Francois-Marie Arouet, son of Francois Arouet and Marie Marguerite d'Aumart, was born in Paris, France on 21 Nov 1694. Known by his nom de plume Voltaire, Arouet was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression and separation of church and state. He was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form including plays, poems, novels, essays and historical and scientific works.
Voltaire was exiled to Tulle in 1715 for mocking the regent Orleans. Two years later, in 1717, he returned to Paris, only to be arrested and exiled to the Bastille for a year on charges of writing libelous poetry. He was sent to the Bastille again in 1726 for arguing with the Chevalier de Rohan and was detained there for two weeks before being shipped off to England where he remained for three years. In 1733, the publication of his Letters on the English Nation angered the French church and government, forcing him to flee to Lorraine. In 1778, He remained there for the next 15 years with his mistress, Emile De Breteuil, at the Chateau de Direy, visiting Paris occasionally as of 1735, when he was granted re-entry. By 1778, the French public had begun to regard him as a literary genius, and he returned to Paris a hero. He died there on 30 May 1778.
In 1752 he wrote "Micromegas," perhaps the first piece of science fiction. The tale recounts the visit to Earth of a being from a planet circling the star Sirius, and of his companion from the planet Saturn. The story is organized into seven brief chapters.
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| Micromegas Captures a Ship |
His first stop is Saturn, where he befriends the secretary of the Academy of Saturn, a man less than a third of his size (standing only 6,000 feet tall). They discuss the differences between their planets. The Saturnian has 72 senses; the Sirian has 1,000. The Saturnian lives for 15,000 Earth years; the Sirian lives for 10.5 million years. At the end of their conversation, they decide to take a philosophical journey together.
Eventually, they arrive on Earth and circumnavigate it in 36 hours, with the Saturnian only getting his lower legs wet in the deepest ocean and the Sirian barely wetting his ankles. They decide that the planet must be devoid of life, since it is too small for them to see with the naked eye. In the Baltic Sea, the Saturnian happened to spot a tiny speck swimming about, and he picks it up to discover that it is a whale. As they examine it, a boatful of philosophers returning from an Arctic voyage happens to run aground nearby.
The travellers examine the boat and, upon discovering the lifeforms inside it, they conclude that the tiny beings are too small to be of any intelligence or spirit. Yet they gradually realize the beings are speaking to each other, and they devise a hearing tube with the clippings of their fingernails in order to hear the tiny voices. After listening for a while, they learn the human language and begin a conversation, wherein they are shocked to discover the breadth of the human intellect.
The final chapter sees the humans testing the philosophies of Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz and Locke against the travellers' wisdom. When the travellers hear the theory of Aquinas that the world was made uniquely for mankind, they fall into an enormous fit of laughter. Taking pity on the humans, the Sirian decides to write them a book that will explain the point of everything to them. When the volume is presented to the Academy of Science in Paris, the secretary opens the book only to find blank pages.
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