Lucian's True History: Satire as Early Fantasy

22 May 2026·9 min read

Lucian of Samosata was a Greek-Syrian satirist writing in the 2nd century CE. Around 150 CE he wrote A True Story, or alethes historia in Greek, a travel narrative explicitly designed to parody the breathless tall tales that passed for historical writing in his era. The joke in the title is that everything in the book is plainly invented. And yet, because Lucian wrote with a straight face about moon-voyages, giant whales, and battles between the inhabitants of celestial bodies, the book reads to modern eyes like early fantasy. This piece, from the team at Tyrian Games, is about why Lucian matters for modern worldbuilding and how HAWKER uses his voice.

TL;DR

Lucian of Samosata wrote A True Story around 150 CE.
The text is satirical travelogue but structurally resembles modern science fiction fantasy.
Lucian is an ancestor of Kepler's Somnium and most Western speculative fiction.
HAWKER draws on Lucian's satirical-fantastic approach for the in-world texture of Ysward's stories.
The works are fully public domain, which makes them ideal source material for indie developers.

What's in A True Story

The plot, briefly. Lucian and a party of adventurers sail west past the Pillars of Hercules. A storm takes them into the air. They land on the Moon, which is at war with the Sun over the colonisation of Venus. They fight in the lunar army. They sail back down to Earth, get swallowed by a whale, and live inside it for months. They eventually escape and find the Island of the Blessed, where famous dead poets live. They witness the wedding of Odysseus and Helen. And so on.

The text is about 70 pages in modern translation. Every paragraph contains something that would be recognisable material for a modern indie fantasy game. The moon-war has rules and factions. The whale's interior has an ecology. The Island of the Blessed is a careful catalogue of cultural fantasies. Lucian was not setting out to invent a literary genre. He was making a joke about other writers. But the joke turned out to be a genre.

Why it matters

Four reasons Lucian is worth knowing for modern game developers and writers.

He established a vocabulary for "clearly invented but internally consistent." Unlike the breathless historians Lucian was parodying, who wrote as if their moon voyages were real, Lucian wrote with deliberate absurdity. But he maintained internal consistency. The moon-war had rules. The whale's interior had its own ecology. This is the grammar that fantasy writing later adopted: plainly invented settings, rigorous internal logic.

He's the ancestor of Kepler's Somnium. Kepler read Lucian. Somnium's moon voyage is a direct descendant of Lucian's. When renaissance writers wanted to write speculative fiction, they looked back to Lucian as the canonical model. Without Lucian, the entire western sci-fi tradition would have had to invent itself later.

His satire translates. A lot of ancient literature feels distant because its concerns are alien. Lucian's concerns, which are lies pretending to be truth, credulous readers, and fantasies dressed as history, are immediately familiar. Modern readers can laugh at most of Lucian's jokes without footnotes, and the internet-age experience of misinformation makes Lucian feel more contemporary rather than less.

He modelled straight-faced absurdity. The tone Lucian hit, which is invented fantasy delivered with academic composure, is a specific writerly skill that most modern fantasy either doesn't attempt or overplays. Lucian's ability to describe a battle on the Moon with the same sober sentence structure used for Thucydides' history is the thing indie writers can learn from him. It's a tone that games often want and rarely execute.

Why it shaped HAWKER

Three specific influences in our game.

The in-world books in Ysward. Duval and other NPCs occasionally reference absurd travelogues that may or may not be true. We wrote these in the Lucian voice: straight-faced implausibility with internal consistency. The Hawker can collect fragments of these books as lore items, and the fragments describe things like a trader who spent a year inside an Austican beast or a town that exists only between midnight and dawn. All of these are legitimate within Hawker's lore, but their tone is unmistakably Lucian.

The satirical register of certain character voices. One of our scholar NPCs occasionally dismisses human superstition with the same sideways irony Lucian uses to dismiss human credulity. This is a Lucian-derived voice we use deliberately, though most players won't recognise the source. The line "yes, and I once met a man who claimed his shop sold honest prices" is the kind of dry observation Lucian would have written in the second century.

The moon-voyage as worldbuilding license. Our supernatural race, the laustic, come from elsewhere. We use Lucian's "they came from the Moon and the war goes on" structure as a working framework. The laustic's origin culture has politics, factions, a history. Nothing about the structure is Lucian's exact invention, but the licence to describe an off-world culture with the same detailed earnestness as an on-world one is one he granted the tradition.

Other ancient proto-sci-fi

Lucian isn't alone. Ancient precursors to fantasy and science fiction include Plato's Timaeus from around 360 BCE, which gave us the Atlantis myth. Homer's Odyssey from the 8th century BCE is a proto-fantasy travel epic. The Panchatantra from around 300 BCE is the Indian animal fable tradition. The Epic of Gilgamesh from around 2100 BCE is the oldest speculative-narrative fragment we have. Of these, Lucian is the most directly ancestral to modern Western speculative fiction, but a full picture of the tradition draws on all of them.

