Fairy Tale Spotlight: A Voyage to the Moon

Did you know that I stopped reading books for like 2 years? What happened was that I ended up getting kicked out of one job and into a much worse job. It sucked the life right out of me, and I did not have the drive to enjoy reading a good book. I now have a much better and far more relaxing job now, and that was when I decided it was time to go back to reading those wonderful classics that I love so much.

Well... I kind of had a false start by reading a book about an exorcist, but right after that I dived head first into Cyrano de Bergerac's classic... A Voyage to the Moon! This is widely considered the very first science fiction novel, although that might not be true. Either way, it was a book written in the 1600s about how Cyrano himself went to the moon.

If any of you don't know who Cyrano is, you might have heard of a particular stage play about a rather flamboyant man with a very long nose. That play was Cyrano de Bergerac, and that was the man who wrote and also starred in A Voyage to the Moon.

I heard a lot of people found this book very boring, and I do understand why. A lot of the enjoyment of this story requires a love of the main protagonist. Cyrano was counter-culture to the era in which he lived. In fact, it seems like he world have been counter-culture in any era. Even today, I think we would be rather annoyed with how non-conformist he was.

In the book, he had some extremely odd ideas about the universe he lived in. He saw the stars are simply other suns that perhaps had their own planets and moons. He thought about going to these places and had some very imaginative ways to make that idea a reality. He ended up making a machine propelled by fireworks that got him there in the book, but that was not his first attempt. I like the first attempt a bit more.

Cyrano took a number of glass bottles, filled them with water, and tied them to his body with strings. He then laid himself out on a sunny day within a town in France. The sun evaporated the water inside the bottles, but since those bottles were corked, the vapor could not escape. And so, the vapor then raised the up the bottles and Cyrano along with it, with the intention that they would carry him up to the moon. But they fell short of it and unfortunately dropped him down in Canada.

It makes no sense outside if cartoons, but it did require a lot of imagination to conjure. The very idea that he could even think in that way, in that time, was very enjoyable. The moon itself was, as you may expect, very strange. It was full of people who acted in their own way, with their own language, and with their bizarre little customs. The Garden of Eden was apparently there, and so was a collective of famous Biblical characters such as Elijah, Enoch, and a host of angels.

The bulk of the book has to do with the sad fact that Cyrano just doesn't fit in there. They don't understand him and constantly try and proclaim him to be a lot of things that make sense to them but not at all to Cyrano himself. They mistake him once for a female... and then some sort of bird. They also accuse him of being almost blasphemous when he claims that the moon circles around the Earth when they claim is it the opposite of that.

It seems to me that no matter where Cyrano went, he was never accepted for who he was. Everyone was constantly trying to make him sane. The books main antagonist was a psychologist that was simply trying to disprove everything Cyrano believed in... replacing it with some sort of safe ideal of cynicism. By the end of the book, I really felt for the poor guy.

But don't get me wrong, the book is still very amusing. There are a lot of comedic moments such as when Cyrano was late for dinner. When asked why he did not ask the people for the time, he said that he did but they all stubbed their noses up at him. It was explained that the people of the moon had very long noses for a reason. When they lifted up their faces, their nose would act as a sundial. They were merely attempting to answer his question.

I do recommend A Voyage to the Moon, but I must warn you that this book is really intended for fans of the man who wrote it. There is a lot of long-winded dialog which is really just Cyrano trying to make his arguments and contrast them with his own devil's advocate. That is the core nature of the book. He simply used the moon to make it happen. If you are interested in this man, this book will give you insight into who he was, and why he was such an uncommon person in this world.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!