True History
Alethe Diegemata
A narrator who announces at the outset that everything he is about to say is a lie can still expose real truths about human credulity, by pushing the conventions of travelers' tall tales and historical exaggeration to such openly absurd extremes that no honest reader could mistake the account for fact.
- explicit fiction as satire of travelers' tall tales
- parody of Herodotus and the Odyssey
- an early ancestor of science fiction
- a trip to the moon and an interplanetary war
- meditation on the nature of narrative truth
True History opens with Lucian announcing that his entire narrative is an invented lie, a preemptive joke aimed above all at historians and travel writers like Ctesias of Cnidus and Iambulus, whose fantastic claims Lucian felt were presented with a straight face, and at poets, treating Odysseus's tall tales to the Phaeacians in the Odyssey as the model liar's story; Herodotus is not named among the preface's targets but turns up later, punished among the liars on the Isle of the Wicked. The narrative sends its narrator and crew on escalating impossible adventures, a storm blowing their ship to the moon, where they find a war between the kings of the Sun and Moon, and a stay inside the belly of a giant whale. Written by a Greek-speaking satirist from Roman Syria, the work is now regarded as an important ancestor of both science fiction and the self-consciously fictional novel.
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