Dreams of space travel and speculation about life on other planets have long histories beginning well before Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the widely recognized fathers of science fiction, ever picked up a pen.
The earliest writers' imaginations focused mainly on the Moon. Lucian of Samosata's second-century book True History, in which the author sails to the Moon, is the earliest example of literature about space travel. In the late 1650s, Cyrano de Bergerac wrote L'Autre Monde (The Other World) in which people reached the Moon with flying machines fitted with rockets. Later authors such as Daniel Defoe and Edgar Allan Poe also wrote about the Moon in their stories about journeys beyond Earth.
Seventeenth-century Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher Christiaan Huygens helped move attention beyond the Moon when he contended that the universe brimmed with other worlds. He presented one of the earliest discussions of extraterrestrial life in a book called Cosmotheoros, which was published in 1698 three years after his death.
In the early twentieth century, the writings of Percival Lowell, the impassioned observer of Mars, shifted the favorite location for space fantasies shifted from the Moon to the red planet.
