[11] Photius states though in his Bibliotheca that its main object was Antonius Diogenes' The Incredible Wonders Beyond Thule,[10] a genre blending of fantastic voyage and Greek romance which popularized Pythagorean teachings.
Exotic travel writing appeared in the form of wonder books in the medieval West in the 13th century, fantastic tales of imaginary voyages presented as real autobiographical accounts.
Denis Vairasse' The history of the Sevarambi (1675) and Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre australe connue (1676), which describe voyages to utopian civilisations in Australia, both received popular translations into English.
A 1750 article in the London-based periodical The Monthly Review commented that "voyage accounts are generally looked upon as truth [as they have] a much stronger claim to the reader's attention, than the most striking incidents in a novel or romance.
First literary space flights after Lucian were: Juan Maldonado's Somnium (1541), Johann Kepler's Somnium (1634), Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), John Wilkins' The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), Athanasius Kircher's Itinerarium extaticum (1656), David Russen's Iter lunare (1703), Diego de Torres Villarroel's Viaje fantástico (1723), Eberhard Christian Kindermann [de]'s Die geschwinde Reise auf dem Luftschiff nach der obern Welt (1744) – the first flight to planets, Robert Paltock's The life and adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), Voltaire's Micromégas (1752).
For example, in Daniel Defoe’s The Consolidator (1705), the flying machine serves as a metaphor for parliament, while in Captain Samuel Brunt's A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727) the narrator searches for gold on the moon in an extended reference to the contemporary South Sea Bubble financial crash.
Twentieth century inheritors include L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) and Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).