About this Text
The Man in the Moone (1638) by Francis Godwin. This is an early science fiction book about a spaniard named Domingo Gonsales. Gonsales flees from spain to the East Indies. He spends much time on the island of St. Helena, and then on the moon in a fictional utopian society. When he returns to earth he lands in China (Godwin, 1638).
This text is often associated with science fiction studies and early space travel more than with the traditioinal travel narrarive genre. Scholars are fascinated with the more fantastical elements of the story and the association with Kepler, the greatest astronomer of the early modern period (Poole 2005; Poole 2016). Nevertheless, scholars have still connected Godwin's text to Defoe. Fancis goes so far as to say that The man in the moon "in part a desert-island story, [and thus] a predecessor of Robinson Crusoe" (Francis, 2021, 98). However, I am less concerned about plot element similarities than movement and location similarities.
The edition that was used in the mapping process of this project was from Project Gutenberg. Although this is by no means the authoritative edition of the novel, we needed a clean txt file in order to perform the computations.
