Two novellas from the inventor of perpetual motion and godfather of
German science fiction. Rakkóx the Billionaire (1901), a Protean
Novel, tells the tale of a multibillionaire who abandons his
militaristic aspirations (and such Quixotic fantasies dreamed up by his
Department of Invention as the utilization of herring in submarine
warfare) in favor of a plan to convert a cliff into a work of
architectural art. The Great Race (1900), a Development Novel in Eight
Different Stories, describes an intergalactic competition among worm
spirits who wish to separate from their stars and achieve true autonomy
in a ferocious race of winged sleds, cannon-airships, sky-high
wheel-shaped vehicles and 100-mile-tall stilt machines, whose winners
will be transformed into gods. Veering from humorous, aggressive
slapstick to ethereal visions of cosmic philosophy, Scheerbart's fiction
offers something of a cartoon space odyssey, and resembles that of no
other writer, either of his time or our own.
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet,
newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture
and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the wise clown by his
contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical
fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist
authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German
science fiction.
