Just read: The States and Empires of the Moon, by Cyrano de Bergerac
Occasionally people dispute whether it's proper SF - the mechanism by which he gets to the moon is a bit silly, and the only reason for placing it on the moon is so that the talking heads have a suitaly weird setting for their wild ideas, and nobody needs to be prosecuted for heresy.
But that ignores the fact that the weird ideas are, themselves, the very stuff of SF. Given that it was written on the cusp of the scientific revolution, a few decades before Newton, the questions it asks are cutting edge: what is matter, how does perception work, what is the soul; does society make sense, could we change the way the familiy works, what if attitudes to sex and death were different?
Ok, so a lot of his answers were completely loopy, but every so often he's pretty close to what we now recognise as conventional science. Reading between the lines, it's a great insight into the 17th century understanding of the world.
It feels in many ways like something by Robert Heinlein or Greg Egan.
Unfortunately, as with so much modern SF, the aforementioned talking heads have a tendency to spout long lectures, with only the barest of rebuttal. And it's taken to eleven - any semblence of plot barely gets a look-in between all the Socratic dialogues.
So it's not the most entertaining of novels, but a good source of inspiration for your next cod-Baroque Cycle magnum opus.
