This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

A young girl makes her fractured family whole again with the help of a very special book When eleven-year-old Ella's mother has to be hospitalized to undergo a dangerous cancer treatment, Ella spends the summer at "Broken Family Camp" with her eccentric grandmother, whom she's never met. The situation is hardly ideal for either of them. Ella is scared her mother may die, but her grandmother seems to care more about her library full of books than she does about her very own granddaughter. But when a rare and beloved book, Kepler's Dream of the Moon, is stolen from her grandmother's amazing library, Ella and her new friend Rosie make up their minds to find it. Finding the beautiful book her grandmother loves so much could even be the key to healing Ella's broken family. An affecting and beautifully written story of family, forgiveness and the wonder of the stars, Kepler's Dream is a sparkling and memorable debut.

Somnium is a Latin word for Dream. This novel was written by Johannes Kepler in 1608, in a time when a trip to the ethereal regions of the moon would be possible only with the assistance of supernatural forces. Historians consider this lunar exploration a remarkable and revolutionary text, and one of the most provocative and innovative of Kepler's works. Great authors/scientists such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan suggested it as the first science fiction story. If it is not, we can at least consider it as the first serious scientific work about lunar astronomy.

This book tells the story of the early modern astronomer Johannes Kepler’s Somnium, which has been regarded by science historians and literary critics alike as the first true example of science fiction. Kepler began writing his complex and heavily-footnoted tale of a fictional Icelandic astronomer as an undergraduate and added to it throughout his life. The Somnium fuses supernatural and scientific models of the cosmos through a satirical defense of Copernicanism that features witches, lunar inhabitants, and a daemon who speaks in the empirical language of modern science. Swinford’s looks at the ways that Kepler’s Somnium is influenced by the cosmic dream, a literary genre that enjoyed considerable popularity among medieval authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante, John of Salisbury, Macrobius, and Alan of Lille. He examines the generic conventions of the cosmic dream, also studying the poetic and theological sensibilities underlying the categories of dreams formulated by Macrobius and Artemidorus that were widely used to interpret specific symbols in dreams and to assess their overall reliability. Swinford develops a key claim about the form of the Somnium as it relates to early science: Kepler relies on a genre that is closely connected to a Ptolemaic, or earth-centered, model of the cosmos as a way of explaining and justifying a model of the cosmos that does not posit the same connections between the individual and the divine that are so important for the Ptolemaic model. In effect, Kepler uses the cosmic dream to describe a universe that cannot lay claim to the same correspondences between an individual’s dream and the order of the cosmos understood within the rules of the genre itself. To that end, Kepler’s Somnium is the first example of science fiction, but the last example of Neoplatonic allegory.

Both a scientific treatise on lunar astronomy and a science-fiction story about a voyage to the moon, Kepler's Somnium went unrecognized for centuries. This edition presents a full translation from the original Latin.

With an introduction by Albert Einstein: The collected letters of the Renaissance astronomer who discovered the laws of planetary motion. Astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler made major contributions to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. While his achievements are well-documented elsewhere, this volume of his personal correspondence offers a rare window into the life of a man who pursued knowledge through a dangerous and turbulent period of history. Spanning more than thirty years, from 1596 to the end of his life, Kepler’s letters reveal the internal conflicts of a devout Protestant who nevertheless opposed many pronouncements of the Church, an eminent man of science who was also swayed by astrology, and a contemporary of Galileo who served three succeeding Holy Roman Emperors.