Early Lasswitz: Blogging, Jesting

I've just read Kurd Lasswitz' "To the Absolute Zero of Existence" (1871), which was translated last year for Franz Rottensteiner's THE BLACK MIRROR & OTHER STORIES, an anthology of German and Austrian sf. I'd read about this story in secondary sources, but those accounts centered in the whimsicality of the characters and plot.

What struck me about the story itself is that Lasswitz' half-serious, half-comical vision of the future is very much like that of Albert Robida -- but Robida's THE TWENTIETH CENTURY appeared eleven years later. I don't think there have been any connection, because Lasswitz' early fiction was published in obscure media and was probably never known outside Germany until scholars took an interest more than a century later.

One idea the two authors share is an interest rapid air travel (fresh food can be brought from practically anywhere in the world in a matter of hours in Lasswitz' story) and telecommunications. Lasswitz has nothing like the telephonoscope of Robida, but he does have a system by which news is transmitted by telegraph and automatically displayed on "public boards." And here's a passage that jumped out at me:

"It was not unusual to find on the public boards, between the business news and the adverts for the entertainment industry, attacks and responses from private individuals."

And indeed, the story later turns on a malicious blog.

Beyond all that, the tone of the story, and the fact that Lasswitz called this sort of thing "wissenschaftliches Marchen" – “scientific fairy tales” – seems to point up what I think is an overlooked factor in the development of sf in Germany, where nothing or nearly nothing that we'd consider sf had been published since Julius von Voss' INI in 1810 -- whereas a number of sf or at least proto-sf works had appeared in England, France and the US during the same period. Lasswitz first two wissenschaftliches Marchen were almost like fractured fairy tales on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show -- it was as if you weren't supposed to write science fiction except in jest. Of course, by the time he wrote TWO PLANETS, Lasswitz could afford to be sober.

The closest contemporary parallel I can think of is Paul Verhoeven's movie version of STARSHIP TROOPERS, which actually used Heinlein's ideas -- but in a manner just facetious enough that Verhoven could tell Heinlein fans he was being faithful but assure Hollywood liberals that it was all a joke.

--J.J.