Quotes About Somnium

Another pioneer of the scientific revolution, Johannes Kepler, was the first to couch an earnest scientific argument – a representation of the Copernican theory of the solar system – as a visionary fantasy. His Somnium (A Dream, 1634) also includes an ingenious attempt to imagine how life on the moon might have adapted to the long cycle of day and night.

The Somnium makes clear to us, although it did not to all of Kepler's contemporaries, that "in a dream one must be allowed the liberty of imagining occasionally that which never existed in the world of sense perception." Science fiction was a new idea at the time of the Thirty Years' War, and Kepler's book was used as evidence that his mother was a witch.