Did Wells Read Kepler's "Somnium"?

 

It seems as if the answer must be: yes, because Wells uses a quotation from Kepler as the epigraph to War of the Worlds (1898), and incorporates references to the Somnium into The First Men in the Moon (1901). Bedford and Cavour are discussing the likelihood that the moon is hollow, as they travel there in their anti-gravity spacecraft.

“Of course! The moon must be enormously cavernous, with an atmosphere within, and at the centre of its caverns a sea.

“One knew that the moon had a lower specific gravity than the earth, one knew that it had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that it should be different in composition. The inference that it was hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact. Kepler, of course——”

His voice had the interest now of a man who has discovered a pretty sequence of reasoning.

“Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his sub-volvani was right after all.” [First Men in the Moon, 143]

The Subvolvani are one of two alien species mentioned in Kepler's Somnium (1634). So maybe Wells did read Kepler's strange little proto-science-fiction novel.

But how? Somnium was written in Latin, and not translated into English until the twentieth-century. It was little discussed in nineteenth-century: an obscurity, copies of the (posthumously published) 1634 edition very rare. David Lake is puzzled:

Since 1965 we can all read Kepler’s marvellous work in John Lear’s English translation; but I am puzzled to know how Wells read him. There was a German translation by Ludwig Gunther, Leipzig 1898; Wells may have read this, or the original Latin, or possibly some popularizing summary of the work. But he certainly had some contact with the Latin text, for he makes Cavor say “Kepler with his sub-volvani was right after all”. Subvolvani is Kepler’s invented Latin name for the inhabitants of Subvolva, the nearside hemisphere of the Moon; they are so called because they live under Volva, which they see revolving. Science fiction always delights in neologisms, even in Latin. [David Lake, ‘Mr Bedford’s Brush with God: Fantastic Tradition and Mysticism in The First Men in the Moon,’ The Wellsian (1990), 4-5]

I'm puzzled too. Wells had a little Latin, something he picked up under the tutelage of Horace Byatt, at Midhurst Grammar School in 1883: he took these lessons because Latin was considered needful for a dispensing chemist, and Wells at that time was apprenticed to Samuel Cowap in his Midhurst chemist's shop. But the education he received was rudimentary, and I do not believe Wells had the fluency or range in the language to be able to read Kepler's novel right through, even were he able to get hold of a copy of what was, at this point, a rare and expensive volume. Nor do I see him reading Ludwig Gunther's German version, a book not published in the UK, in a language Wells did not speak. So this must mean Wells encountered Kepler's dream-moon, with its hollow, inhabited body and subvolvan aliens, at second hand. Where, though? Despite Lake's speculation, there weren't any popularizing summaries of the work published in the nineteenth-century. There are references to the Somnium here and there, but nothing very detailed.

So, I don't think Wells knew Kepler's novel. Which is to say, my answer to the question posed in this blogpost's title is: no. Cavour's reference to Sub-volvans, with that hyphen, is a tell (Kepler doesn't hyphenate the name) as is the fact that he mentions only one of the two alien peoples in Somnium but not the other:

Though the fixed stars appear everywhere in Levania, just as they do to us, nonetheless there are such pronounced differences in the motion and the magnitudes of the visible planets that the inhabitants of that world have an entirely original system of astronomy. So, just as Earthly geographers divide the world's globe into five zones depending on their astral phenomena so Levania is divided into two hemispheres: Subvolva and Privolva. The Subvolvans are eternally blessed by the light from Volva—which is to say, from our Earth—which assumes the role of a Moon to them. But the Privolvans are forever deprived the Earth. The circle dividing these hemispheres, which is called the divisor, is not unlike the Earthly meridian passing as it does through the solstices and the poles. [Kepler, Somnium]

Why no Privolvani in First Men in the Moon? Wells knew of Kepler's work, that it posited a moon inhabited by alien beings, but he did not actually know the work itself.

One source for his knowledge of Kepler is certainly Richard Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. I mentioned that the epigraph to War of the Worlds is a quotation from Kepler, but Wells is clear that he's not quoting Somnium directly:

“But who shall dwell in these Worlds if they be inhabited?
... Are we or they Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?”
Kepler (quoted in “The Anatomy of Melancholy”).

So Wells clearly read, or at least browsed in (the best way to read it) Burton 1621 miscellany. Here's the passage that supplied Wells' epigraph:

Kepler will by no means admit of Brunus's infinite worlds, or that the fixed stars should be so many suns, with their compassing planets, yet the said Kepler between jest and earnest in his perspectives, lunar geography, et somnio suo, dissertat. cum nunc. sider. [ie. the Somnium] seems in part to agree with this, and partly to contradict; for the planets, he yields them to be inhabited, he doubts of the stars; and so doth Tycho in his astronomical epistles, out of a consideration of their vastity and greatness, break out into some such like speeches, that he will never believe those great and huge bodies were made to no other use than this that we perceive, to illuminate the earth, a point insensible in respect of the whole. But who shall dwell in these vast bodies, earths, worlds, “if they be inhabited? rational creatures?” as Kepler demands, “or have they souls to be saved? or do they inhabit a better part of the world than we do? Are we or they lords of the world? And how are all things made for man?” [Anatomy of Melancholy, II. 2.3]

You can see how Wells slightly alters the original for his purposes. But Burton doesn't mention Subvolvans, or Privolvans; he talks of Kepler's ‘Saturnine and Jovial inhabitants’, the saturnine presumably being the (sad) Privolvans, deprived of Earth overhead, and the Jovial the Subvolvans.

