I'm glad to see this on HN. Francis Godwin's story is worth a read for anyone interested in the history of science fiction. The part about using geese to fly to the moon is fun, but it undersells Godwin's scientific imagination. A lot of things happen in the story:
- The narrator asserts his agreement with Copernicus that the Earth rotates on its axis
- The narrator discovers that the force of gravity is less on the Moon than on the Earth, allowing him to leap around and also allowing creatures there to grow very large
- The narrator reasons that gravity is "a secret Property of the Globe of the Earth, or rather something within it, as the Load-stone draweth Iron" (an insight probably inspired by the work of William Gilbert)
- Although science in the modern sense was still being invented, making this "proto" science fiction, the narrator becomes probably the first character to assert his speculative fiction isn't magic ("finding in all my Discourse nothing tending to Magick")
- So when the narrator is given a stone made of "Ebelus" and finds that he can control gravity depending on which way the stone is oriented, that's probably the first appearance of a non-magical anti-gravity technology in fiction
- It's also probably the first proto SF to borrow from linguistics, because the narrator finds that people on the Moon speak using a language based on music and he makes an explicit analogy toward the end with tonal languages such as Mandarin
My feeling is it's also a much more readable piece than de Bergerac's later story, which is inspired by Godwin but adds to it a bunch of dry old 'natural philosophy.'
It's cute to call it "proto" science fiction ("prescience"?), but much of recent science fiction doesn't have much to do with science. Some is engineering or technology fiction.
Technology is old. I think weaving (as in cloth) might be oldest - I don't count dogs, olives or fire as they were domesticated, not created.
You're right. Weaves wouldn't leave evidence, though the progression of rock, pointier rock, knapping seems easier than the leap of weaving, anyway - I'd guess it came about 70,000 years ago with the cultural explosion of cognition.
From what you're describing, it sounds like he basically made two mistakes: he confused gravity with magnetism, and he supposed that space is filled with air.
Without a modern physics education, I wonder how many of us would have done so well.
Science, in essentially its modern form and related to it by direct transmission, was invented in the 11th century CE by al-Haytham working in Egypt in service of investigations recorded in his book Optics, that is explicitly acknowledged by the first European proto-scientists as defining conditions for their work.
The author mentions that the Pfeilstorch was found
> in 1882 in Mecklenburg, Germany
which was surprised me as being relatively recent. But according to its Wikipedia article [1], the Pfeilstorch was actually found in 1822. Still quite recent, but decidedly less so. Wikipedia also mentions that bird migration has been known about (at least in some circles) since the late 18th century [2]:
> Thomas Bewick's A History of British Birds (Volume 1, 1797) mentions a report from "a very intelligent master of a vessel" who, "between the islands of Menorca and Majorca, saw great numbers of Swallows flying northward"
Does anyone else know further history on how we came to understand bird migration? It seems quite interesting.
It's very surprising to me that as late as 1822 Europeans had no idea where migratory birds went. I would have expected that this would have been determined back during the age of exploration, once they gained access to these places. Why did this not happen?
I don't think this is a sufficient explanation; there were a number of scientific voyages of explanation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_and_American_voyages_..., although most of those postdate 1822. Still, there were a number before then.
Even without explicitly scientific voyages, the Americas -- north and south -- had been settled by Europeans for hundreds of years, and the US was now an independent country, and settlement of Australia had been underway for decades. That leaves plenty of discovery to be done on land.
Like, Carl Linnaeus had died some 40 years earlier. His taxonomy included New World species, and so did other taxonomies made by other later 18th-century biologists.
Meanwhile James Cook had taken various scientists on a number of his voyages (which were primarily intended for exploration), resulting in among other things the discovery of a number of new plant species.
So, I don't think this is an accurate description of the state of affairs at the time.
Chances are that Alzheimer's will not be seen as caused by amyloid plaques. And the notion of electric power from magnetic-confinement fusion will be a grand joke.
In almost any field, you can find old mandarins struggling manfully to suppress the work of youngsters who will overturn their fond delusions as soon as they have retired or died. The former group, emeritus with plenty of free time, are all over Wikipedia defending their legacy against appalling new evidence.
There is even a law, attributed to Max Planck: "Science advances one funeral at a time."
- The narrator asserts his agreement with Copernicus that the Earth rotates on its axis
- The narrator discovers that the force of gravity is less on the Moon than on the Earth, allowing him to leap around and also allowing creatures there to grow very large
- The narrator reasons that gravity is "a secret Property of the Globe of the Earth, or rather something within it, as the Load-stone draweth Iron" (an insight probably inspired by the work of William Gilbert)
- Although science in the modern sense was still being invented, making this "proto" science fiction, the narrator becomes probably the first character to assert his speculative fiction isn't magic ("finding in all my Discourse nothing tending to Magick")
- So when the narrator is given a stone made of "Ebelus" and finds that he can control gravity depending on which way the stone is oriented, that's probably the first appearance of a non-magical anti-gravity technology in fiction
- It's also probably the first proto SF to borrow from linguistics, because the narrator finds that people on the Moon speak using a language based on music and he makes an explicit analogy toward the end with tonal languages such as Mandarin
My feeling is it's also a much more readable piece than de Bergerac's later story, which is inspired by Godwin but adds to it a bunch of dry old 'natural philosophy.'
Anyway, it's available online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Strange_Voyage_and_Advent...