Book Review: Selected Satires of Lucian by Lucian of Samosata, Lionel Casson (Translator/Editor)

 

 

Selected Satires of Lucian by Lucian of Samosata, Lionel Casson (Translator/Editor)

398 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1968

(Again neck deep in a novel right now…So if the review suffers…sorry)

In my recent adventures with pre-Science Fiction, this is a strange one. It has also made me think about the idea that a woman invented SF. When people say that, they are often giving that credit to Shelly and the Modern Prometheus. However, know-it-alls like me will often point to 1666 and The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish. So I was surprised when I saw mention of the satires of Lucian who lived in the outskirts of the Roman Empire around 150 AD. That was basically 19 centuries ago, and while at the time they were labeled satires or tall tales…Lucian, my dude, was writing fantasy or bizarro, but an argument can be made that it is science fiction. 

As to who Lucian was…he reminded me of a scene from the Mel Brooks movie History of the World Part one. Mel played Comicus in a scene where he goes to get a handout (from Bea Arthur)

"Occupation?"

"Standup Philosopher!"

"What?"

"Standup Philosopher. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension."

"Oh! A bullshit artist!"

Lucian traveled around the eastern Roman empire doing lectures, telling stories and became a noted celebrity in a 2nd-century way.  When he returned to the small town in Syria where he grew up he was amused by tons of wild stories his old friends told. The idea was that these stories were making fun of his buddies. In another words he was a bullshit artist. So keep in mind what I was reading was a translation from the sixties, but we are talking about a piece of humor that is almost 20 centuries old. A friend explained that the humor was as accessible to us as Saturday Night Live would be to someone in the Roman Empire. 

This was written on Earth, but a very different Earth. Is it recognizable as science fiction or Fantasy? Sure, but it really is a relic or an artifact of the ancient world, and fascinating as that. There is not much of a story of any kind, but you should not be coming to this book looking for a story. 

As such the Lucian is the point of view character, and the story starts with him setting out on a journey. What is interesting is when you consider that when this was written, he was talking about the final frontier of the day.

“Sometime ago, I set out on a voyage from the straits of Gibraltar. A favorable breeze carried me into the Atlantic Ocean, and I was on my way. The basic reasons for the trip were intellectual curiosity, my thirst for novelty, and the desire to find out what formed the farther border of the Ocean and what people lived there.”

 The Lucian gets weird, and of course, I love all this stuff. The idea that this island on the farthest border of the known world becomes home to a war between Moonmen, Sun creatures, and Greek gods.  Yeah, super bizarro. This island is in a spot of the world we understand because we have globes and maps of the whole planet. In the context of when this was written, it might as well be set on another planet. 

The events on this island are a war, and while some of the generals have names you might know from Greek mythology, the war itself is as bizarro as it gets. 

“We stayed the night with him as guests. At the crack of dawn his lookouts reported that the enemy was approaching, we rose and took our positions. Endymion had 100,000 troops, not counting supply corps, engineers, infantry, and contingents from foreign allies. Of the 100,000, 80,000 were buzzard cavalry and 20,000 Saladbird Cavalry. The Saladbird is an enormous bird covered all over salad greens instead of feathers; its wings look exactly like lettuce leaves.”

Birds with lettuce wings, soldiers with bean helmets, and cloud centaurs. The details of this war and this faraway island are science fictional for sure. The Moonmen seem like surreal jokes, but it is extraterrestrial characters. Lucian also writes about traveling to the moon. That trip is also great stuff.

“I want to describe the strange, new phenomena I observed during this stay on the moon.

The first is that the males and no the females do the childbearing. Marriage is with the males and there isn’t even a word for “woman.” Men under twenty-five are the wives, men over, the husbands. The embryo is carried not in the belly but in the calf. Once conception takes place, the calf swells up; after a due period of time, it is cut open and the child not yet alive, is extracted. Life is induced by placing the child, mouth open wide, toward the wind.”

There is absolutely world-building, I mean, sure it is info-dumps, but the bizarro biology of the Moonmen is really interesting.  Lucian put a lot of thought into the lack of genders and the biology of the moonmen. I mean…

“Moonmen have artificial penises, generally of ivory but, in the case of the poor, of wood; these enable them to have intercourse when they mount their mates.

They never die of old age but dissolve and turn into air, like smoke.

The diet is the same for everyone: Frog. Every Time they light a fire they grill frogs on the coals because there’s a plentiful supply flying about.”

Put aside for a moment the artificial ivory dicks, they eat flying frogs and puff into smoke when they die. The weird world-building of the moonmen might be my favorite part of this whole experience. It is awkward info-dumping of weird elements piled on, but this was the 2 century, so I found it impressive. 

The explicit nature or books and movies kinda goes up and down, but my dude Lucian certainly was randy, and it is clear he thought the philosophers of the era would bonk anyone. 

“Their attitude on sex and making love is as follows. They have intercourse with both males and females, and in public with everyone looking on; this doesn’t strike them as anything to be the least bit ashamed of. Socrates is an exception. He swore up and down that his relations were of the purest…”

As for overall thoughts. It is funny a couple of folks who had read it on a facebook thread warned me not to read it. That the satire was too out of date, that I would be bored. I was not. I had a blast reading this. I thought if was fascinating, and if you read with idea of when it was written, well that is a fun experience waiting to happen.