To narrate an imaginary voyage, therefore, on lines laid down in the past, you must take to yourself to begin with either a political and social theory or a general spirit of ridicule, either an instructive or a corrective temper.
If you take a political and social theory to establish you must show it in operation in a realm where there is perfect and ideal wisdom, where the obstacles in the world do not hold, as they do not in the Happy Valley, Utopia, and the New Atlantis.
Suggestion on how to write a satiric imaginary voyage
If you undertake to ridicule present mistaken tendencies and follies, your task will be a little harder. First you must work out your argument somewhat in detail before you begin your voyage, since you will need to fit adventures, objects, people, and speeches, either by way of exaggeration or oppositeness, to their modern counterparts. Next, you should have definitely in mind a few prominent leaders in the movement or a few promoters of the policy you mean to laugh at. You may take the portrait and characteristics of these men as basis, and exaggerate and modify to suit your purpose. Just as a good cartoonist must know anatomy and the rules of correct drawing, so a caricaturist and satirist must know real people. It will happen probably that readers not in the secret of your originals will fail to recognize them surely, as people now fail to recognize de Bergerac's and Swift's; yet your story can not but be the livelier and better for your concrete thinking. And as we now read the "Journey to the Moon" and "Gulliver's Travels" for the amusing adventures, so your audience will enjoy your story for the same reason and no other. But you can hardly create amusing adventures without something to create them of, and the lives of real people are to be the stuff. This suggestion is merely the embodiment of the psychological fact that all the chimeras that man ever thought of are but modifications of real images. Then it will be well also to remember the convenience of allegory and to use it upon occasion. In fact, many imaginary voyages are but rough-and-ready allegories. Yet you must be careful not to over-do the allegory; for in the fourth place, you should strive for minute versimilitude. The nearer like the details of a real journey your small incidents are, the better your readers will be pleased with your large incidents. It is the little surprises of familiarity among strangeness that create the emotion of pleasure.
Last of all, and first of all, and altogether requisite is this virtue: To be a good narrator of imaginary voyages, you must be, like Defoe, the "best of liars." Nothing is too stupendous to tell if you only know how to tell it.
Mellonta Tauta
On Board Balloon "Skylark,"
April 1, 2848.
Now, my dear friend—now, for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent, and as unsatisfactory as possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some one or two hundred of the canaille, all bound on a pleasure excursion (what a funny idea some people have of pleasure!), and I have no prospect of touching terra firma for a month at least. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do. When one has nothing to do, then is the time to correspond with one's friends. You perceive then, why it is that I write you this letter—it is on account of my ennui and your sins.
Get ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be annoyed. I mean to write at you every day during this odious voyage.