Renaissance Sci-Fi in Games: From Somnium to Outer Wilds

Between roughly 1600 and 1700, a small number of European writers wrote speculative fictions about space. Kepler's Somnium in 1608, published in 1634. Cyrano de Bergerac's The Other World in 1657. Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World in 1666. These books weren't science fiction in the modern sense. They were philosophical essays with a fantastical wrapper. But the wrapper matters. The moon voyages, the imagined alien societies, the speculative physics were new.

This mode survived into modern games, though most players don't know the source. This piece, from the team at Tyrian Games, is a short essay on how, and on how HAWKER uses renaissance sci-fi texture in its in-world books.

TL;DR

The renaissance produced a distinctive mode of speculative fiction: fantastical space travel framed inside a scientific or philosophical argument.
This mode shapes games like Outer Wilds, Heaven's Vault, and a number of 2020s space-exploration titles.
HAWKER uses renaissance sci-fi texture in the in-world books the Hawker can collect during scavenging.
Key source texts include Kepler's Somnium, Cyrano de Bergerac's The Other World, and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, all public domain.
Lucian's True History from around 150 CE is the ancient ancestor of the entire tradition.

What's in renaissance sci-fi

Four recognisable features of the mode.

A traveller from Earth to another world. Almost always the moon. Occasionally further. The traveller is usually an educated narrator rather than a hero, which matters because the traveller is a camera more than an agent.

The traveller meets non-Earthling beings. Usually humanoid, occasionally bizarre. The beings are usually more rational than humans, which is the author's way of pointing at what humans lack.

The alien society mirrors or inverts the author's society. Cavendish's Blazing World is a utopia structured to critique 17th-century England. Cyrano's moon is a satirical inversion of French nobility. The speculation is argumentation in a costume.

The physics or cosmology are presented seriously. Kepler's Somnium includes mathematics. Cyrano speculates on the mechanics of flight. The seriousness is the difference between renaissance sci-fi and pure fantasy, and it's what links the tradition to modern hard sci-fi.

Which modern games inherit it

Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019). The clearest heir. A small solar system, a traveller who learns its physics through observation, a narrative layered as cosmic philosophy. Mobius haven't cited Somnium directly as an influence, but the mode is unmistakable.

Heaven's Vault (Inkle, 2019). Space-traveller archaeology with a lost-civilisation frame. Inkle's storytelling has renaissance-sci-fi texture, particularly in the way the protagonist's scholarship is the game's primary action.

No Man's Sky (Hello Games, 2016 onwards). Fits in the "traveller meets alien worlds" tradition, less in the philosophical frame. But the sheer number of alien worlds described serves a similar purpose to the single-world descriptions in Kepler or Cavendish: to make strangeness legible by dwelling on it.

Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over The Age, 2022). Science-fiction narrative with heavy philosophical content, not moon-voyage specifically but adjacent. The Eye is a Cavendish-style critique in a cyberpunk shell.

The Outer Worlds (Obsidian, 2019). Colonial sci-fi more than renaissance sci-fi, but shares the mode of social critique through fictional society. The corporation-colonies are the modern equivalent of Cavendish's moon.

Everspace 2 (Rockfish Games, 2023). Space combat with an exploration layer that occasionally hits the renaissance-sci-fi note in the quieter moments between combat encounters.

Why this matters for game design

Four reasons to care about the source of this tonal register.

The philosophical frame legitimises strangeness. When a game is willing to be genuinely strange, having a clear intellectual tradition behind the strangeness helps it land. Renaissance sci-fi is the tradition, and it gives modern developers a pedigree to point at when critics ask why the game is so weird.

The source material is public domain. Kepler, Cyrano, and Cavendish are all out of copyright. Games that want to quote, reference, or draw direct inspiration face no legal barrier, and the texts are short enough to read in a weekend.

The mode handles "one small traveller, one big strange place" beautifully. This is the exact shape most indie exploration games want to hit. Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight (in a different mode), and a hundred smaller indies are all structurally about a small figure in a large, slightly alien world. Renaissance sci-fi was solving this problem four hundred years ago.

