The Stairway to the Sun & Dance of the Comets brings together two
short books, originally published in 1903, by the antierotic godfather
of German science fiction, Paul Scheerbart. The Stairway to the Sun
contains four fairy tales of sun, sea, animals and storm, each set in a
different, fantastical locale, from the giant palace of an astral star
to a dwarf's underwater glass lair in the jellyfish kingdom.
Scheerbart's sad, whimsical tales provide gentle though unexpected
morals that outline his work as a whole: treat animals as one would
treat oneself, mutual admiration will never lead to harm and if one is
able to remember that the world is grand, one will never be sad.
Dance of the Comets, though published as an "Astral Pantomime," was
originally conceived as a scenario for a ballet, which Richard Strauss
had planned to score in 1900 (and which Mahler accepted for the Vienna
Opera). Though the project was never realized, Scheerbart's written
choreography of dance, gesture, costume, feather dusters, violet moon
hair and a variety of stars and planets outlines a sequence of events in
which everyone--enthusiastic maid, temperamental king, indifferent
executioner, foolish poet--seeks, joins and, in some cases, becomes a
celestial body: a staging of Scheerbart's lifelong yearning for a home
in the universe.
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet,
critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and
would-be inventor of perpetual motion.
