Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels is a fascinating book. Many people are probably familiar with the first two parts of the book, where he travels to the miniature land of Lilliput and the giant land of Brobdingrag.

But there are two further sections to the book. The third part, deals with his travels on the floating island of Laputa while the fourth deals with his travels in the land of the Houyhnhnms (the intelligent horses).

Gulliver's Travels is more of a fantasy than a science fiction novel. For starters, the book does not take into account the results of scaling a body down or up. In real life, the people of Lilliput would lose too much body heat while those of Brobdingrag would break their legs at the first step they make. This happens because when you scale a body, the mass increase by the cube of the height while the surface area increases by only the square.

But if that effect of scaling is ignored, the other parts that are described are remarkably logical. Particularly neat are the parts where Gulliver has to resort to using a, shall we say, ready source of water from himself, to put out a fire in the palace in Lilliput, to his description of how ugly humans can look if we could see ourselves microscopically, as Gulliver did in Brobdingrag.

His description of how Laputa floats is nice (they use the Earth's magnetic field) as well as how a city defends itself against the floating when its inhabitants decided to rebel. His description of the Houyhnhnms is less ingenious (never really explaining how horses can erect structures using only their hooves) but the ending of the story, where he has to re-adjust to living with humans, is hilarious.

Of course, the book can be seen as a book on social and political commentary since Swift goes to some lengths to explain the social and political structure of the lands he travels to as well as putting in a few good criticisms and making some apparently hypocritical views of his own on the situation in European countries.

But as a science-fiction reader, I am more interested in seeing how Swift creates the lands that Gulliver travels to.

If you are interested, you can read an online edition of the book and find out for yourself how Gulliver's journeys.

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Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift