“This has not in the least hindered the outpouring of my imagination.” “I’m getting nowhere with my prototype,” he says. The diary of intense frustration hits innumerable highs and lows as Scheerbart tries, fails, and fails again to invent a real perpetual-motion machine (he and his wife needed the money). The central question seems to be-is success or failure better for the imagination? Translator Andrew Joron did great work capturing Scheerbart’s wonderful range of raw emotion as he struggles to tell “The Story of an Invention,” as the book is subtitled. My favorite Scheerbart in English so far is The Perpetual Motion Machine (Wakefield Press). He dreamed of an enormous solar system-and it appeared to him like a system of millions of rubber bands that were continuously being stretched apart and then rebounding back together again. Using the basic tropes of sci-fi, Scheerbart creates a sharp social satire of European salon culture, industrial ambition, and the groupthink of his day, including offhand musings like this about quantum mechanics and string theory that are startlingly accurate: The most recent Scheerbart in translation is Lesabendio: An Asteroid Novel, and kudos to Wakefield Press (in Cambridge) for creating a wonderful illustrated edition of Scheerbart’s short novel about brainy humanoid worm-aliens, dreamers who float around and consider their place in the cosmos. These are enjoyable books, optimistic, ironic, and, as the titles indicate, pro-feminist for their time. MIT Press brought out his glass architecture novella, The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White: A Ladies’ Novel, and University of Chicago Press published T he Light Club (the full title is The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies’ Novelette), about an underground utopia created by a group of wealthy humanists. Some major university presses have published a handful of Scheerbart’s work in English. It’s a testament to Scheerbart’s prophetic vision that his fiction has attracted such lasting attention: he wrote mostly outer-space novels and utopian stories about things like glass architecture.īeyond the quirky concepts, however, Scheerbart’s work has a revolutionary, philosophical zeal and the image of him that arises is that of a steampunk Ralph Waldo Emerson with imaginative powers equal to those of Thomas Edison and Jules Verne. Yet during his prolific career his eccentric fiction, art, and poetry influenced a range of intellects, from architect Bruno Taut to writer Walter Benjamin. No one reads German polymath Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915).

His book reviews appear most often in The National. His short stories are available online at 3:AM Magazine and Necessary Fiction.

Lesabendio paul scheerbart