The Moon and the Sun

Lore & Background

Marie-Josèphe, with the help of Count Lucien de Chretien—a dwarf atheist and the king's trusted advisor—plots to free Sherzad. Their initial attempt fails, but Yves, after recognizing Sherzad's sentience, aids them. In the end, Marie-Josèphe and Lucien are exiled, but Sherzad showers them with sunken treasures. The novel was adapted into a film titled The King’s Daughter, released in 2022 after multiple production delays.

Reader's Guide

The Moon and the Sun is significant for blending alternate history with romance and for its Nebula Award win over a major fantasy work. It explores themes of colonialism, science versus religion, and the ethics of exploiting sentient beings. The novel's influence extends to its film adaptation, which underwent a long development process involving multiple studios and directors. Its legacy includes recognition on several award lists, including the James Tiptree Jr. Award short-list and a Seiun Award nomination.

Did You Know?

• The novel won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1998 (for works published in 1997), beating A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin.
• The film adaptation was first planned in 1999 and was eventually released in 2022 as The King’s Daughter.
• The sea creature Sherzad has two tails, tangled hair, and a gargoyle face, and communicates through music.

The Inhabited Sun: A Long Tradition of Solar Life

From the second century CE onward, writers imagined the Sun as a place teeming with life. Lucian of Samosata's A True Story, often cited as the earliest depiction of space travel, placed the Sun's residents in conflict with those of the Moon. This habit of populating the Sun with inhabitants persisted through Athanasius Kircher's 1656 Itinerarium exstaticum, where angelic beings replaced conventional life, and Cyrano de Bergerac's 1662 Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun. The underlying assumption was the plurality of worlds: that celestial bodies should resemble Earth and therefore support life. French authors in the 1700s continued this tradition—Chevalier de Béthune gave solar beings dominion over Mercury's people, while Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert crafted a solar society marked by gender equality. The belief lingered into the 1800s through works like George Fowler's 1813 novel and Joel R. Peabody's 1838 A World of Wonders. Even after spectroscopic measurements confirmed the Sun's surface temperature in the early 1900s, juvenile fiction such as John Mastin's 1909 Through the Sun in an Airship still imagined visitors arriving by airship. It was only as the impossibility of conventional life became undeniable that authors turned to stranger, more exotic solar organisms.

The Dying Star: Dimming, Extinction, and Catastrophe

Before the 1920s revealed nuclear fusion as the Sun's true energy source, most writers assumed it burned like a fire and would eventually exhaust its fuel. This anxiety shaped an entire genre of disaster narratives. Physicist Lord Kelvin's 1862 estimate—based on gravitational contraction rather than combustion—that the Sun would fade within a few million years fed directly into the plots of Camille Flammarion and H. G. Wells. Even after the fusion mechanism was confirmed, the image of a dimming or extinguished Sun remained a staple of catastrophe stories, sometimes paired with desperate attempts to reignite it. A second destructive mechanism, the Sun going nova, appeared with regularity, and solar flares offered yet another avenue for planetary havoc. In the rare science fiction films that centered on the Sun, it almost never played any role beyond being a source of destruction. The Sun's lethality extended to spacecraft: several stories feature vessels that must approach the star by necessity or by design, facing the danger that proximity brings. This pattern of the Sun as an existential threat to Earth and to human technology has made it one of the most persistent, if one-dimensional, antagonists in speculative fiction.

Power, Propulsion, and the Sun's Dual Nature

Beyond its destructive potential, the Sun has served fiction as a wellspring of energy and capability. Solar power in its practical form—harnessing sunlight for technology—appears alongside more fantastical applications, including characters who wield superpowers derived from the star. The solar wind, that stream of charged particles flowing outward from the Sun, has been tapped by spacecraft equipped with solar sails, providing propulsion without conventional fuel. Yet the same star that powers these vessels also endangers them; several narratives place ships in close proximity to the Sun, either by mission requirement or deliberate choice, and the resulting peril is a recurring tension. The Sun's influence also extends to the human body and society: solar eclipses have featured in a large number of stories, and sunspots, with their roughly eleven-year cycle of increasing and decreasing frequency, appear in a smaller but notable set of works. In rarer cases, the Sun is portrayed as a sentient entity, though this treatment is far less common than the personification of other stars. The duality of the Sun as both life-sustaining power source and lethal force gives it a narrative flexibility that other celestial bodies lack.

Eclipses and the Untapped Potential of the Sun

Among the Sun's most narratively versatile features is the eclipse. In the earliest stories, solar eclipses served as a trick: a character who understood the mathematics of prediction would feign the ability to cause the event, intimidating those who could not. This device was likely inspired by the historical account of Christopher Columbus using a lunar eclipse in 1504 to command respect among local populations. By the 1930s or 1940s, audiences had grown tired of the ruse, and eclipses largely disappeared from fiction. They staged a comeback near the end of the twentieth century, this time as ominous harbingers of social upheaval rather than simple parlor tricks. Beyond eclipses, the Sun's broader narrative footprint remains surprisingly thin. Science fiction bibliographer Richard Bleiler observed that the Sun's fictive potential has barely been tapped, perhaps because it is so universally taken for granted. Compared to the rich literary traditions surrounding Mars and Venus, the Sun occupies a modest niche—appearing as a setting, a threat, a power source, or occasionally a conscious being, but rarely as the sustained, complex focus it might warrant.