiphon serves as prophet and interpreter. In short, Lucian draws a map of how stories reach us—how we want to believe, choose to doubt, and sometimes settle in between. (This York University PDF keeps the place-names and pageantry.)
Why call it “science fiction” at all?
Lucian isn’t proposing testable theories about rockets or lunar geology, and he knows it. Yet the book hits several marks later readers link to science fiction:
- Extraterrestrial travel told as a physical journey with distance, motion, and logistics (even if the “engine” is a storm).
- Alien environments and societies that flip human norms by changing basic constraints—no women, different reproduction, new foods and materials.
- Interplanetary war with tactical detail—Moon vs. Sun, a treaty, and colonization terms.
- Technological imagination in miniature: the spider-spun skyfield works like infrastructure built to meet a strategy.
The point isn’t that Lucian anticipates rocketry. It’s that he uses world-building—new rules applied consistently—to stage thought experiments. Later writers from Cyrano de Bergerac to Swift borrow the trick: make a place that can’t exist, fill it with believable behavior, and use the contrast to expose the reader’s world.
The rhetoric of precision
One charm of the book is its mock-scientific voice. Lucian counts furlongs, measures gulfs, names winds, and gives ingredient lists—and none of it makes the marvels less impossible. That isn’t sloppiness. It’s craft. The more plausible the texture, the sharper the comedy when you catch yourself nodding along to a cheese island or a floating forest standing upright in a calm sea. When modern readers say Lucian “feels modern,” they’re reacting to this style: reporting the impossible.
Satire with a human core
Behind the fireworks is a steady human interest. A True Story is a book about credulity and desire. People want to believe that their heroes—Odysseus, Homer, Herodotus—are exactly what school taught, and that stories which make the world bigger must be true. Lucian delights in that wanting and refuses it at the same time. He gives you more wonders than any liar could promise, then winks: “I told you I was lying.” You get to enjoy invention without giving up judgment. That balance—pleasure without gullibility—feels very modern.
How the Moon looks from the second century
Lucian’s Moon is habitable, busy, and political. It has kings, courts, farms, and armies. To us, that’s wrong. To him, it fits how many Greeks pictured the universe—layered, rule-governed, full of agents whose motives you can guess from human motives. The Moon is an elsewhere far enough away to strip Earthly claims of their glamour and measure them again. When the Sun clouds the Moon to force a truce, the move is impossible and yet perfectly sensible inside the story’s war logic. Lucian gives the Moon what any good stage needs: rules, stakes, audience, and consequences.
Influence and afterlives
Readers in late antiquity and the medieval and early modern worlds met A True Story through summaries, schoolroom excerpts, and translations. Artists kept reinventing its scenes. Seventeenth-century engravers pictured the air-war as a cosmic brawl; nineteenth-century illustrators like William Strang and Aubrey Beardsley gave the spider battles and dreamscapes a new look. Later prose travelers—Cyrano, Swift, Holberg—borrowed Lucian’s frank “this is all a lie” stance even when they claimed otherwise, because it lets them invent while keeping readers alert.
So, was this the first sci-fi story?
It depends on how you define science fiction. Ancient literature is full of marvels that feel speculative, and other writers sent travelers to realms that look extraterrestrial or utopian. What keeps Lucian near the front of the line is the bundle he ties together: a clear space voyage, alien cultures, interplanetary warfare, built environments, and a self-aware narrator who uses them to test truth claims. Even if you resist the “first” label, A True Story reads like the moment when wonder and critique learn to work side by side.
How to read it now
You don’t read A True Story for hard science; you read it to watch a brilliant ancient prose writer test your belief reflexes. Its absurdities aren’t a failure of realism but a tool for thinking. Take it as both literature and lens: a set of scenes—Moon battles, whale kingdoms, cheese islands—that also trains you to track tone, authority, and evidence in any marvelous claim. In that sense the book is not only proto-sci-fi; it’s proto-media literacy.
