Two Planets

Two Planets (German: Auf zwei Planeten, lit. On Two Planets, 1897) is a novel by Kurd Lasswitz.

Written before the exploration of the North Pole, it tells the story of a group of explorers who find a Martian base. The Martians can only operate in a polar region not because of climatic requirements, but because their spacecraft cannot withstand the rotation of the Earth at other latitudes. Lasswitz's Martians resemble Earth people in every respect except that they have much larger eyes, with which they can express more emotions. Their name for the inhabitants of Earth is "the small-eyed ones".

The Martians are highly advanced, and initially peaceable; they take some of the explorers back with them to visit Mars dominated by canals. Lasswitz kept closer to the description by the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, though more so to Percival Lowell, than did H. G. Wells in his The War of the Worlds, or Edgar Rice Burroughs in his stories of Barsoom, or the lesser-known Edwin Lester Arnold in his Gulliver of Mars novel, other science fiction stories of that era dealing with that planet—and which were all written after Lasswitz's book.

Lasswitz's story is rooted in its own era, however, in that it concludes the contemporary battleship armaments race between Germany and Britain by having the Martians defeat the Royal Navy.

Literary significance & criticism

This novel was popular in the Germany of its day. Wernher von Braun and Walter Hohmann were inspired by reading it as a child just as Robert H. Goddard was by reading The War of the Worlds. While the novel was not translated into English until 1971, Everett F. Bleiler notes that it likely influenced American genre sf via Hugo Gernsback: "Hugo Gernsback would have been saturated in Lasswitz's work, and Gernsback's theoretical position of technologically based liberalism and many of his little scientific crotchets resemble ideas in Lasswitz's work."

Theodore Sturgeon, reviewing that 1971 translation for The New York Times, found Two Planets "curious and fascinating . . . full of quaint dialogue, heroism, decorous lovemaking, and gorgeous gadgetry." Bleiler noted that the translated text was severely abridged, losing 40% of the original text; although the quality of the translation was good, he characterized the abridgment as "a bad emasculation . . . This loss of detail results in a skeletization that omits important background and weakens motivations and plot connections. Lester del Rey similarly dismissed the 1971 translation as a bowdlerization" which is "bad scholarship, . . . unfair to readers [and] grossly unfair to Lasswitz." del Rey noted that the translation was based on a 1948 abridgment prepared by the author's son, with other modifications made by the translator.