Abstract
Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Kircher’s Iter exstaticum (1656), and Cyrano’s Voyage dans la Lune (1657) use elements of dream and fiction as literary strategies for imparting new cosmological knowledge. This essay argues that it is above all the heuristic potential inherent in metaphorical and analogical operations that fuels the recourse to fiction in Kepler, Cyrano, and Kircher. By utilizing fiction and metaphor as a heuristic faculty of the human imagination, Kepler’s Somnium establishes the epistemological counterpart to the Copernican revolution.
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