Somnium

Author: Johannes Kepler

There are some (Adam Roberts, for example) who argue that this is the first work of science fiction, though there are many other contenders for that title. Published posthumously only a few years before Godwin's The Man in the Moone, which was also posthumous, it takes the form of a fantasy that incorporates many of Kepler's ideas about astronomy. Kepler recounts a long, complicated dream in which daemons transport people to "the island of Levania" (their name for the Moon), a journey which involves extreme cold, shortage of air, and the need to accelerate away from Earth and then, once the Lagrange point is passed, to decelerate towards the Moon. Once on Levania, the traveller learns lots of scientific details, such as how an eclipse would look from the Moon and the relative sizes of the planets. Why it's on the list: Whether or not one agrees with Adam Roberts, there is no doubting the importance of this narrative in the early history of science fiction.