CYRANO de BERGERAC

   The form of his name under which French soldier and writer Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) is best known. He is famous as the hero of a play by Edmond Rostand (1868-1918), Cyrano de Bergerac (1898 UK), which made legends of his swordsmanship and the size of his nose. He fought with the Gascon Guard but retired after sustaining bad wounds. Only parts of his major work of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION, L'autre monde, were published in posthumous versions, censored (to tone down their heretical elements) by CdB's friend Henri le Bret. Histoire comique, par Monsieur de Cyrano Bergerac, contenant les etats et empires de la lune (1657 France; trans Tho. St Serf as Selenarchia: The Government of the World in the Moon 1659) is complete, but the text of Fragment d'Histoire comique par Monsieur de Cyrano Bergerac, contenant les etats et empires du soleil (1662 France; trans A. Lovell together with the former item as The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and Sun, coll 1687) is partial. Some of the censored text is restored in a French edition of Cyrano's complete works (Oeuvres [coll 1957], and both books - Moon and Sun - are translated from that edition in Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and Sun (trans Geoffrey Strachan omni 1965). It is possible that the remainder of the second part and the third part (The History of the Stars) were written but subsequently lost or destroyed.The hero of the comic histories attempts SPACE FLIGHT by several absurd methods, including ROCKET power. His adventures are SATIRES interrupted by discourses and dialogues regarding contemporary issues in natural philosophy. A classic sequence in the second history has the hero tried for the crimes of humanity by a court of birds. The histories influenced several later satirists, including Jonathan SWIFT and VOLTAIRE. The first part borrows Domingo Gonsales from Francis GODWIN's The Man in the Moone (1638), and in the second part Tommaso CAMPANELLA appears as the hero's guide.

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   See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; MOON; RELIGION.