Kurd Lasswitz
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Kurd Lasswitz (Template:Langx; 20 April 1848 – 17 October 1910) was a German author, scientist, and philosopher. He has been called "the father of German science fiction".[1] He sometimes used the pseudonym Velatus.
Biography
Lasswitz studied mathematics and physics at the University of Breslau and the University of Berlin, and earned his doctorate in 1873. He spent most of his career as a teacher at the Ernestine Gymnasium in Gotha (1876–1908).[2]Template:Rp
Works
His first published science fiction story was Script error: No such module "Lang". ("To the Zero Point of Existence", 1871), depicting life in 2371, but he earned his reputation with his 1897 novel Script error: No such module "Lang"., which describes an encounter between humans and a Martian civilization that is older and more advanced. The book has the Martian race running out of water, eating synthetic foods, travelling by rolling roads, and utilising space stations. His spaceships use anti-gravity, but travel realistic orbital trajectories, and use occasional mid-course corrections in travelling between Mars and the Earth; the book depicted the technically correct transit between the orbits of two planets, something poorly understood by other early science fiction writers. It influenced Walter Hohmann and Script error: No such module "Lang"..Script error: No such module "Unsubst". The book was not translated into English until 1971 (as Two Planets), and the translation is incomplete. Script error: No such module "Lang". was his most successful novel.[2]Template:Rp A story from Lasswitz's Script error: No such module "Lang". served as the basis for "The Library of Babel", a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.[3]
His last book was Script error: No such module "Lang". ("Star Dew: the Plant of Neptune's Moon", 1909). He is also known for his 1896 biography of Gustav Fechner.
For his writing (totalling around 420 works including non-fiction), Lasswitz has been called "the first utopistic-scientific writer in Germany" or even "a German Jules Verne".[2]Template:Rp
A crater on Mars was named in his honour, as was the asteroid 46514 Lasswitz.
There also is the Script error: No such module "Lang"., an award for German-speaking as well as foreign authors of science fiction since 1981.
See also
References
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- ↑ "German SF" by Franz Rottensteiner, in: Neil Barron ed, Anatomy of Wonder. Third Edition. New York: Bowker, 1987. pp.379–404.
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- ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis, and Eliot Weinberger. "The Total Library" in Selected Non-Fictions. New York: Penguin Books, 1999, pp.215–216.
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Further reading
- Born, Erik. 2018. “Some Omissions in the Universal Library: Kurd Lasswitz and the Emergence of Science Fiction.” Monatshefte 110 (4): 529–51.
- Andreas Daum, Script error: No such module "Lang".. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998, including a short biography.
External links
- Template:Internet Archive author
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- Template:Trim Kurd Lasswitz at the Internet Speculative Fiction DatabaseTemplate:EditAtWikidata
- Works by Kurd Lasswitz at Projekt Gutenberg-DE Template:In lang
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