Introduction

There is a particular kind of delight that comes from discovering that something you assumed was modern is, in fact, astonishingly ancient. We tend to think of science fiction as the child of the industrial age, a genre born from telescopes and rocketry, from the anxieties and ambitions of a mechanized world. We imagine voyages to the moon as the invention of authors writing by gaslight or under electric bulbs, dreaming forward into a future their readers could scarcely conceive. And yet, nearly two thousand years ago, in the sun-baked provinces of the Roman Empire, a sharp-tongued Greek writer sat down and composed a tale of intrepid sailors blown off course by a cosmic whirlwind, carried up beyond the clouds, and deposited upon the lunar surface in the middle of an interplanetary war. He wrote of voyagers swallowed whole by a sea creature so vast that an entire civilization lived within its belly. He wrote of islands made of cheese, of rivers running with wine, of lamps that walked and talked, and of an afterlife where the great heroes and philosophers of antiquity bickered, drank, and made fools of themselves like everyone else.

The author was Lucian of Samosata, and the work you are about to read has carried many names across the centuries: A True Story, The True History, Verae Historiae. The title itself is the first joke, and a magnificent one, because Lucian announces with perfect deadpan sincerity that everything he is about to tell you is an outrageous lie. This is a book that opens by promising to deceive you and then proceeds to keep that promise with such inventive abandon that you cannot help but love it for its honesty. To read it today is to feel the centuries collapse, to recognize in this distant voice a sensibility so playful, so irreverent, and so gleefully absurd that it might have been written yesterday. It is, by many reasonable measures, the oldest surviving work of fantastical fiction in the Western tradition, the great-great-grandfather of every starship and every impossible voyage that has followed. But to reduce it to a museum piece, a historical curiosity to be admired and shelved, would be to miss the point entirely. This is a book meant to be enjoyed, and it remains, after all this time, enormously enjoyable.

A Writer Who Refused to Take Anyone Seriously

To understand the spirit of this remarkable little book, it helps to understand something of the man who wrote it, though Lucian himself would probably have laughed at the idea of being treated with scholarly reverence. He was born around the year 125 of the common era in Samosata, a city on the banks of the Euphrates in the province of Syria, at the eastern fringe of the vast and sprawling Roman world. He was not, by birth, a member of the Greek cultural elite whose language and traditions dominated the intellectual life of the eastern Empire. His first language may not even have been Greek. He came, by his own account, from a family of modest means, and was at one point apprenticed to an uncle who was a sculptor, a career he abandoned almost immediately. And yet this provincial outsider, this self-made man from the edge of the map, taught himself to write Greek with such elegance, wit, and command that he became one of the most celebrated prose stylists of his entire age, and his reputation has endured where countless aristocratic authors have crumbled into dust.

Lucian made his living, at least for a time, as a traveling lecturer and rhetorician, one of the polished performers who roamed the cities of the Empire delivering speeches, declamations, and clever set pieces for paying audiences. This was the great age of what scholars call the Second Sophistic, a period in which rhetorical skill was prized above almost all else, when a man who could speak beautifully could win fame, fortune, and the admiration of crowds. Lucian mastered this art completely, and then, characteristically, he turned around and mocked it. For at his core, Lucian was a satirist, perhaps the finest satirist the ancient world produced. He looked at the pretensions of philosophers, the credulity of the religious, the pomposity of historians, the greed of charlatans, and the gullibility of the public, and he found all of it irresistibly ridiculous. His enormous body of surviving work, dozens of dialogues, essays, and stories, is held together by a single unifying thread: a refusal to take anyone’s self-importance at face value. He punctures the inflated, deflates the grand, and exposes the gap between what people claim to be and what they actually are.

What makes Lucian so appealing, and so unusual, is that his satire is rarely bitter. There is anger in him, certainly, and a genuine contempt for fraud and hypocrisy, but the dominant note is one of mischievous glee. He seems to delight in human folly even as he skewers it. He is the kind of writer who would rather make you laugh than make you furious, who understands that ridicule is often a more effective weapon than rage, and who knows that the most devastating thing you can do to a pompous fool is to take his ideas to their logical, absurd conclusion. In the work before you, this comic genius reaches one of its purest expressions, because here Lucian sets aside the specific targets of his other satires and aims at something larger and more universal: the very act of telling tall tales, of dressing up lies as truth, of asking an audience to believe the unbelievable.

The specific objects of his mockery were the travel writers and historians of his day, the authors who filled their accounts of distant lands with marvels and monsters and impossible wonders, all the while insisting solemnly upon their own accuracy. Lucian had read these writers, and he had no patience for them. He had read the epic poets too, the Homers and the Hesiods whose heroes performed feats no mortal could accomplish. He had read the philosophers who built elaborate systems of the cosmos out of pure speculation and then proclaimed them as established fact. And so he conceived a perfect revenge, a piece of literary jujitsu so clever that it has never been surpassed. Rather than argue against the liars, he would out-lie them. He would write a travel narrative so extravagantly, so deliriously, so transparently false that no one could possibly mistake it for truth, and in doing so he would expose the dishonesty of all those who lied while pretending to be truthful. His one act of perfect honesty, he tells us, is to admit openly that he is lying. Every other word in the book is a fabrication, and he wants you to know it.

