Kurd Lasswitz

Kurd Lasswitz (Breslau, 1848 – Gotha, 1910) was a German writer, scientist and philosopher working in Prussia in the nineteenth century. He is regarded as the father of science fiction in the German language. What makes him interesting is that he combined two areas that are often kept apart today: a rigorous training in mathematics and physics and a literary wish to imagine other worlds and other futures.

He studied mathematics and physics at the universities of Breslau and Berlin and earned his doctorate in those subjects in 1873. Most of his working life was spent as a teacher at the Ernestine Gymnasium in Gotha, a job he combined with writing. He published treatises on epistemology, studies on Immanuel Kant and essays on nature and culture, some of them under the pseudonym Velatus. He also wrote a biography of the psychophysicist Gustav Fechner.

His first science fiction story, Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins (1871), depicts life in the year 2731. His real breakthrough came with Auf zwei Planeten (1897), in which humans meet the inhabitants of Mars, an ancient civilization far more advanced than their own. The novel describes the orbital transfer between two planets with a precision that few writers of the genre had managed, and this care sets it apart from much science fiction of its time. His last book, Sternentau (1909), is set on a moon of Neptune.

His philosophical outlook, rooted in Kant, holds that science widens our picture of the world and forces us to revise the categories we use to think about it. His influence was considerable. The Martian novel inspired Walter Hohmann and Wernher von Braun, pioneers of astronautics, and his story Die Universalbibliothek (1904) gave Jorge Luis Borges the starting point for The Library of Babel. He is remembered today through a Martian crater, the asteroid (46514) Lasswitz and the literary prize bearing his name, awarded since 1981.