Micromégas is a short philosophical tale in which a gigantic inhabitant of a planet circling Sirius is banished for his unorthodox ideas and begins to travel the universe. On Saturn he befriends a local scholar, who is tiny by his standards yet enormous compared with humans. Together they journey on to Earth, where they discover with some difficulty that small creatures live on it and can think and talk. Their conversation with a group of human philosophers is the heart of the story. Voltaire uses the visitors' viewpoint to laugh at human pride, scholarly quarrels and our confident claims about the universe. It is an early and witty forerunner of modern science fiction.