This is the crucial frame through which to read what follows. Lucian is not trying to fool you. He is inviting you into a game, a knowing collaboration between author and reader, in which you both understand from the very first page that none of this happened, that none of it could have happened, and that the impossibility is precisely the point. He builds his absurdities with a straight face, narrating the most preposterous events in the calm, measured tone of a man reporting a slightly unusual fishing trip. That tonal contrast, the gulf between the cosmic strangeness of the events and the unflappable composure of the narrator describing them, is the engine of the book’s comedy. It is a technique that humorists have used ever since, the deadpan delivery of the outrageous, and Lucian wielded it with a confidence that few have matched in the eighteen centuries since.

It is worth pausing to appreciate how genuinely radical this enterprise was. The ancient world had its myths, its epics, its fables, and its legends, but the idea of fiction as we understand it, of a story openly acknowledged to be invented and offered purely for the pleasure and stimulation it provides, was not a settled or familiar concept. Stories were generally expected to carry the authority of tradition, the weight of religious truth, or the moral instruction of allegory. Lucian, by announcing at the outset that his tale is a deliberate and complete fabrication, was doing something close to inventing the modern relationship between a fiction writer and an audience. He was saying, in effect: here is a story I made up, I know I made it up, you know I made it up, and we shall both enjoy it all the more for that shared understanding. There is something thrillingly forward-looking in this, a literary self-awareness that would not become commonplace for many centuries. When later writers like Rabelais, Swift, Cyrano de Bergerac, and even the creators of modern science fiction reached for the tools of fantastical satire, they were, whether they knew it or not, following a path that Lucian had blazed.

A Voyage Beyond the Edges of the Possible

The structure of the book is, fittingly, the structure of a voyage. Lucian casts himself as the narrator, a traveler who, along with a band of adventurous companions, sets sail in search of what lies beyond the known boundaries of the world. From this simple and ancient premise, the premise of the Odyssey and of every sea-faring legend that followed, he launches a series of episodes that grow steadily more extraordinary, each one outdoing the last in sheer imaginative audacity. The journey carries the reader across strange seas, onto stranger shores, and eventually into realms that no earthly geography could contain. It is an episodic adventure, a string of marvels and encounters, and part of its charm is that you never know what lunatic wonder will appear over the next horizon.

I will not describe the specific destinations and discoveries that await you, because so much of the pleasure of this book lies in the surprise of it, in turning a page and being confronted with some new impossibility delivered with that magnificent straight face. But I can say that Lucian’s imagination ranges across the heavens and the depths, across the worlds of the living and the dead, across realms of pure fantasy and pointed parody. He takes the conventions of heroic literature and turns them inside out. He takes the religious and philosophical beliefs of his age and renders them gloriously ridiculous. He invents creatures, customs, and civilizations with a fertility of invention that would be the envy of any modern fantasist. And throughout, he maintains his comic discipline, never winking too obviously, never breaking character, allowing the absurdity to bloom and unfold with a kind of dreadful logic all its own.

One of the great pleasures awaiting the attentive reader is the recognition of just how many later literary inventions have their seeds here. The notion of an interplanetary war, of voyaging to other worlds, of encountering alien races with their own bizarre biologies and political conflicts, of being consumed by a monster and surviving within it, of visiting the realms of the famous dead and finding them all too human, of utopian and dystopian islands, of the fantastical voyage that satirizes the society it leaves behind. These ideas, which feel so thoroughly the property of later centuries, are all present here in embryonic form. To read Lucian is to watch a thousand later books being conceived in a single, dizzying burst of creative energy. Yet the experience is never dry or academic, never a matter of dutifully cataloguing influences. It is, first and foremost, a romp, a riot of invention propelled forward by the author’s evident joy in making it all up.

There is, beneath the comedy, a serious intelligence at work, and the modern reader who wishes to dig will find rich rewards. Lucian is not merely being silly. Every absurdity is a comment, every impossibility a critique. When he parodies the travel writers, he is making a real argument about truth and falsehood, about the responsibilities of those who claim to inform us, and about the credulity of audiences who want so badly to believe in wonders that they will swallow any nonsense dressed up in confident prose. When he sends his heroes among the famous dead and shows the great names of history and literature behaving badly, he is gently deflating the reverence with which his culture treated its ancestors, reminding his readers that the legendary figures of the past were, in the end, only people, with all the pettiness and absurdity that being a person entails. When he constructs his impossible societies, he is holding up a mirror to his own, inviting us to see the strangeness in what we take for granted by rendering it in unfamiliar form.