Somnium (novel)

Somnium

Reproduction of 1634 title page
Author	Johannes Kepler
Language	Latin
Genre	Science fiction
Published	1634 (1634)

Somnium (Latin for "The Dream") — full title: Somnium, seu opus posthumum De astronomia lunari — is a novel written in Latin in 1608 by Johannes Kepler. It was first published in 1634 by Kepler's son, Ludwig Kepler, several years after the death of his father. In the narrative, an Icelandic boy and his witch mother learn of an island named Levania (the Moon) from a daemon. Somnium presents a detailed imaginative description of how the Earth might look when viewed from the Moon, and is considered the first serious scientific treatise on lunar astronomy. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov have referred to it as one of the earliest works of science fiction.^[1][2]