Does Steve Jobs iBook store hold a copy of Cyrano's science fiction novel?

By Harry van Vliet on 30 April 2010

With all new devices constantly craving for our attention and money, our eagerness is fed to what comes next. We want to look beyond the horizon and see what is heading our way, just out of curiosity or to have a ‘first mover’ advantage. But we seem to forget that to know the future one must look back. Take for instance two manuscripts that circulated in the 1640’s among the underground intelligentsia of that day, entitled Voyage dans la Lune (The Voyage to the Moon) and Voyage du Soleil (The Voyage to the Sun). They were written by Savinien de Cyrano aka Cyrano de Bergerac. Yes, the man really lived and is not just a musical character with a big nose. Indeed the heritage of Savinien de Cyrano suffers heavily from the romantic personage that the playwright Edmond Rostand created and that has inspired so many plays, movies and even Sesame Street (‘Cyranose the Bergerac’). The ‘real’ Cyrano was among other things a professional writer, he published letters, plays and a two-volume science fiction novel.

In this science fiction work he saw the description of several devices that were ahead of their time. Most of them have to do with transportation, but he also dreamt up the concept of the mobile home and there is a short mention of an “artificial eye to see by night”. But there is also the imagination of a personal audio device in the context of talking books, which give the people of the moon every opportunity to read and do other things at the same time, thus considerably expanding the amount of time in the day could be devoted to this uniquely enriching activity. Dyrcona, the protagonist, receives two books from a host and starts to examine them: “At the opening of the box I found something in metal almost similar to our clocks, filled with an infinite number of little springs and imperceptible machines. It is a book indeed, but a miraculous book without pages or letters; in fine, it is a book to learn from which eyes are useless, only ears are needed. When someone wishes to read he winds up the machine with a large number of all sorts of keys; then he turns the pointer towards the chapter he wishes to hear, and immediately, as if from a man’s mouth or a musical instrument, this machine gives out all the distinct and different sounds which serve as the expression of speech between the noble Moon-dwellers. When I had reflected on this miraculous invention in book-making I was no longer surprised that the young men of that country possessed more knowledge at sixteen or eighteen than grey-beards in our World. Since they know how to read as soon as they speak, they are never without reading. Indoors, out of doors, in town, traveling, on foot, or on horseback, they can have in their pocket or hanging from their saddle-bows as many as thirty of these books, and they have only to wind up a spring to hear a chapter, or several chapters, if they are in the mood to hear a whole book. In this way you have continually about you all great men, living or dead, and you hear them viva voce. This present occupied me for more than an hour, and then hanging them upon myself like earrings I went out to walk in the town.” An iPod with audiobooks from the 17th century, which makes you wonder: does Steve Jobs iBook store hold a copy of Cyrano’s science fiction novel?

Cyrano’s works influenced several later writers, among them Thomas d’Urfey’s Wonders in the Sun or the Kingdom of the Birds (1706) which play is inspired by Cyrano’s characters and the main situation of a trial before the court of birds, taken from Voyage to the Sun; Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver’s Travels (1726) which borrowed some general ideas from Cyrano and at least one passage in ‘Voyage to Lilliput’ is taken from the Moon; Voltaire, whose fantastical Micromégas: Histoire philosophique (1752) satirized our world from the viewpoint of giant visitors from space; and others like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

Some hold that with the landing on the moon, in 1969 by Armstrong and Aldrin, the Moon as a metaphor was ruined. If so, we at least we have the (i)books to read about them…

tagged with: ebook, history, ipod, future

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