Works
His first published science fiction story was "Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins" ("To the Zero Point of Existence", 1871), depicting life in 2371, but he earned his reputation with his 1897 novel Two Planets, 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 Wernher von Braun. The book was not translated into English until 1971 (as Two Planets, and the translation is incomplete). A story from Lasswitz's Traumkristalle served as the basis for The Library of Babel, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
His last book was Sternentau: die Pflanze vom Neptunsmond ("Star Dew: the Plant of Neptune's Moon", 1909). He is also known for his 1896 biography of Gustav Fechner.
A crater on Mars was named in his honour, as was the asteroid 46514 Lasswitz.
There also is a Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, an award for German-speaking authors of science fiction since 1981.
Read more about this topic: Kurd Lasswitz
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”
—William James (1842–1910)