
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Classic proto-SF, and a probable ancestor of many a fantastic voyage narrative, from St Brendan to Gulliver to Sinbad to the Dawn Treader - though it drew on earlier travellers' tales, and notably on Homer, who Lucian greatly admired and constantly referenced, and who is even a character in this story. It's also arguably among the first works of fiction, though, and the differentiation it explicitly makes between itself and those earlier tales is that the author states upfront that everything in it is made up and a complete lie. It's not presenting wild speculation as authentic chronicle, but as the fiction it always was.
And the speculation is wild. The travellers, led by the first-person narrator, sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic, and get caught up into the air by a freak wind, landing on the moon. The moon people are at war with the people of the sun over wanting to colonize Venus, and the travellers take part in the war, on what turns out to be the losing side (because of late reinforcements of centaurs). They're ransomed, though, and the king of the moon offers to marry the narrator to his son, which the narrator refuses. The people of the moon have no women; instead, the men under the age of 25 receive the seed of the older men in their thighs, where they gestate the children. (I assume this was satire on the then-common practice of older men having younger male lovers.)
They leave the moon, and have further adventures, including being swallowed by an immense whale, miles in length, and eventually killing it by setting the trees growing inside it on fire. They come to an island where the Elysian Fields (the Greek afterlife) can be found, and speak with famous people including Homer, some of whom are satirized. In this afterlife, men openly have sex with both men and women, and nobody thinks anything of it, and the women are "in common," but this doesn't stop some of the men being jealous about their wives.
The ruler of the realm of the dead tells them they have to leave, since it's not yet their time to be there, and they eventually make it back home, via Circe's island (the narrator carries a message from Odysseus to Circe, which he's careful not to let Penelope see).
The more you know about ancient Greek literature and culture, the more you'll get out of this, I'm sure, because there are a good few name-drops that I had to look up. But even a superficial knowledge will get you by, and it's interesting as an early example of fantastical fiction. I'm not quite ready to add it to my annual recommendation list, though; it's a bit niche for that.
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