Two Planets

Two Planets (in German, Auf zwei Planeten, literally "On Two Planets") is a science fiction novel by the German writer Kurd Lasswitz, published in October 1897 in two volumes by the Weimar publisher Felber. It is the author's best-known work and one of the founding novels of German science fiction. It imagines contact between humanity and a technologically superior Martian civilization.

The story follows a group of German explorers who travel to the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. On arrival they discover a Martian base. The Martians, who call themselves the "Nume", master interplanetary flight through a technology based on the cancellation of gravity. The explorers are welcomed and encounter a civilization that surpasses humanity in every respect, with its own moral code, the "Numenheit". The Martians are not entirely benevolent, however: they need the solar energy of Earth and intend to colonize it. Over time, partly through their own arrogance, relations with humanity become hostile. Tensions with Europe end in a clash in which the Martians defeat a British warship, leading to the fall of the British Empire and an occupation that becomes tyranny. A worldwide resistance, centred on America, manages to reproduce Martian technology and turns the course of the war; together with a pro-human faction on Mars, it eventually leads to a peace treaty.

Lasswitz shaped his picture of Mars around the observations of Giovanni Schiaparelli and, even more, those of Percival Lowell, who saw the Martian "canals" as engineering works of intelligent beings. His Mars therefore resembles the one of those astronomers more than that of other novels of the period, such as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, which appeared shortly afterwards.

The novel was popular in Germany and was overshadowed outside it by Wells's work. According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it deeply influenced at least two generations of young Germans, among them Wernher von Braun. The critic Everett F. Bleiler argues that it may have influenced American science fiction through Hugo Gernsback. An abridged version appeared in 1948, and an abridged English translation in 1971.