Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!

Paul Scheerbart, a German writer whose name is only now becoming familiar to English readers, a hundred years after his death. Scheerbart, born in 1863, was never a major figure in German letters. He was, rather, a literary bohemian—“a mainstay of cafe society” in Berlin, according to Christopher Turner, writing in the recent University of Chicago anthology Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!: A Paul Scheerbart Reader. Alcoholic, eccentric, and prolific, supported mainly by his wife, Scheerbart produced “over thirty major works and hundreds of minor works of staggering diversity.” But he had little commercial or critical success, and only a small audience appreciated his speculative science fiction or his wildly imaginative, futuristic manifestoes. These works—at least, the ones that have been translated into English so far—are driven by a technological utopianism so extreme, and yet so apparently earnest, as to make them tantalizingly strange.

Scheerbart often reads like an apocalyptic mystic out of the Middle Ages who was somehow transported to the age of railroads and telegraphs.New York Review of Books

Figure 23 from Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, 1910

Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!: A Paul Scheerbart Reader is published by the University of Chicago Press. The Perpetual Motion Machine and Rakkóx the Billionaire & The Great Race are published by Wakefield Press.