Manuel Antonio de Rivas

Manuel Antonio de Rivas was a Franciscan friar in Mérida, a Spanish colonial town on the Yucatán Peninsula. Details of his life are sketchy, though there are court documents that prove that in the 1770s he was accused of heresy. He is best known for an account of a journey of lunar discovery, Syzygies and Lunar Quadratures, which is credited as the first science fiction text written in the Americas. though it appears he was already an old man by the time he was brought to trial. According to Rivas scholar Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado, he arrived in Yucatán in 1742, and soon started "making enemies and trouble for himself." He deviated from orthodoxy by believing, for instance, that heavenly bodies affected human behavior (denying free will), reading banned books, and criticizing the veneration of saints. Apparently he printed leaflets critical of his fellow churchmen and distributed them. His behavior was so offensive that he was put on trial in 1775, a trial which revealed his speculative book on lunar travel. He was accused of believing in astrology, of proposing a "branch of hell in the Sun's center," and of endorsing the heliocentrism of Nicolaus Copernicus. An accusation of sodomy was dropped quickly. No actual date of composition is given in the manuscript.

The manuscript was rediscovered in 1958 by Pablo González Casanova, "hidden among the dusty volumes of the National Archives in Mexico City" The letter is signed by the president of the Moon university.

The anctitones provided fodder for the Inquisition's trial: as it happens, they have studied Earth and its inhabitants for a long time, and question various elements on earthly history. For instance, they have doubts about Biblical chronology, and about "the mythological return of the Messiah". They also recall the legend of Phaëton, whose fiery accident burned the lunar records, forcing them to start their history anew, in "a new Lunar Era," now 7,914,522 years ago.