The tone has genuine emotional texture. Renaissance sci-fi isn't cold. Kepler's Somnium has real warmth for its Icelandic astronomer. Cavendish's Blazing World has genuine affection for its Empress protagonist. The mode's capacity for quiet warmth in strange settings is part of why it still works for modern games.

What Hawker uses from renaissance sci-fi

Hawker isn't a space game. But the in-world books in Ysward, the ones Duval and other NPCs reference, use the voice of renaissance scholar-fantasy: straight-faced imaginary cosmologies, plausible-sounding natural philosophy, a certain kind of early-modern humour. The Hawker can collect fragments of these books as lore items during scavenging.

This is a deliberate influence. Kepler, Cyrano, and especially Lucian's earlier precursor (see our Lucian piece) give us a tonal register that's neither modern nor medieval, but specifically early-modern, and that suits Ysward's quasi-Belle Epoque setting. The laustic, our supernatural race, are described within the in-world books in exactly the tone Cavendish used for her Empress's subjects: strange, sympathetic, arrived from elsewhere, worthy of careful description.

A first-hand Hawker example

One of the clearest renaissance-sci-fi moments in Hawker is a small in-world book called "Natural Philosophy of the Blightstorm." It's a document written in-fiction by a scholar who tried to explain the blightstorms using late-Renaissance natural philosophy. The book is divided into propositions, each with a proposed mechanism, and each is wrong in different ways.

We wrote this book in 2024 as an experiment. We wanted to see whether players would engage with lore presented in a deliberately archaic voice. The answer was yes, enthusiastically. The book's propositions are legible because they're structured like early modern argument. The voice is memorable because it's specific. And the wrongness of the mechanisms is often funny, because a scholar earnestly explaining blightstorms as a "disturbance in the caloric spirit of the region" is the kind of specific detail that rewards close reading.

Kepler's footnotes in Somnium taught us that a text can carry voice through its structural choices, not just through its prose. The Blightstorm book is a Somnium-shape in miniature, and players who find all the fragments get a complete picture of a scholarly tradition that the game's NPCs treat with a mixture of respect and embarrassment. That layered attitude, respect-plus-embarrassment toward old science, is itself renaissance sci-fi. We owe Kepler the tonal register.

FAQ

What's the earliest science-fiction novel?

Contested. Most scholars point to either Lucian's True History (around 150 CE) for structural similarity, or Kepler's Somnium (1608 / 1634) for the first work framed inside a scientific worldview.

Is Outer Wilds renaissance-sci-fi inspired?

The developers haven't named Somnium as a direct influence. But the mode, which includes a traveller, observation, and a cosmic frame, is recognisable.

What games directly reference Kepler?

Very few, explicitly. The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind has a "Kepler" star-observer character. Most modern space games inherit the mode without knowing the source.

Can I use renaissance sources in my own game?

Yes. All pre-1800 texts are public domain. Project Gutenberg has most of them in translation.

Why is renaissance sci-fi still relevant?

Because the problems it addressed (how to describe strangeness, how to critique society through fiction, how to make the unknown legible) are still the problems speculative fiction has to solve. The tradition's answers are still useful.

The women of renaissance sci-fi

Worth pulling out the Cavendish thread specifically. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published The Blazing World in 1666 as a companion to her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. She's arguably the first female science fiction author in English, predating Mary Shelley by 152 years, and her work has been under-appreciated for most of the intervening centuries. Recent academic work has restored her reputation, and the Penguin Classics and Oxford editions of The Blazing World are both in print. For game designers thinking about renaissance sci-fi, Cavendish's combination of natural philosophy and fantastical narrative is one of the most directly game-adaptable texts in the canon. Her utopian-Empress protagonist is a character-shape modern RPGs don't often use.

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 tone. The in-world books, the laustic origin structure, and the scholarly voice in the codex are all part of our public framing. Specific late-game book contents sit behind this wall.

Closing

Renaissance sci-fi is a small tradition with big echoes. Outer Wilds is its 21st-century flag. HAWKER borrows its voice for in-world texture. If you haven't read Kepler's Somnium, it's free and short.

Save HAWKER to your wishlist.

Next read: Kepler's Somnium, or Lucian's True History.