cpound
One is that Basile's use of language is just visibly more complex than Perrault--Mother Goose--who presented similar stories in simpler forms only decades later: e.g. Cinderella ("The Cinderella Cat"), The Fairies ("The Two Little Pizzas"), Puss in Boots ("Cagliuso"), and Sleeping Beauty ("Sun, Moon, and Talia"). In other words, if you compare the two, you find that some fairy tales really were written for children back then too, just not by Basile.
The other reason is maybe to warn that Basile's unexpurgated stories, e.g. in Nancy Canepa's translation, may be a surprise to 21st C. adults who've only read Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, etc., because they are not only dark or whatever--they are Rabelaisian, scatological, etc., offering some fun 17th C. cultural surprises even for adults. I don't know enough about 17th. C. Naples to have an opinion on whether Basile would have been OK with using the same language around young children--like, maybe or maybe not. I'd just note Perrault didn't, d'Aulnoy didn't, L'Héritier didn't, and so on only like 60 years later.
https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/october-2021/ins...
- The narrator asserts his agreement with Copernicus that the Earth rotates on its axis
- The narrator discovers that the force of gravity is less on the Moon than on the Earth, allowing him to leap around and also allowing creatures there to grow very large
- The narrator reasons that gravity is "a secret Property of the Globe of the Earth, or rather something within it, as the Load-stone draweth Iron" (an insight probably inspired by the work of William Gilbert)
- Although science in the modern sense was still being invented, making this "proto" science fiction, the narrator becomes probably the first character to assert his speculative fiction isn't magic ("finding in all my Discourse nothing tending to Magick")
- So when the narrator is given a stone made of "Ebelus" and finds that he can control gravity depending on which way the stone is oriented, that's probably the first appearance of a non-magical anti-gravity technology in fiction
- It's also probably the first proto SF to borrow from linguistics, because the narrator finds that people on the Moon speak using a language based on music and he makes an explicit analogy toward the end with tonal languages such as Mandarin
My feeling is it's also a much more readable piece than de Bergerac's later story, which is inspired by Godwin but adds to it a bunch of dry old 'natural philosophy.'
Anyway, it's available online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Strange_Voyage_and_Advent...
[0]: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/
I also liked barry charman's robot love story, "Upgrades": https://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/robots-and-c...
And Shae Davidson's "10 Reasons Aliens Just Can't Get Enough of This Small West Virginia Town": https://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/aliens/shae-...
"The Negation of the Negation of the Negation" ( http://www.bigecho.org/the-negation-of-the-negation-of-the-n... ).
https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/a-journey-round-m...