Voyages to the Moon and the Sun

These two seventeenth-century narratives follow a speaker who builds machines and is carried first to the moon and later, after further trouble in France, into the sun. On the moon he finds a society that walks on all fours, debates the soul, and treats Earth as a moon; he meets figures who argue physics and scripture. The solar voyage continues the satire through courts of birds and philosophers. Both books mock authority, scholastic science, and pious certainty. They are comic philosophical voyages, not astronomical treatises and not later novelistic science fiction.

Quarter dark brown cloth, pale brown paper boards, cover-label printed in brown. Cream endleaves with a pattern in brown by Blake. Dark brown slipcase.