This paper focuses on three trips to the moon written for a young readership, Louis Desnoyers’ Les Aventures de Robert-Robert (1839), Émile Bouchery’s Les Petits Neveux de Gulliver (1842), and Alfred Driou’s Les Aventures d’un aéronaute parisien dans les mondes inconnus (1856), from the points of view of cultural and genre history as well as the history of the imagination. Projecting the narrative into space frees a creativity and an imagination, which combine with an object lesson. From Romanticism onwards, in a fourth dimension of fantasy, located between fear, dreams, and laughter, a poetics of science-fiction established itself, and an objective approach to the cosmos commingled with a delirious and highly enjoyable creativity. Space as a mirror for Earth is also an Ur-nature and concentrates elements taken from reality giving rise to the figures if the extra-terrestrial alien and of the super-hero.