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Somnium (Latin for "The Dream") — full title: Somnium, seu opus posthumum De astronomia lunari — is a novel written in Latin in 1608 by Johannes Kepler.It was first published in 1634 by Kepler's son, Ludwig Kepler, several years after the death of his father.
Ismaël Bullialdus accepted elliptical orbits but replaced Kepler's area law with uniform motion in respect to the empty focus of the ellipse, while Seth Ward used an elliptical orbit with motions defined by an equant. [109] [110] [111] Several astronomers tested Kepler's theory, and its various modifications, against astronomical observations.
A time slip is a plot device in fantasy and science fiction in which a person, or group of people, seem to travel through time by unknown means. [12] [13] The idea of a time slip has been used in 19th century fantasy, an early example being Washington Irving's 1819 Rip Van Winkle, where the mechanism of time travel is an extraordinarily long sleep. [14]
Artist rendition of a spaceship entering warp drive. Generic terms for engines enabling science fiction spacecraft propulsion include "space drive" and "star drive". [g] [2]: 198, 216 In 1977 The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction listed the following means of space travel: anti-gravity, [h] atomic (nuclear), bloater, [i] cannon one-shot, [j] Dean drive, [k] faster-than-light (FTL ...
American science fiction author and editor Lester del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado or fan—has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is," and the lack of a "full satisfactory definition" is because "there are no easily delineated limits to science fiction." [3] Another definition comes from The Literature Book by DK and ...
"A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content." [13] Basil Davenport. 1955. "Science fiction is fiction based upon some imagined development of science, or upon the extrapolation of a tendency in society." [14] Edmund ...
John Clute, writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, commented that Bleiler's suite of reference works consisting of The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983), Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990), and Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (1998) "stands as a central resource for the study of sf books" alongside the works of authors such as Neil Barron (author of Anatomy of Wonder) and ...
This is a timeline of science fiction as a literary tradition. While the date of the start of science fiction is debated, this list includes a range of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance-era precursors and proto-science fiction as well, as long as these examples include typical science fiction themes and topoi such as travel to outer space and encounter with alien life-forms.