First on the Moon

Lore & Background

The film follows a group of journalists around 2000 who uncover evidence that before World War II, in 1938, the USSR built a rocket and planned a crewed lunar mission. The story focuses on the selection and training of cosmonauts, particularly Captain Ivan Sergeyevich Kharlamov, who is launched to the Moon but loses contact. The space program then dissolves, possibly due to Stalin's purges. Kharlamov is implied to have returned to Earth, landing in Chile, then traveling through Polynesia and China to the Russian Far East, but he fears capture. He is later found on the Mongolian steppes after the Battles of Khalkhin Gol with a traumatic brain injury, undergoes psychiatric treatment, and disappears. His wife later remarries. The film ends with footage found at the landing site in Chile, showing Kharlamov piloting the vehicle and a lunar landscape.

Reader's Guide

First on the Moon is significant as a mockumentary that successfully mimicked the documentary mode, leading some Russian newspapers to initially treat it as a real event, referring to it as the Santiago Meteorite. The film won the Venice Horizons Best Film Award at the 2005 Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded as a documentary. Its production spanned three years, involved over a thousand people, and used real cosmonaut training equipment, including a centrifuge used by Yuri Gagarin. The film explores themes of Soviet state machinery creating and then discarding its heroes, as noted by the director. It received multiple awards at festivals including Cottbus, Flanders, Warsaw, Zagreb, and Kinotaur.

Did You Know?

• The film was made in both black and white and color.
• Actors worked without stunt doubles, including spinning in a centrifuge used by Yuri Gagarin.
• Some Russian newspapers initially treated the film as a documentary about a real 1938 event, calling it the Santiago Meteorite.
• The film won the Venice Horizons Best Film Award at the 2005 Venice Film Festival.

Defining the Genre

The question of what exactly constitutes science fiction has generated decades of debate among writers, critics, and readers alike. Asimov framed it as literature dealing with humanity's reaction to shifts in science and technology, while Heinlein emphasized realistic speculation grounded in solid knowledge of the real world. Del Rey acknowledged that even devoted fans struggle to articulate clear boundaries, noting that no fully satisfactory definition exists because the genre resists easy delineation. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Clute and Nicholls, devoted extensive discussion to this very problem. Knight's wry observation that science fiction is simply "what we point to when we say it" captures the circular nature of the debate. Some scholars, like David Seed, suggest it is more productive to think of the genre as an intersection of more concrete subgenres rather than trying to draw a single boundary line. The term "sci-fi" itself, popularized around 1954, eventually became associated by some with lower-quality pulp work, while others in the community preferred the abbreviation "SF" or "sf" as a mark of serious engagement with the field.

Ancient Roots and Early Predecessors

Scholars have traced the seeds of science fiction back to antiquity, when the boundary between myth and empirical reality was not yet firmly established. Lucian's A True Story, composed in the second century CE, already contained elements we now recognize as core to the genre: journeys to other worlds, encounters with extraterrestrial beings, interplanetary conflict, and the creation of artificial life. Some readers even claim it as the first science fiction novel. The tradition continued through the medieval and early modern periods, with works like The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Ibn al-Nafis's Theologus Autodidactus cited as containing speculative elements. The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment produced a cluster of texts now regarded as genuine science-fantasy: Bacon's New Atlantis, Kepler's Somnium, Kircher's Itinerarium extaticum, Cyrano de Bergerac's lunar and solar epics, Cavendish's The Blazing World, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Holberg's underground journey, and Voltaire's Micromégas. Asimov and Sagan singled out Kepler's 1634 Somnium as the first true science fiction story, depicting a voyage to the Moon and the observation of Earth's motion from that vantage point.

The Expanding Landscape of Subgenres

The elements that define science fiction have broadened considerably over the centuries. Early works centered on space exploration, alien life, time travel, and robotics. Later additions brought parallel universes, dystopian societies, and biological manipulation into the fold, while the most recent decades have seen information technology, transhumanism, posthumanism, and environmental challenges join the canon. This expansion has given rise to a rich taxonomy of subgenres. Hard science fiction prioritizes scientific accuracy and rigorous extrapolation, whereas soft science fiction turns its lens toward social sciences and human behavior. Space opera emphasizes pure adventure in settings where interstellar travel is routine, cyberpunk probes the friction between technology and society, and climate fiction confronts pressing environmental issues. The modern genre crystallized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when popular writers began drawing inspiration from rapid technological progress. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is frequently credited as the first true science fiction novel, while Jules Verne and H. G. Wells became pivotal architects of the field. The twentieth century's Golden Age further expanded the genre through pulp magazines, dystopian literature, and the space opera tradition.

Cultural Reach and Critical Function

Science fiction's influence extends far beyond the printed page, shaping film, television, and broader cultural conversation. The genre serves a dual purpose: it entertains and inspires a sense of wonder, while simultaneously offering a lens through which to critique present-day society and imagine alternative futures. By projecting scientific and technological advances into speculative scenarios, science fiction allows readers and viewers to examine human responses to change before those changes actually arrive. The DK publisher's The Literature Book describes the genre as dealing with scenarios that are technologically impossible at the time of writing, extrapolating from present-day science, or exploring speculative science-based conceits such as a society that has developed in wholly different ways from our own. This capacity for both escapism and social commentary has made science fiction a persistent force in popular culture. The genre's ability to question the present while speculating about the future ensures its continued relevance across literary, cinematic, and philosophical domains.