On our way we passed many countries and put in at the Morning Star, which was just being colonised. We landed there and procured water. Going aboard and making for the Zodiac, we passed the Sun to port, hugging the shore. We did not land, though many of my comrades wanted to; for the wind was unfavourable. But we saw that the country was green and fertile and well-watered, and full of untold good things.

Sailing the next night and day we reached Lamp-town toward evening, already being on our downward way. This city lies in the air midway between the Pleiades and the Hyades, though much lower than the Zodiac. On landing, we did not find any men at all, but a lot of lamps running about and loitering in the public square and at the harbour. Some of them were small and poor, so to speak: a few, being great and powerful, were very splendid and conspicuous. Each of them has his own house, or sconce, they have names like men, and we heard them talking. They offered us no harm, but invited us to be their guests. We were afraid, however, and none of us ventured to eat a mouthful or close an eye. They have a public building in the centre of the city, where their magistrate sits all night and calls each of them by name, and whoever does not answer is sentenced to death for deserting. They are executed by being put out. We were at court, saw what went on, and heard the lamps defend themselves and tell why they came late. There I recognised our own lamp: I spoke to him and enquired how things were at home, and he told me all about them.

. . . we regard the cosmos as very beautiful. Yet it is also very terrible. For ourselves, it is easy to look forward with equanimity to our end, and even to the end of our admired community; for what we prize most is the excellent beauty of the cosmos. But there are the myriads of spirits who have never entered into that vision. They have suffered, and they were not permitted that consolation. There are, first, the incalculable hosts of lowly creatures scattered over all the ages in all the minded worlds. Theirs was only a dream life, and their misery not often poignant; but none the less they are to be pitied for having missed the more poignant experience in which alone spirit can find fulfilment. Then there are the intelligent beings, human and otherwise; the many minded worlds throughout the galaxies, that have struggled into cognizance, striven for they knew not what, tasted brief delights and lived in the shadow of pain and death, until at last their life has been crushed out by careless fate. In our solar system there are the Martians, insanely and miserably obsessed; the native Venerians, imprisoned in their ocean and murdered for man’s sake; and all the hosts of the forerunning human species. A few individuals no doubt in every period, and many in certain favoured races, have lived on the whole happily. And a few have even known something of the supreme beatitude. But for most, until our modern epoch, thwarting has outweighed fulfilment; and if actual grief has not preponderated over joy, it is because, mercifully, the fulfilment that is wholly missed cannot be conceived.

Our position in the material universe is special and probably unique, and . . . it is such as to lend support to the view, held by many great thinkers and writers today, that the supreme end and purpose of this vast universe was the production and development of the living soul in the perishable body of a man.

‘Sir,’ I replied to him, ‘the majority of men, who only judge things by their senses, have allowed themselves to be persuaded by their eyes, and just as the man on board a ship which hugs the coastline believes that he is motionless and the shore is moving, so have men, revolving with the Earth about the sky, believed that it was the sky itself which revolved about them. Added to this there is the intolerable pride of human beings, who are convinced that nature was only made for them – as if it were likely that the Sun, a vast body four hundred and thirty-four times greater than the Earth, should only have been set ablaze in order to ripen their medlars and to make their cabbages grow heads!’

‘As for me, far from agreeing with their impudence, I believe that the planets are worlds surrounding the Sun and the fixed stars are also suns with planets surrounding them; that is to say, worlds which we cannot see from here, on account of their smallness, and because their light, being borrowed, cannot reach us. For how, in good faith, can one imagine these globes of such magnitude to be nothing but great desert countries, while ours, simply because we, a handful of vainglorious ruffians are crawling about on it, has been made to command all the others? What! Just because the Sun charts our days and years for us, does that mean to say it was only made to stop us banging our heads against the walls? No, no, if this visible god lights man’s way it is by accident, as the King’s torch accidentally gives light to the passing street-porter.’

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many – perhaps most – of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven – or hell. How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars. Men have been slow to face this prospect; some still hope that it may never become a reality. Increasing numbers, however, are asking: ‘Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?’ Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos . . . we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We are only seeking Man. We don’t know what to do with other worlds . . . We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.