I think the source for Wells's reference in The First Men in the Moon is Thomas Gwyn Elger. I think Wells read Elgers The Moon: A full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features (1895) in preparation for writing his moon-set fantasia. Indeed, we know that Wells did read this book, because he quotes from it in an article he published in 1895: ‘The Visibility of Change in the Moon’ Knowledge 18 (Oct 1895), 230-31. [The article is about the possibility of volcanoes on the moon, and Wells addresses the fact that nobody has observed any such eruption by saying that such activity might very well go on unobserved: ‘As Mr. Elger has pointed out, objects as large as Monte Nuovo or Jorullo might come into existence in many regions without anyone being the wiser, and a catastrophe as extensive as the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii might still escape detection.’ This is from Elger's The Moon, p.37: ‘might not objects as large as Monte Nuovo or Jorullo come into existence in many regions without any one being the wiser? It would certainly have needed a persistent lunar astronomer, and one furnished with a very perfect telescope, to have noted the changes that have occurred within the old crater-ring of Somma or among the Santorin group during the past thirty years, or even to have detected the effects resulting from the great catastrophe in A.D. 79, at Vesuvius; yet these objects are no larger than many which, if they were situated on our satellite, would be termed comparatively small, if not insignificant.’]

One of the things Elger discusses are lunar rills:

The significance of the word rille in German, a groove or furrow, describes with considerable accuracy the usual appearance of the objects to which it is applied, consisting as they do of long narrow channels, with sides more or less steep, and sometimes vertical. They often extend for hundreds of miles in approximately straight lines over portions of the moon's surface, frequently traversing in their course ridges, craters, and even more formidable obstacles, without any apparent check or interruption, though their ends are sometimes marked by a mound or crater. Their length ranges from ten or twelve to three hundred miles or more (as in the great Sirsalis rill), their breadth, which is very variable within certain limits, from less than half a mile to more than two, and their depth (which must necessarily remain to a great extent problematical) from 100 to 400 yards.

What are these rills? Elger doesn't know:

Of the actual nature of the lunar rills we are, it must be confessed, supremely ignorant. With some of the early observers it was a very favourite notion that they are artificial works, constructed presumably by Kepler's sub-volvani, or by other intelligences. There is perhaps some excuse to be made for the freaks of an exuberant fancy in regard to objects which, if we ignore for a moment their enormous dimensions, judged by a terrestrial standard, certainly have, in their apparent absence of any physical relation to neighbouring objects, all the appearance of being works of art rather than of nature. The keen-sighted and very imaginative Gruithuisen believed that in some instances they represent roads cut through interminable forests, and in others the dried-up beds of once mighty rivers. [Elger, The Moon (1895), 22]

Here is sub-volvani, with the egregious hyphen, in a context in which it is clear that the word is the name for an alien species dwelling in Kepler's moon. It tells us nothing more, doesn't mention Kepler's privolvans, but it's enough for Wells to be able to drop the word into his novel.

This gives us another pointer to the novel. Where do Bedford and Cavour land, when they land on the moon? This is what we are told:

For a flash Cavor opened a window moonward, and we saw that we were dropping towards a huge central crater with a number of minor craters grouped in a sort of cross about it. And then again Cavor flung our little sphere open to the scorching, blinding sun. I think he was using the sun’s attraction as a brake ... There came a jar, and then we were rolling over and over.

The Moon contains Elger's own lunar map, in four sections, with a diameter of 18 inches: ‘It is much less complex than the maps of Neison, Schmidt, Mädler, and Lohrmann, and for that reason, one of the most usable lunar maps ever produced. Printed with the maria in green, and with easily legible type, it is still an ideal reference map (Ashworth).’ I picture Wells poring over this map looking for a place to land his adventurers. He chooses an Eastward location because he wants to describe the lunar sunrise immediately after they land. Copernicus catches his eye:

So that's where they come down: a large crater with a rough cross of smaller craters around it. Also, who is this little chap, with his surprised expression and large right hand, emerging nervously from behind the ink blot?

Looks like one of Wells's picshuas.

Proximus Caesar

 

Proximus Caesar is the big villain of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), the fourth instalment of the Planet of the Apes reboot franchise. He is the tyrannical king of the Coastal Ape Colony, a rogue clan of apes that claim to follow the ways and teachings of the late Caesar—the Moses-figure, who in the first trilogy led the apes to their promised land, played by Andy Serkis in a mo-cap suit. The new movie is set many generations after Caesar's death, and Proximus is claiming to inherit Caesar's mantle. Hence his name, which the movie clearly thinks means ‘the next Caesar’, Caesar's successor, next-in-line.

It doesn't, though. Proximus means next in a purely spatial sense: nearest-to, alongside, adjoining. But the name, or title, invented for this character isn't supposed to mean that this new Caesar occupies a physical propinquity to the long-dead original Caesar. It is clearly intended to point to a temporal succession. Heir to Caesar. Caesar's rightful successor. What the film wanted was Successor Caesar, or perhaps Hereditarius Caesar. But the scriptwriter presumably typed ‘next Caesar’ into Google Translate or equivalent and copied-down proximus from the list of options. This is indicative of a larger problem with online resources like Google Translate, of course; although one might think that a budget of $160 million dollars for the making of a movie might mean there was a modest fee available to pay someone to check the script's Latin.