The Moon has been the subject of many works of art and literature and the inspiration for numerous others. The Moon in fiction is a motif in the visual arts, the performing arts, poetry, prose, and music. Works are included in this list if they are fictional and prominently feature the Moon.

Before the telescope was invented (–1608) Lucian's and True History, written in the 2nd century AD, deal with imaginary voyages to the Moon such as on a fountain after going past the Pillars of Hercules. The theme did not become popular until the 17th century.

"The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter", a 10th-century Japanese folktale, tells of a mysterious Moon Princess growing up on Earth as the adopted daughter of a bamboo cutter and his wife, dazzling human Princes and the Emperor himself with her beauty, and finally returning to the Moon. It is among the first texts of any culture assuming the Moon to be an inhabited world and describing travel between it and the Earth. One of the earliest fictional flights to the Moon took place on the pages of Ludovico Ariosto's Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso (1516). The protagonist Orlando, having been thwarted in love, goes mad with despair and rampages through Europe and Africa, destroying everything in his path. The English knight Astolfo, seeking to find a cure for Orlando's madness, flies up to the Moon in Elijah's flaming chariot. In this depiction, the Moon is where everything lost on Earth is to be found, including Orlando's wits, and Astolfo brings them back in a bottle and makes Orlando sniff them, restoring his sanity. A fairy tale titled "The Buried Moon" features the Moon walking on Earth in an anthropomorphic form. After getting stuck in a bog, it is imprisoned by evil creatures. The Moon is then rescued by humans with the aid of an old wise woman.

From the first telescope to Apollo 11 (1608–1969)

The invention of the telescope hastened the popular acceptance of the concept of "a world in the Moon", that the Moon was an inhabitable planet which might be reached via some sort of aerial carriage.

Fantasy

Literature

Pan Twardowski, a sorcerer who made a deal with the Devil in Polish folklore and literature, is depicted as having escaped from the Devil who was taking him to Hell and ending up living on the Moon, his only companion being a spider; from time to time Twardowski lets the spider descend to Earth on a thread and bring him news from the world below. "The Man in the Moon" is a nursery rhyme first recorded in Joseph Ritson's collection Gammer Gurton's Garland (1784). In a few lines it relates the man in the Moon's adventures after he "came down too soon" or "came tumbling down". "The Galoshes of Fortune" (1838) by Hans Christian Andersen. A watchman unknowingly fits on a pair of magic galoshes that can grant people's wishes. As he wishes he could visit the Moon the shoes send him flying there. There he meets several Moon men who all wonder whether Earth is inhabited and decide this must be impossible. Back on Earth the lifeless body of the watchman is found and he is brought to a hospital, where they take his shoes off, breaking the spell again. He awakens and declares it to have been the most terrible night he had ever experienced. The Marvellous and Incredible Adventures of Charles Thunderbolt, in the Moon (1851) by Charles Rumball, features a steam-powered spaceship which allows the protagonist to travel to the Moon and Jupiter. The Princess of the Moon: A Confederate Fairy Story (1869) by "A Lady of Warrenton, Va" (Cora Semmes Ives) has the "Fairy of the Moon" descend to Earth to save a Confederate soldier from his grief after the U.S. Civil War. She gifts him with a Pegasus steed that can fly him anywhere. After surveying the South and the Union, he flies to the Moon, meets the king of the Moon and his people, falls in love with the princess, and helps their kingdom fight off an invasion of Union soldiers arriving in balloons. Johnny Gruelle's 1922 children's book, The Magical Land of Noom, relates the adventures of two Earth children among the inhabitants of the far side of the Moon. Roverandom by J. R. R. Tolkien was written in 1925 to console his son Michael, then four years old, for the loss of a beloved toy dog. In the story, the dog has flown to the Moon and had a whole series of amusing adventures there. The story was only published posthumously. In addition, Isil and the guidesman Tilion in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth cosmology are based in Tolkien's familiarity with Norse and Gaelic myths of the Moon.

"The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" (1923) is J. R. R. Tolkien's imagined original song behind the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle The Cat and the Fiddle ... the cow jumped over the moon", invented by back formation. In Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928), Doctor Dolittle travels to the Moon on the back of a giant moth and encounters intelligent plants whose language he learns (as he never did with earthly plants). He also meets the Moon's single human inhabitant, a prehistoric man who has grown into a giant due to lunar foods and conditions. The literary basis of the 1962 Polish fantasy film The Two Who Stole the Moon was a story of the same title, written by Kornel Makuszyński in 1928. Goodnight Moon (1947) by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd. The Distance of the Moon, the first and probably the best-known story in the Cosmicomics collection of short stories by Italian author Italo Calvino. Calvino takes the fact that the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth and builds a story about a love triangle among people who used to jump between the Earth and the Moon, in which lovers drift apart as the Moon recedes.

Theater

Il mondo della luna (1777) , an 1899 operetta by Paul Lincke, depicts a fantastic Moon which the protagonist, amateur inventor Steppke, comes to visit.

