colonize Venus.

But Lucian's works are not science fiction. They are intended to be read as fantasy--imaginings of the impossible--just like similar works for the following fourteen hundred years. As late as 1532, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso projected a trip to the Moon merely as a preposterous fantasy (to find and bottle his hero's lost wits).

Meanwhile, however, other events were taking place, events that would profoundly transform the world and the European concept of space.

The magnetic compass and advances in shipbuilding made possible the voyages of so-called "discovery" in the late 15th century, leading to a "New World"--that is, new to Europeans. Then in 1540 came the publication of an earthshaking book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, Copernicus' demonstration that the cosmos is vast and does not revolvearound the Earth. With the development of the telescope in the early 17th century, the concept of "plurality of worlds" began to be taken seriously. Marvelous voyages to the Moon, planets, and stars became commonplace.

Johannus Kepler, who developed the basic laws of planetary motion, uses them in Somnium (1634) to imagine living on the Moon. Francis Godwin describes a utopia on the Moon in The Man in the Moone (1638). Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1659) and Sun (1687) include marvelous inventions such as solar energy converters and talking machines.

As the European concept of space was being reshaped, the European concept of change, and of historical time itself, was also being transformed.

Thomas More's Utopia, published in 1516, introduced a concept