ABSTRACT
Star, or Psi Cassiopeia: The Marvelous History of One of the Worlds of Outer Space, subtitled "Fantasia" by its author Charlemagne Ischir Defontenay, occupies a significant place in the literary history of early science fiction (SF). The narrator in the documents explains that his information comes from the found manuscripts, and he then takes the reader on a mind-journey to the Psi Cassiopeia system, describing the mother-planet, inhabited satellites, nature, races, peoples, and customs. Three times, his description is replaced by a text "translated from the Starian". Defontenay's position in the continuum of science fiction history is a key to understanding the second dimension, the one concerning world-building, and to freeing ourselves from a sort of mythification proposed by Versins. The building of its Starian system is not so much a matter of invention or astronomical plausibility than of textual strategy; a case of elocutio and dispositio rather than inventio.
