HAWKER

Kepler's Somnium: The 1608 Sci-Fi Novel Hiding in Modern Games

·8 min read

Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who worked out the laws of planetary motion, also wrote what most historians call the first real science-fiction novel. Somnium, published posthumously in 1634 but drafted from around 1608, tells the story of a young astronomer named Duracotus who travels to the Moon by spirit-borne journey and describes what the Moon looks like from the inside. The novel was decades ahead of its formal publication because Kepler spent years circling it, rewriting it, defending his mother against witchcraft charges partly caused by it, and annotating it with 223 scholarly footnotes that together are longer than the book itself. This piece, from the team at Tyrian Games, is the story of Somnium and why it keeps turning up in modern indie game worldbuilding.

TL;DR

  • Johannes Kepler wrote Somnium starting around 1608 and it was published posthumously in 1634.
  • Somnium is widely regarded as the first true science-fiction novel, using a dream-frame to tell a story of travel to the Moon with actual astronomical principles.
  • The novel's DNA shows up in HAWKER's worldbuilding and in the broader renaissance sci-fi aesthetic of 2020s indie games.
  • Other key renaissance sci-fi texts include Lucian's True History, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone, and Cyrano de Bergerac's The Other World.
  • All of these texts are public domain and free for developers to draw from directly.

What is Somnium?

Somnium, Latin for "The Dream," is about 75 pages in modern paperback editions depending on which footnotes are included. The plot, briefly.

A young Icelandic astronomer named Duracotus is taken by his mother, a witch called Fiolxhilde, to meet a daimon who can transport mortals to the Moon. The daimon takes Duracotus there. Duracotus describes the Moon, its two hemispheres (one eternally facing Earth, one facing away), its extreme temperatures, its inhabitants who live in the cooler twilight zones, and its view of Earth as the Moon's "moon."

The point of the novel isn't the trip. The point is the description. Kepler used the dream-frame to rigorously work out what the Moon would actually be like if Copernicus was right about heliocentrism. How long would a lunar day last? Fourteen Earth days. What would Earth look like from the Moon? Large, rotating, phased. What would the inhabitants be like if they existed? Adapted to extreme temperatures and long nights.

This is why Somnium counts as science fiction rather than fantasy. Kepler was using narrative as a thought experiment. The daimon is just a way to get the astronomer to where the real work happens.

Why it matters for games

Four ways Somnium shows up in modern indie worldbuilding.

The "visit elsewhere and describe what it is actually like" structure. Most fantasy settings don't work this way. Tolkien's Middle-earth, for example, is internally consistent but not grounded in physics. Somnium established the alternative: imagined worlds worked out with scientific rigour. This is the ancestor of hard sci-fi and of science-fiction-flavoured fantasy. Outer Wilds is perhaps the purest modern video game descendant.

The dream-frame as narrative device. Kepler used the dream-frame partly as narrative convenience, partly as political cover, because travelling to the Moon by daimon was less heretical in 1608 than travelling by physical means. Games like The Longest Journey, Alan Wake, and Night in the Woods use similar dream or dream-adjacent structures to let protagonists access spaces that would otherwise require scientific implausibility.

The daimon as narrative convenience. Kepler's daimon is a scholarly daimon, clearly not an evil spirit but a kind of supernatural travel agent. Games that need to move characters between realities often borrow this device. The daimon has become an archetype in the same quiet way Ankou has. HAWKER's Ankou is a distant cousin of Kepler's daimon, though we borrow more directly from Breton folklore than from Kepler.

The annotated-novel format. Kepler's 223 footnotes treat the narrative as a thought experiment and provide real astronomical notes on what the narrative implies. This footnoted-novel style has been quietly copied by modern indie games that frame their world-lore as annotated codices rather than cutscenes. Tunic's in-game manual is one of the more direct modern descendants.

Why Somnium shaped Hawker

Four specific places Somnium influenced our worldbuilding.

The laustic as visitors from elsewhere who describe what Ysward looks like from their perspective. This is the Somnium shape exactly. Our supernatural race arrives from a place called Austica, observes Ysward, and describes it. The scientific-minded nature of Ankou's subplot in the back half of the game is downstream of Somnium's "what would home look like from here" structure.

The renaissance sci-fi aesthetic. Our Steam page describes HAWKER as inspired by renaissance sci-fi and Breton folklore. The renaissance sci-fi half of that is Somnium and its descendants: Lucian's True History (earlier, comedic), Cyrano de Bergerac's The Other World (later, satirical), Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (contemporary to Kepler). The aesthetic is real scientific thought, narrative cover, and strange worlds described with unexpected rigour.

The 223 footnotes as a model for in-game codex. Kepler's annotations are the most distinctive thing about Somnium. This footnoted-novel style shapes HAWKER's in-game tablet codex. We treat the lore as annotated rather than narrated, with the player character occasionally marginalia-ing his own experiences in the codex directly, in a way that makes the lore feel like a tool the Hawker is using rather than a cutscene imposed on him.

