Crazy imaginary journies.......

Gratuitous use of a great image. Perhaps the greatest visionary of techno-anthropormorphic human flight was Cyrano de Bergaerac. Before he was the object of Edmund Rostand’s 1897 play, de Bergerac was a massively creative author, producing, among other things, the book Histoire des Etats et Empires de la Lune (History of the States and Empires of the Moon, published posthumously in 1657), followed by Histoire des Etats et Empires du Soleil (History of the States and Empires of the Sun). In a very complicated series of adventures the protagonists are brought to the moon and to the other side of the sun and such by being flown in a basket attached to the neck of a giant bird. (In one part of the escapade, Cyrano takes us to the moon, which is a paradise, where the adventurer is captured and imprisoned by the intelligent indigenous folks, and from which he escapes by clinging to a soul being removed by the devil).