History of astronomy is itself a distant sun. During the renaissance period, astronomy began to undergo a revolution in thought known as the Copernican revolution, which gets the name from the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who proposed a heliocentric system, in which the planets revolved around the Sun and not the Earth. His De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published in 1543. While in the long term this was a very controversial claim, in the very beginning it only brought minor controversy. The theory became the dominant view because many figures, most notably Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton championed and improved upon the
The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens mid-21st-century to the mid-twenty-second. Individual stories are set on spaceships traveling between planets and individual planets such as Earth, Krishna, Ganesha and Osiris (it being assumed that Terrans will have carried their penchant for naming planets after gods to other star systems). Features of the postulated future include an Earth governed by a World Federation in which Brazil has become the paramount great power, with Terran space travel monopolized by a Brazilian-dominated agency called the "Viagens Interplanetarias" ("Interplanetary Tours" in Portuguese). Interstellar travel is limited to sub-light speeds, as the author eschews such common science fiction gimmicks as hyperdrives. The