Ride a Goose to the Moon

A 1628 novel anticipating space travel is the star of the show at the British Library's upcoming exhibition on science fiction in literature.

From a piece in the Guardian...

When Francis Godwin, a 17th-century bishop, sat down to work out how man might get to the moon (he thought harnessing a man to a flock of geese might do the trick), he presumably did not realise that he was launching a new literary genre. But this summer, Godwin's 1628 book, The Man in the Moone, which anticipated the moon landing by 341 years and is now regarded as the first work of science fiction in English literature, will form a central part of the British Library's first ever exhibition devoted to the genre.

In fact, Godwin was not the first author to imagine other worlds, or even how to reach the moon. A book by Lucian of Samosata, written in the second century AD and depicting a war between moon people and sun people, is also in the exhibition in a Dutch edition published a few years after Godwin's book.

The exhibition, timed for the school summer holidays, will include not only ancient works from the library's archives, but also books by current writers including Cory Doctorow and China Miéville. A copy of the first serialised version of HG Wells's The War of the Worlds will be on display, and there will also be play texts (an 1826 melodrama based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein shows the monster with long hair and wrapped in a toga), sheet music and even advertisements.