A first-hand Hawker example

One of the Lucian-influenced design decisions we're happiest with in Hawker is a set of short in-world books the player can find in scavenging runs. Each is about a page of text. Each purports to be a travelogue or a natural history. All of them are nonsense.

The most memorable during playtesting was a book titled "Of the Fish That Swallowed the Duchy," which describes a giant fish that once rolled through Ysward swallowing villages before being killed by a hero whose identity changes depending on which fragment you find. Playtesters found the book delightful because it treated the fish as real, described the fish's stomach ecology in academic detail, and offered competing theories about which hero did the killing. The whole thing is a Lucian riff. Lucian's whales, Lucian's factional histories, Lucian's straight-faced cataloguing of nonsense.

We wrote about a dozen of these books across development. They don't affect the main narrative. They add texture. And the players who find them tend to ask where the voice came from, which gives us an excuse to credit Lucian in the answer. The lesson, for anyone writing an indie game with a lot of lore to manage, is that the voice of your in-world texts matters as much as the content. Lucian's voice is free to borrow, and it does a kind of tonal work that modern fantasy voice rarely manages.

FAQ

When was A True Story written?

Around 150 CE, by Lucian of Samosata, a Greek-Syrian satirist who worked across the eastern Roman Empire.

Is A True Story the first science fiction novel?

Contested. Most scholars say no because Lucian didn't intend his work as science fiction. He intended it as satire. But structurally it reads like early speculative fiction, and it shaped the tradition that eventually produced Kepler, Cyrano, and Voltaire.

Is Lucian in the public domain?

Yes. Original Greek texts are public domain. Most English translations are also out of copyright. Project Gutenberg has several editions freely available.

What games draw on Lucian?

Few explicitly. HAWKER in September 2026 borrows Lucian's satirical-fantastic voice for in-world books. Most games that draw on ancient satire do so unconsciously, inheriting Lucian's tone through later descendants like Swift or Voltaire.

What should I read after A True Story?

Kepler's Somnium from 1608 for the direct descendant. Cyrano de Bergerac's The Other World from 1657. Voltaire's Micromegas from 1752. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels from 1726 is also in the satirical-fantastic tradition and is much more widely read than any of the earlier texts.

Translations worth knowing

If you decide to read Lucian, the translation matters. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler's four-volume 1905 edition for Oxford Clarendon Press is the classical scholar's standard. Keith Sidwell's 2005 Chattering Courtesans collection includes a readable True Story alongside other Lucian works. A.M. Harmon's Loeb Classical Library edition is the best facing-page Greek-English for students. Each version has a slightly different voice, and True Story in particular benefits from a lively translator. Sidwell is the most modern-sounding. Harmon is the most scholarly. Fowler is the most dated but freely available online. Pick based on taste.

Extended genre notes

Worth naming a few observations about the broader indie gaming landscape this category sits in across 2026. The indie market has grown significantly since 2020, with Steam alone now publishing thousands of titles per year. Discovery is the category's biggest challenge, not production. Most players find new games through a combination of algorithmic recommendation, word of mouth, and curated lists like this one.

The 2026 commercial story for the category favours studios that ship with clear positioning rather than studios that ship as genre-default entries. A game that knows who it's for tends to find its audience even at small scale. A game that hopes to be liked by everyone often ends up being recommended by no-one. HAWKER's positioning (grimdark shopkeeper roguelite, Breton folklore, thirty-day clock) is deliberately narrow because narrow positioning travels better than broad positioning in 2026's crowded indie market.

The audience for this category tends to cross generational lines. Players who grew up on 1990s PC games, players who came in through the 2010s indie boom, and players new to indies through 2020s word-of-mouth are all represented. The category isn't age-coded the way some indie genres are, which means studios can build for breadth rather than specific cohorts.

Practical buying advice

If you're using this list to build a reading-and-playing library, a few practical suggestions. Most of the games mentioned go on Steam sale at least twice a year, often at 50 percent or more off. Adding them to your wishlist and waiting for the next sale is usually the most cost-efficient approach. Many of the older entries are cheap year-round. The newer ones often go on sale first during Steam's summer or winter sales. HAWKER's Early Access price is below the planned full-release price, which is standard indie practice.

If you play on handheld (Steam Deck, Switch 2, ROG Ally) most of the games above run well on these platforms. The category tends to be performance-friendly because the production values prioritise tone over graphical fidelity. This is worth knowing because category fans often play across multiple platforms.

Spoiler wall

Everything above keeps Hawker at the level of worldbuilding and voice. The in-world books, the laustic origin structure, and the scholarly dialogue register are all part of our public framing. Specific late-game book contents sit behind this wall.

Closing

Lucian wrote a satirical travelogue two thousand years ago that reads like a modern fantasy novel. The sources are public domain. The voice is immediate. For a game looking for a specific tonal vocabulary of straight-faced implausibility and internally consistent absurdity, Lucian is a treasure most developers haven't read.

Wishlist HAWKER on Steam.

Next read: Breton folklore in modern games, or Kepler's Somnium.