The witch-mother figure. Kepler's Fiolxhilde is a strange, scholarly witch whose role in the narrative is procedural rather than antagonistic. This shape shows up in Hawker's relationship with several NPCs who have knowledge the Hawker needs and are willing to share it at a price. We didn't set out to copy Fiolxhilde. We noticed the pattern in our own writing during a late 2024 pass on the script and kept it.

Other renaissance sci-fi worth knowing

If Somnium interests you, four adjacent texts extend the genre.

Lucian, True History (circa 2nd century CE). The ancient ancestor. A satirical journey to the Moon and beyond that predates Kepler by over 1,400 years. Lucian was joking. Kepler wasn't. Both are recognisable science fiction. See our Lucian piece for more.

Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone (1638). Written contemporaneously with Somnium's publication. A Spaniard travels to the Moon by harnessing migratory birds. Less rigorous than Kepler but broader appeal, and its influence on later sci-fi is surprisingly strong for how obscure the book now is.

Cyrano de Bergerac, The Other World (1657). Travel to the Moon and Sun by various imaginative means. Satirical, ambitious, influential on later sci-fi. Cyrano would be more famous if his Moon voyage weren't overshadowed by the swashbuckling play written about him centuries later.

Voltaire, Micromegas (1752). A visitor from Saturn observes humanity. Satire-heavy, science-fiction-shaped. Voltaire is technically Enlightenment rather than renaissance, but the lineage runs through.

A first-hand Hawker example

The clearest Somnium influence on a specific Hawker design decision came in mid-2024 when we were writing the first real laustic-perspective scene. A laustic character had to describe Ysward to the Hawker, from the laustic's own point of view as a visitor from elsewhere. Our first draft had the laustic describe the world the way a resident would: "here is the Gwiravon, here is the Keep, here is the problem." It felt flat. The scene didn't do anything the UI hadn't already done.

We pulled out Somnium and reread the passages where Duracotus describes Earth from the Moon. Kepler's trick is that he describes Earth with the surprise of someone seeing it for the first time. Earth is large. Earth rotates. Earth has phases when seen from outside. A resident of Earth wouldn't write this. A visitor would.

We rewrote the laustic scene in that shape. The laustic describes Ysward with a naturalist's surprise. The sun here is small. The light behaves oddly. The ground remembers things. That phrasing is Somnium's, not ours. But the scene landed in playtest in a way the earlier draft hadn't, because the laustic suddenly felt like a traveller rather than an exposition machine. We credit Kepler for the shape of a scene none of us knew we needed until we read him.

FAQ

Is Somnium really the first sci-fi novel?

Contested. Lucian's True History (circa 150 CE) is much older and has a valid claim. But Somnium is the first novel to use scientific thought as the core of the narrative rather than satire or comedy. By that standard, it's the first science fiction rather than proto-science fiction.

Is Somnium difficult to read?

The narrative is short and accessible. The footnotes are dense and scientific. A reader interested in the narrative can skim the notes; a reader interested in Kepler's astronomy will spend time in them. Edward Rosen's 1967 English translation is the standard modern edition.

Why was Kepler's mother charged with witchcraft?

Somnium's narrator has a witch-mother who summons a daimon. When Kepler was drafting the novel, his own mother was accused of witchcraft in her village in Württemberg. The real case took years to resolve. Scholars have long noted that Somnium contributed to the charges, and the novel was published only after Kepler's death partly to avoid renewed legal trouble.

What games use Somnium's influence directly?

HAWKER in September 2026 draws on Somnium for its laustic worldbuilding. Outer Wilds has a similar scientific-rigour-as-narrative structure. Tunic's in-game manual is an annotated-novel descendant. Beyond those, the influence is diffuse but visible across the renaissance-sci-fi-flavoured indie space.

Is Kepler's Somnium in the public domain?

Yes. Both the original Latin text and the early modern translations are public domain. Rosen's 1967 English translation is under its own copyright but is widely available through academic libraries and used booksellers.

Spoiler wall

Everything above keeps Hawker at the level of worldbuilding and tone. The laustic as visitors, the Austica homeworld, and the codex format are all part of our public framing. Specific characters past the demo boundary, including the identity of specific laustic figures met after the train to Keridann, sit behind this wall.

Closing

Kepler wrote a science-fiction novel by accident, partly because he was working out lunar astronomy and needed a narrative frame, partly because he wanted to be creative in a century that didn't yet have a genre for the creative scientist. Somnium is short, strange, and still shaping how games think about alien worlds four hundred years later.

Wishlist HAWKER's September 2026 launch.

Next read: Breton folklore in modern games, or Lucian's True History.

External citations

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