Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lucian of Samosata, who lived around 125 to after 180, was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician, and pamphleteer. He was known for a tongue-in-cheek style with which he ridiculed philosophers, priests, religious practices, and superstitions, and he wrote entirely in ancient Greek though his native language was probably Syriac.
A True Story is a prose satire by Lucian that parodies the fantastic tales of Homer's Odyssey and the history of Thucydides. It describes a voyage past the Pillars of Heracles, a whirlwind that carries the travelers to the Moon, a war between the king of the Moon and the king of the Sun, and a two-hundred-mile-long whale. It is often regarded as the earliest known work of science fiction.
Everything known about Lucian comes exclusively from his own writings, because he is not mentioned in any contemporary text or inscription and does not appear in Philostratus's Lives of the Sophists. His heavy use of sarcasm makes these writings hard to interpret, and classicist Donald Russell warned that it is foolish to treat them as autobiography.
Lucian invented the genre of the comic or satirical dialogue, a parody of the traditional Socratic dialogue. In Double Indictment he declares this his proudest literary achievement, modeling it on the Platonic dialogue but making it comedic rather than philosophical.
Lucian had a wide-ranging impact on Western literature. His True Story inspired Thomas More's Utopia of 1516 and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels of 1726, his work shaped Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, and Christopher Marlowe's line about the face that launched a thousand ships paraphrases a Lucianic exchange between Hermes and Menippus.
Lucian was born in the town of Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates, on the far eastern edge of the Roman Empire. Samosata had been the capital of the kingdom of Commagene until 72 AD, when Vespasian annexed it into the Roman province of Syria, and its population was mostly Syrian.