Film

Melody Time (1948). In the segment "Pecos Bill", Pecos Bill's fiancée Slue Foot Sue gets thrown to the Moon by Pecos' horse Widowmaker, from which she is unable to return. Bill is so depressed by the loss of his love that he howls at the Moon, and coyotes join in out of sympathy. This is a tall tale of why coyotes howl at the Moon. The Two Who Stole the Moon (1962) has twin brothers capture the Moon in a fishing net as the Moon sets down.

Science fiction

Literature

Early stories

17th century

Vejamen de la Luna (A Satirical Tract on the Moon) by Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera (written in 1626 and published posthumously in 1634). The writer falls asleep and is transported to Selenopolis, the Imperial Court of the Moon. This lunar city is a disguised Madrid, where poets are satirized as lunatics. The work, although apparently following the traditional Ptolemaic vision of the cosmos, responds to the new cosmology as presented by Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler. The Dream (Somnium) (1634) by Johannes Kepler (written before 1610, but not published during Kepler's life). An Icelandic voyager is transported to the Moon by aerial demons; an occasion for Kepler to offer some of his astronomical theories in the guise of fiction. The Man in the Moone (1638) by Francis Godwin. A Spaniard flies to the Moon using a contraption pulled by geese. The lunar journey is according to the scholar Sarah Hutton a key element of "the utopian aspect of the narrative, as the vital link between earthly and lunar societies". The Discovery of a World in the Moone, or a discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable there may be another habitable world in that planet. (1638) by John Wilkins. Voyage dans la Lune (1657) by Cyrano de Bergerac, inspired by Godwin. Cyrano is launched toward the Moon by fireworks.

18th century

The Consolidator (1705) by Daniel Defoe. Travels between China and the Moon on an engine called The Consolidator (a satire on the Parliament of England). A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727) by Samuel Brunt Acajou et Zirphile (1744) by Charles Pinot Duclos. In this satirical fairy tale, the prince Acajou travels to the Moon to retrieve the severed head of the princess Zirphile and restore it to her body. Syzygies and Lunar Quadratures Aligned to the Meridian of Mérida of the Yucatán by an Anctitone or Inhabitant of the Moon (1775), by Franciscan friar Manuel Antonio de Rivas Newest Voyage (1784) by Vasily Levshin. A protagonist flies in a self-constructed winged apparatus. The improbable adventures of Baron Munchausen (1786) included two voyages to the Moon, and a description of its flora and fauna. A Voyage to the Moon (1793) by Aratus (the penname of an anonymous British author, not the original Greek scientist)

19th century

The Conquest by the Moon (1809) by Washington Irving. An invasion story meant as an allegory about treatment of Native Americans by European settlers in America. Land of Acephals (1824) by Wilhelm Küchelbecker. Flight in a balloon. A Voyage to the Moon (1827) by George Tucker. "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835) by Edgar Allan Poe features a repairer of bellows in Rotterdam who creates a giant balloon and an 'air compressor' to allow him to travel to the Moon.

In the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, a newspaper reporter concocted a series of stories purporting to describe the discovery of life on the Moon, talking of such creatures as winged humanoids and goats.

20th century

The Hopkins Manuscript (1939) is a social-political dystopian novel written by R. C. Sherriff. It describes how the nations of the world, bent on destroying each other, band together to meet a common disaster—the imminent threat of the Moon itself landing on Earth.

First voyage

The first flight to the Moon was a popular topic of science fiction before the actual landing in 1969.

From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1870) by Jules Verne, in which a projectile is launched from Florida and lands in the Pacific Ocean, not unlike in the Apollo program lunar orbit rendezvous. In Les Exilés de la Terre (Exiled from Earth, 1887), by Paschal Grousset (writing as André Laurie), a Sudanese mountain composed of pure iron ore is converted into a huge electro-magnet and catapulted to the Moon where the protagonists have various adventures. The First Men in the Moon (1901) by H. G. Wells in which a spaceship gets to the Moon with the aid of Cavorite; a material which shields out gravity. It is inhabited by insect-like Selenites who are ruled by a Grand Lunar, and who prevent Cavor from returning to Earth after learning of humanity's warlike nature. Na srebrnym globie [The Silver Globe] (1903), by Polish writer Jerzy Żuławski in which a first expedition from Earth gives birth to a lunar society. The story was continued in Zwycięzca [The Conqueror] (1910) and Stara Ziemia [The Old Earth] (1911). This so-called Lunar Trilogy was the first modern Polish SF story. It was adapted to the screen as On the Silver Globe by Andrzej Żuławski. "Trends" is a 1939 short story by Isaac Asimov in which religious fanatics oppose a fictional first flight to the Moon in the 1970s. Prelude to Space is a 1951 novel by Arthur C. Clarke recounting the events leading up to a fictional first flight to the Moon in 1978. Leonard Wibberley's 1962 novel The Mouse on the Moon and 1963 film is about the British, American's and Russian's wanting to get to the moon first, although the characters get worried thinking the moon will be to soft to land on.

Colonization

Human settlements on the Moon are found in many science fiction novels, short stories and films. Not all have the Moon colony itself as central to the plot.

Menace from the Moon (1925), by English writer Bohun Lynch. A lunar colony, founded in 1654 by a Dutchman, an Englishman, an Italian, and "their women", threatens Earth with heat-ray doom unless it helps them escape their dying world.