Future Predictions of Cyrano

The French author Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, whom fate and Edmond Rostand's play have made immortal for the size of his nose and his superlative swordsmanship, should properly be remembered as a lively science-fiction writer, a competent playwright, an inquiring scholar, and also, perhaps, as a prophet.

His two romances on trips to the moon and the sun (which usually appear in a single volume under the English title Voyages to the Moon and the Sun) were published posthumously in 1656 and 1662, respectively. In them, only a few years after Galileo had recanted the fact before the Inquisition, Cyrano described the orbit of the earth and other planets around the sun, and the weak gravitational field of the moon, and he proposed, among seven fanciful methods of interplanetary travel, a form of rocket propulsion. He also proposed, 300 years before the idea was borrowed by the writer Erich von Däniken, that the gods and mythological beings with whom earth's history is intertwined were actually travelers from outer space-in this case, inhabitants of the moon (though originally from the sun) who could change their shape at will.

Cyrano also, and far more remarkably, described the following items of moon technology: houses that could be withdrawn into the ground on huge screws in cold weather (though the retractable screw is something no yet attempted by builders of berm houses); houses that moved about with the seasons, driven by sails filled by bellows; devices to record and play back speech; and radiant bulbs that made the lunar night as bright as day.

Although many science-fiction writers have forecast new technology, none was so early in the field as Cyrano, with his prevision of such electrical and electronic inventions as the phonograph and tape recorder, mobile homes and light bulbs. He may, indeed, have equals in the field, but we shall have to wait another two or three hundred years to find out.

See: (Sam Moskowitz, Explorers of the Infinite , pp.23-27)

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