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INTRODUCTION
Francis Godwin (1562-1633), bishop successively of Llandaff and Hereford, wrote what was later regarded as the first piece of English science-fiction, The Man in the Moone, published posthumously in 1638. This pseudonymous work is narrated by a Spaniard named Domingo Gonsales, who flies to the moon attached to a flock of trained birds, where he finds an advanced civilization of serene lunar beings. What are the origins of this signal work of early prose fiction? This article evaluates and disproves the claim that we should seek the major origin of this work in a continental text of superficially similar plot, Johannes Kepler's quasi-fictional Somnium (printed in 1634). Instead, I shall suggest that Godwin drew from more eclectic and hitherto unnoticed or neglected sources. This will allow us to see that Godwin's work arose from a process of generic hybridization, not via an imitation of an already fictional work.
KEPLER
Godwin's near contemporary Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), the greatest professional astronomer of the period, composed between 1593 and his death a work that finally evolved into his Somnium seu Opus Posthumum de Astronomía Lunari, edited by his son and printed at Sagan and Frankfurt in 1634. This work thus appeared a year after Godwin's and four after Kepler's death. The Somnium, under die guise of fiction, also featured lunar life. Obviously Francis Godwin cannot have read Kepler's Opus Posthumum- he too was dead when it was published. But did he have access to a manuscript of Kepler's Somnium when he wrote his own Man in the Moone, sometime after 1628?' Godwin's last scholarly editor, Grant McColley, thought that he did, basing his case on internal evidence drawn from TAt? Man in the Moone without troubling himself about the external plausibility of a manuscript of the Somnium on English soil. I propose that Godwin did not and could not have utilized the Somnium in any form, and this I shall argue below on both external and internal evidence. The question is important, because if, following McColley as most do, the answer to it is "yes," then Godwin's fiction has a Keplerian base, and we must acknowledge Kepler as the writer who introduced to his English readers the combination of natural philosophical speculation with a formally fiction vehicle....