Dennis Biba

Speculative fiction, as an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy and almost everything that could be considered marvellous and extraordinary, has always been political. It could be argued that escaping into fictional worlds is a political act per se, because one refuses to confront reality. However, this argument is flawed because, firstly, any kind of reading (including non-fictional reading) represents a certain form of escapism. Secondly, turning to fiction does not necessarily mean turning away from reality. Often it is precisely the diversions via fiction that enables a serious examination of contemporary political issues. And sometimes fiction is even the only way to deal with politics in a reasonably safe way, as examples from the Soviet Union (e.g. by the Strugatsky brothers or Zamyatin) show.

Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (not the one from Edmond Rostand’s verse drama, but the original one) probably wanted to play it safe and kept his critical space story to himself. It was published two years after Cyrano’s death by his friend Henri Lebret. His two-part Voyage to the Moon and the Sun (original titles: Les États et Empires de la Lune and Les États et Empires du Soleil) may seem rather harmless to today’s readers. Without a sound knowledge of the political, philosophical, theological and scientific discourses of the mid-17th century, Cyrano’s numerous points and intertextual remarks are almost incomprehensible today. In any case, he himself was at the cutting edge of science of his time and – if we may allow ourselves a little pathos – even quite a bit ahead of it. At least the highly educated satirist, early Enlightenment philosopher and contemporary of Galileo Galilei knew exactly what he was allowed to say and what to put into the mouths of his novel characters without being prosecuted.

His journey into space (one of the first in literature) begins with an annoying argument between the first-person narrator and his uneducated interlocutors about the shape of the moon. As a scientifically educated man, he knows of course that the moon is spherical like the earth. Aristotle already knew this (as did the scholars of the Middle Ages who adopted his model), but the basic findings of physics have probably still not got around to this day. But why take science communication so seriously when you already have all the artistic freedom of a novelist? With nothing but a belt of vials full of morning dew, the narrator of the story leaves the incorrigible doubters behind and ends up in Canada instead of on the moon. However, this mishap is quickly rectified and he sets off into space again. Anyone who thinks there couldn’t be a better holiday destination than Canada will be disabused, because on the moon he finds nothing less than the biblical Garden of Eden and a somewhat strange human race that walks on four legs but otherwise has nothing but contempt for the inhabitants of Earth. Cyrano uses the topos of the inverted world here, in this case the moon as a mirror-image anti-world, which allows him to indirectly criticise earth society without making himself vulnerable as an author.

Cyrano essentially uses utopia as a rhetorical strategy in order to adopt a different perspective on society that would normally be denied due to a lack of distance. He understands fiction first and foremost as a space of (im)possibility (an ambivalence that is also reflected in the genre designation of u-topia), which can be both possible and impossible at the same time. In addition to this mechanism, which is fundamental to fantasy, he also engages in technical extrapolation worthy of a hard science fiction novel: the inhabitants of the moon have already invented the audio book and use it for personal education during their everyday activities – an invention that would still have passed for science fiction in the middle of the 20th century.

What Cyrano has over later science fiction (with a few exceptions, such as Douglas Adams), however, is his admirable lack of seriousness, which does not fit in at all with the political unrest of his time. While the hothead was never at a loss for a duel in real life when someone made an inappropriate remark about his big nose, having one on the moon is of course a sign of a particularly noble character. Cyrano probably also owes his subsequent literary ennoblement as a French national hero to his self-irony and the adaptation by Edmond Rostand, as someone whose unsightly appearance belies his good core. Perhaps the inhabitants of the moon are actually one step ahead of humans in this respect…