Les utopies extraterrestres et les changements du paradigme cosmologique
Extraterrestrial Utopias and Cosmological Representations

Summary/Abstract: Classical utopias often paired with the literary genre of extraordinary and marvelous voyages. With the progress of geographical explorations, as the “blank spaces” on the map were gradually filled in, utopian writers began to seek complementary, new, unknown places, where they could situate their ideal cities and kingdoms. The cosmological discoveries of the Renaissance and the first representations of the universe offered extraterrestrial space as a possible location for utopian or dystopian fictions. In the works of Francis Godwin and Johannes Kepler, the Moon became an inhabited world, while Cyrano de Bergerac imagined kingdoms of the Moon and the Sun, Voltaire envisaged Sirius, etc. From the 19th century onwards, with the rise of the science-fiction genre, various authors ranging from Camille Flammarion to Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin found in other solar systems the landscape for utopian or dystopian parables of our world.

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