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Kepler's Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar AstronomyFrom Dover Publications
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Both a scientific treatise on lunar astronomy and a remarkably foresighted science-fiction story about a voyage to the moon, Kepler's Somnium went unrecognized for centuries. This edition of the work by the 17th-century mathematician and astronomer presents a full translation from the original Latin, with an informative introduction and helpful notes.
- Sales Rank: #1754621 in Books
- Published on: 2003-09-18
- Released on: 2003-09-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .60" h x 5.40" w x 8.44" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Early science fiction novella with tons of astronomy notes
By Aaron Wooldridge
"Somnium" (which means "Dream") by 17th century astronomer Johann Kepler is quite possibly the first modern story of space travel. It was not published until after Kepler's death and was rarely published or translated until the late 1800s. Today it is very difficult to find English translations of this book, most copies selling used for more than $100. I had to acquire a copy through inter-library loan, but even that was not the real book from the publisher. My library copy was a facsimile produced by a university in the 1980s of the mid 1900s translation in this Amazon listing. I am not aware of any public domain e-book versions of Somnium -- if anyone knows a website where I can download one please let me know in the comments.
Kepler wrote Somnium as a fantasy literary platform to launch his scientific defense of the then-unpopular astronomical theories of Copernicus, namely that the earth and other planets travel around the sun. For fear of being persecuted like Galileo, Kepler kept his Copernican ideas out of the public eye, only discussed them with close confidants, wrote Somnium as a fantasy taking place within a dream, and delayed publishing the book for decades. He intended the short story as a thought experiment to consider what the earth might look like from the moon. In doing so he devised some physics hypotheses of space travel that remain fairly accurate to this day, and he even realized centuries before Darwin and natural selection that lifeforms in wildly differing environments would appear and behave very differently from each other.
Somnium is an extremely short story, taking up only about 20 pages. These are followed by about 80 pages of Kepler's detailed scientific notes (originally footnotes but fortunately moved until after the main text in this edition). These notes are the reason for Kepler's decades-long delay of publishing the book because he wanted his argument to be unassailable by the political, religious, and scientific figures who might oppose him. In a way these notes are the real body of the book, but I only skimmed through them because my purpose in reading the book was for science fiction and early ideas of space travel rather than detailed astronomy. These notes are followed by approximately 150 pages of appendices written by the translator which cover everything from biography to history to science, some appropriate for the general reader and some appearing very technical. Unfortunately I did not have time to get very far into these appendices before I had to return the book to the library.
Somnim as a short story (all 18 or 20 pages of it): Kepler has a dream about an Icelandic boy whose mother is a witch. Due to poverty the mother sells her son to a ship's captain, and the boy eventually ends up in Denmark apprenticing to an astronomer whom Kepler himself had learned from when he was a boy. The boy develops a fascination with the moon and eventually is allowed to return home. His mother is extremely happy to see him, and they discover that they both have an interest in the moon (hers occultic and his scientific). The mother tells her son that she knows a demon who has taken her to the moon before, and they decide to go see the demon together. The demon takes them to the moon using a method that is magical in nature but demonstrates sound scientific principles (the discussion of the safety precautions needed to travel in space is by far the most interesting passage in the book). They hide from the sun in caves, examine various lifeforms, and then unexpectedly and abruptly Kepler awakens from his dream.
There is not much story here, and the little bit of story there is I found difficult to understand. I attempted to read it three times before I made it through all 20 pages simply because I wasn't sure what exactly was going on. I was greatly assisted by a certain online article about Somnium by Gale E. Christianson, and I strongly recommend that anyone who is remotely interested in this book Google and read that particular essay which explains everything so clearly and beautifully. In the story I really enjoyed the Icelandic boy as a character and was intrigued by his relationship with his mother. I found the description of the trip to the moon to be thought-provoking, entertaining, and even funny. After they got to the moon everything seemed like a big disappointment because nothing really happened and there was no more plot, just description.
Who would I recommend this book to? I strongly recommend Somnium to fans of early science fiction and anyone who wants to read early ideas about space travel. (That category includes myself.) However, if this is you then I strongly recommend you find a cheaper way to read this book then to spend an enormous amounts to buy a copy. The person who would truly benefit from this book would be a professional astronomer or a scholar.
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
A Good Translation of Perhaps the First Science Fiction Work
By Roger D. Launius
Although technology did not develop to the extent that actual travel to the Moon could take place, for centuries people posited that it was theoretically possible and longed for the time when it would happen. When Galileo first broadcast his findings about the solar system in 1610, he sparked a flood of speculation about lunar flight. Johann Kepler, himself a pathbreaking astronomer, posthumously published a novel, "Somnium" (Dream) (1634), that recounted a dream of a supernatural voyage to the Moon in which the visitors encountered serpentine creatures. He also included much scientific information in the book, speculating on the difficulties of overcoming the Earth's gravitational field, the nature of the elliptical paths of planets, the problems of maintaining life in the vacuum of space, and the geographical features of the Moon. It is an interesting and useful and perhaps the first entry in the genre of science fiction.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
"He fables, yet speaks truth"
By Viktor Blasjo
The Somnium is basically a straightforward account of the moon-equivalents of our days, years, seasons, eclipses, tides, climate zones, view of the planets, means of timekeeping, etc. The playful and pleasant tone of the work may be illustrated by a note where Kepler argues that, owing to the earth's size, the moon receives a significant amount of reflected heat from the earth, making the nights mild in the regions of the moon facing the earth:
"The warmth of moonlight ... we may investigate with our sense of touch, aided of course by art. For if you receive the rays of the full moon on a concave parabolic, or even spherical, mirror, at the focal point, where the rays come together, you will feel a certain warm breath, as it were. This happened to me at Linz, when I was busy with other mirror experiments and not thinking about the warmth of light. For I began looking around to see whether anybody was blowing on my hand." (pp. 122-123)
I was disappointed that Kepler treats the biological implications of his meticulous astronomical account so briefly. Apparently, the moon is full of serpents and pine cones (p. 28), but there is little elaboration on this point. Also sadly, Kepler tells us that he has suppressed a discussion of how living conditions on the moon affect its political climate (p. 130, seemingly omitted for fear of its misinterpretation as allegoric of earthly affairs).
It is of course ridiculous to call this "one of the most important books in the history of science" (back cover). It is also quite silly to call it a work of fiction or even science fiction: the fictional component of the work amounts to little more than a fanciful poetical preface which has nothing to do with the treatise itself.
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