Moons and planets

A character from Fontenelle's 1686 Entretiens sur la plurarité de mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) observes that those who know the most about a planet are not its inhabitants, but their spectators; that is, an acute and fresh observation of Earth needs a perspective from elsewhere: the moon, the planets, another dimension of space-time. We cannot separate this reflection about "plural worlds" (Fontenelle), from the one about "possible worlds" (Suvin); both multiplicity and possibility are essential to the utopian genre. This chapter focuses on literary utopias-particularly before the twentieth century-with "outer-space" settings. These texts can interrogate, in extremis, the boundaries and presumptions of the genre itself. The chapter concludes with a reading of Jeanette Winterson's exemplary The Stone Gods.