A group of adventurers sail from Greece to the Atlantic Ocean and get shot up to the moon by a giant water spout. When they arrive, they quickly get caught up in the war between the moon and the Sun over the colonization of Venus.

This {{Satire}} is not the first ScienceFiction in Human history (as it was written in response to an earlier, now lost, space-travel novel) but if it is Scifi it is one of the oldest examples, dating to the 2nd century CE.

The book can be found online: [[http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/wl2/wl211.htm here]] or [[http://lucianofsamosata.info/TheTrueHistory.html here]].
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!! ''True History'' provides examples of:

* SeventhEpisodeTwist: The explorers go to the moon.
* AliensSpeakingEnglish: All the strange and far-off peoples the Greek adventurers meet speak Greek -- even the people of the moon.
* AllPlanetsAreEarthLike: The Moon, albeit filled with all sorts of wacky monsters, is otherwise earth-like, but it gets even more weird when it turns out there is also civilization (and people, and trees) on the Sun.
* AncientGreece: Or, more accurately, hellenic Greece.
* BasedOnAGreatBigLie: Parodied. Despite the story being obviously an outrageous {{tall tale}}, the narrator and the title itself contend that it is "entirely true".
** Except at one point, when the author inserts a SuspiciouslySpecificDenial to the effect that he has never ever ''ever'' seen or heard or been told about ''any'' events even ''remotely'' like the ones depicted in this book, and warns the reader (a little too strenuously) not to believe a single word of it.
* BizarreAlienBiology: Moon people. Among various things, they store fetuses in their calves and can remove and replace their own genitals (which are made of gold for the nobles and wood for the poors) at will.
* BoldlyComing: Some of the narrator's traveling companions have sex with tree-women on a remote island, and end up stuck to them.
* HorseOfADifferentColor: The king of the Moon rides on a vulture-horse.
* ItRunsOnNonsensoleum: The point of this book.
* LevelAte: The sailors visit an island with rivers of wine, and an island made entirely out of cheese in a sea of milk. The cheese island is a pun on the Phoenician city of Tyre ("Tyros" in Greek), which is the same as the Greek word for cheese.
* MisterSeahorse: The lunar people are all men, so this trope naturally appears. The sons grow inside the calves of the men.
* MixAndMatchCritters: The vulture-horses of the moon.
* OneGenderRace: The lunar people.
* StandardHeroReward: Possibly parodied and turned upside-down: Our heroes help the Moon People in their war against the Sun People and are defeated. Nevertheless, the Moon King still rewards the main character with goods and give him his son as a spouse.
* TakeThat: Against Creator/{{Herodotus}} and generally the Greek authorities.
* TallTale: The book is a big TropeMaker for the literary tall tale and had a huge influence on later works in that genre.
* ToBeContinued: The ending. It seems that Lucian never actually wrote a continuation (and probably never intended to).
* UrExample: For ScienceFiction and, possibly, the literary TallTale.
* WombLevel: The belly of the whale.

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