Lesabéndio (German Edition)

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Textgrundlage ist die Ausgabe: Herausgegeben von Else Harke, Stuttgart: Die Paginierung obiger Ausgabe wird in dieser Neuausgabe als Marginalie zeilengenau mitgefuhrt.

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A German Expressionist Space Fantasy: Scheerbart’s “Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel”

Write a customer review. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations. View or edit your browsing history. Get to Know Us. Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses weaving t First published in German in and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbart's masterpiece, Lesab'ndio is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid Pallas, where rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green stars.

Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses weaving together the mountains and valleys, a visionary named Lesab'ndio hatches a plan to build a mile-high tower and employ architecture to connect the two halves of their double star. A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbart's novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem whose wedding present to Benjamin was a copy of Lesab'ndio.

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Benjamin had intended to devote the concluding section of his lost manuscript "The True Politician" with a discussion of the positive political possibilities embedded in Scheerbart's "Asteroid Novel. Paul Scheerbart was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion, who wrote fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.

Paperback , pages. Published November 1st by Wakefield Press first published June To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. Jan 27, Richard rated it really liked it. Their struggle to realize their ideas often puts them at odds with each other and causes irrevocable changes to their culture and the ecology of their planet which tend to feedback on themselves, causing even more upheaval.

So, you could look at this as kind of an allegory of life on earth around the eve of WWI - tremendous technological and cultural changes, the invention of wireless communication, new ideas of the cosmos and our place in it - except the aliens deal with all this change in a much more constructive way than most humans I know.

Scheerbart_Lesabendio

Throughout the story, characters - great artists, engineers, architects, visionaries, and naturalists - are constantly forced to deal with competing visions of what track life should take and have to make tough compromises. The vision that overwhelms all the others comes from Lesabendio who imagines a gigantic tower incorporating some of the architectural ideas that Scheerbart was interested in that will reach miles into the sky to eventually touch the mysterious cloud that illuminates their planet, and beyond.

The story is essentially optimistic with characters hoping to find ways to work with and include each other in their grand schemes, with varying degrees of success. There are some interesting themes present, including the conflict between living your life to its fullest and surrendering yourself to something greater.

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One thing that really struck me was the sheer inventiveness of the story — all the details that go into making an incredibly strange alien ecosystem and culture come alive. The Pallasians and other aliens were truly alien — especially when compared to what passes for aliens in most science fiction. The book itself is a wonderful book-object. View all 4 comments. Feb 26, Rowan Tepper rated it it was amazing. Why on earth or Pallas did it take nearly a century for this book to appear in English translation?

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Otherworldly yet compelling, meaningful in relation to life - yet no mere allegory - and an absolute pleasure to read. Dec 20, Jennifer rated it really liked it Shelves: I discovered this book from some end-of-the-year wrap-up, best books some person read in , and I was fascinated, so I special-ordered it at my local bookstore. In the beginning this book was so foreign that it was a significant amount of work to parse: But once the work was put in, I turned a corner and absolutely loved this book, for reasons that are hard to describe.

First of all, while there is struggle in this book, it is I discovered this book from some end-of-the-year wrap-up, best books some person read in , and I was fascinated, so I special-ordered it at my local bookstore. First of all, while there is struggle in this book, it is absolutely appropriate to call this a utopian novel, which is refreshing in this trend of dystopic fiction.

Even when the characters and their dreams and visions are completely at odds, the care they take of each other is heart-warming. Also inspiring is that while the Pallasian industries totally change the nature of the asteroid that is their home, it's not done in a destructive or exploitive way, and has nothing to do with personal gain, but in the name of art, beauty, and discovery.

The only thing that really drove me around the bend is that the word "star" in this novel is used for stars, but also sometimes planets, moons, and asteroids as well.

A quirk of the translation? It was a big part of why I struggled so much in the beginning to understand this book's cosmology. But overall, a wonderful book.

Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel

Recommended to dreams and fans of philosophical sf. This book mostly focuses on describing an asteroidsystem and its odd inhabitants. Sadly, although much of it is quirky enough to pique one's interest, much of the story feels somewhat insignificant. Towards the end it gets more interesting, and at times touching, but it's altogether too romantic and lighthearted to really pull you in. Really an odd book: There's a great deal of imaginative detail in the workings of this strange world, although the scifi aspects of the story truely take a backseat to the philosophical ponderings that dominate the second half of the story.

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