Following a successful test flight he determines to resume his voyage home, hoping that he might "fill the world with the Fame of Glory and Renown".
Gonsales gradually comes to realise that these birds are able to carry substantial burdens, and resolves to construct a device by which a number of them harnessed together might be able to support the weight of a man, allowing him to move around the island more conveniently. Eventually he comes to rely on a species of bird he describes as some kind of wild swan, a gansa, to carry messages and provisions between himself and Diego. A scarcity of food forces Gonsales and Diego to live some miles apart, but Gonsales devises a variety of systems to allow them to communicate.
On his voyage home he becomes seriously ill, and he and a negro servant Diego are put ashore on St Helena, a remote island with a reputation for "temperate and healthful" air. There he prospers by trading in jewels, and having made his fortune decides to return to Spain. Recent studies have focused on Godwin's theories of language, the mechanics of lunar travel, and his religious position and sympathies as evidenced in the book.ĭomingo Gonsales is a citizen of Spain, forced to flee to the East Indies after killing a man in a duel. The book was well known in the 17th century, and even inspired parodies by Cyrano de Bergerac and Aphra Behn, but has been neglected in critical history. Some critics consider The Man in the Moone, along with Kepler's Somnium, to be one of the first works of science fiction. M." promises "an essay of Fancy, where Invention is shewed with Judgment". In his opening address to the reader the equally fictional translator "E. The story is written as a first-person narrative from the perspective of Domingo Gonsales, the book's fictional author. Godwin's astronomical theories were greatly influenced by Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius (1610), but unlike Galileo, Godwin proposes that the dark spots on the Moon are seas, one of many parallels with Kepler's Somnium sive opus posthumum de astronomia lunari of 1634. Although Copernicus is the only astronomer mentioned by name, the book also draws on the theories of Johannes Kepler and William Gilbert. The work is notable for its role in what was called the "new astronomy", the branch of astronomy influenced especially by Nicolaus Copernicus. It was first published posthumously in 1638 under the pseudonym of Domingo Gonsales. Long considered to be one of his early works, it is now generally thought to have been written in the late 1620s. The Man in the Moone is a book by the English divine and Church of England bishop Francis Godwin (1562–1633), describing a "voyage of utopian discovery". The Man in the Moone or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales
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