Los falsarios

What if the story of the Moon wasn't what we've been told? Long before Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of ​​Tranquility, imagination had already colonized it. Madmen, dreamers, visionaries, romantic poets, mystics, charlatans, and forgers. For centuries, a strange brotherhood of lunatics dedicated themselves to a prodigious undertaking: to gaze at the Moon, populate it with Selenites, imagine their civilizations, and erect cities on its surface built in the image of Paris, with its boulevards, its winged horses, its bourgeois crimes, and even a junkyard tower suspiciously similar to Eiffel's. And when reality wasn't enough, they invented it. On July 24, 1969, Lieutenant Thorndike—son of a watchmaker, obsessed with time, and passionate about the Moon—awaits the arrival of the Apollo 11 crew after their historic lunar mission. From that moment begins a narrative as erudite as it is delirious, in which some of the most unusual visionaries in history parade by: Jules Verne, the writer who imagined the journey to the Moon before anyone else; Abbé Marchena, a Spanish spy who claims to have reached it by balloon; the poet José de Espronceda, convinced that the spirit of his beloved Teresa Mancha inhabits its surface; or Émile-Marie Wolff, friend of Huysmans and author of a book that describes the Moon as an acidic and merciless copy of terrestrial society.