Eleven years before Jules Verne took his readers to the Moon, 40 years before H. G. Wells devised the Time Machine, nearly a century before J.R.R. Tolkien published Lord Of The Rings, Charles Defontenay wrote the imaginary history of an entire star system located in the far off constellation of Cassiopeia. Long before science fiction writers dreamed of interstellar travels, alien races and the colonization of other planets, in 1854, on the eve of the Crimean War, Charles Defontenay, a French medical doctor born in 1819, penned the first modern "space opera". STAR is a treasure chest of alien lore, the history of a world and its varied species, their rise and fall, triumphs and failures. It includes samples of their literature, arts and moral codes. Above all, it is a visionary work without precedent in the history of science fiction.