In the late 1620s, nearly two centuries before Mary Shelley helped establish the genre of science fiction with her landmark novel Frankenstein (1818), an English bishop named Francis Godwin wrote a speculative tale about beings living on another world. Titled The Man in the Moone (1638), Godwin’s story is significant not only as a work of proto-sci-fi, but also because it contains perhaps the earliest mention of an extraterrestrial language. ‘The difficulty of that language is not to be conceived,’ the narrator complains when initially sojourning in the utopian society of the Lunars, ‘because it consists not so much of words and letters, as of tunes and uncouth sounds, that no letters can express.’ Rather than imagining a language like those he was familiar with, Godwin dreamed of something deeply perplexing: a musical tongue sung-spoken by Moon-dwellers. ‘This is a great mystery,’ the narrator reflects, and worth ‘searching after’.

And then, in the 19th century, the boundaries between storytelling and science began to blur. Originally conceived in fiction, the idea of extraterrestrial language and the quest to understand it were adopted by scientists. The first serious proposal for communicating with aliens came in 1820, as a wave of industrialisation swept through Europe…

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