Gazing at the Moon: 1500 years of lunar exploration and encounters

Summary

Collected here are six tales that span nearly two thousand years, from a Roman citizen writing a satire of the ‘historical’ literature of his time in 182 AD to Edgar Allan Poe exploring the idea of a scientific ascent to the moon in 1835. Humanity changed vastly across that time, and yet the moon never lost its allure, its promise of mystery and magic. By the late nineteenth century, it was clear that the moon’s surface was barren, and a wave of moon-based stories inaugurated the expansion into space of fiction.

Before we breached the atmosphere and sent men to our planet’s satellite, humanity spent countless millennia gazing up at the moon and wondering what might be there, telling stories by firelight of the mystery and magic of our constant and changing night-time companion.