Wonder worlds
Wunderwelten is a science fiction by the German writer Friedrich Wilhelm Mader (1866–1945).
content
A group of six people go on an adventurous journey into space. The main characters are the rich English lord and inventor Charles Flitmore, his brave Boer wife Mietje Rijn and the inexperienced servant and mechanic John Rieger. Furthermore, the absent-minded German professor and Africa researcher Heinrich Schultze; the fat Australian captain and engineer Hugo von Münchhausen and the private lecturer and practical adventurer Heinz Friedung participated in the mission. Two docile chimpanzees complete the crew.
Lord Flitmore discovers the possibility of generating a special "centrifugal force" electrically, and thus overriding any force of gravity . He installed the centrifugal drive developed in this way on the specially built, spherical "world ship", which he named Sannah . The group of adventurers he has called together first discovers peculiarities of the world ship, such as its own attraction, on their test flight, then they travel to the back of the moon, where volcanism and sparse vegetation can be observed in the libration zone. Then the expedition lands on Mars, where diverse alien life and a civilization in decline are discovered.
After surviving dangers on Mars, the Sannah crosses a swarm of meteorites and lands on a planetoid in the asteroid belt with its colorful vegetation. On the way again, the group visits the glowing liquid Jupiter from a distance. Since Saturn is in an unfavorable orbit position, the onward journey there takes several days. The surface of the spongy-porous and cracked rings of Saturn allows a short stopover, after which the expedition can camp on the ring planet itself and discovers, among other things, a colossal insect fauna corresponding to the low matter density of Saturn.
During the fourth landing maneuver for the continued exploration of Saturn, however , the Sannah is carried away by a comet that has already been observed, whose tail, charged with centrifugal force, enters into an irresistible interaction with the ship's propulsion. The planets Uranus and Neptune are only observed from a distance in the wake of this pull; In the process, Schultze discovers two other Uranus moons in addition to the three known ones , one of them with a ring system. In addition to the only known Neptune moon, two new ones are found. A tenth planetary orbit is discovered beyond Neptune; the Transneptune is named after the Roman godsmith Vulkan .
Trapped in the centrifugal tail of the comet, which quickly reaches faster than light speed in interstellar space and moves in the direction of the binary star system Alpha Centauri , the expedition spends several months in and on the world ship, which has formed its own atmosphere. Near the star closest to the Sun, a second comet from there releases the Sannah from the tail of the first comet, so that Alpha Centari can be flown freely again. The first planet discovered there is baptized Eden because of its abundance of life and splendor . Thanks to the original language, Heinz Friedung succeeds in communicating with the Edenites, who have a highly developed culture and morality and lead a paradisiacal life in harmony with Creator and nature and whose aim in life is to enable future generations to have a good life as well as themselves The world travelers spend several months on Eden and exchange ideas with the peace-loving people of the Edenites, who have also devised a way to precisely control the centrifugal force and thus allow the world ship to return to the earthly solar system.
On the return journey, accompanied by Friedungs' new friend, the Edenite Heliastra, a sunless dark world is discovered and named Sheol . While the Sannah is still in its vicinity, another dark world collides with Sheol, triggering a nova . Another month later, the distance to the solar system is covered; However, the faster than light swing of the Sannah means that the world ship hits the sun and is thus occupied. Passing Mercury , which is covered with mirror vegetation , and after a deceleration maneuver in Jupiter's orbit, travelers can return to earth, where they land in familiar regions in southern Africa . Flitmore is immediately planning new world ship expeditions.
Structure, style and language
The novel is a fiction from the beginning of the 20th century on the subject of what other worlds might look like. The setting is space, which offers space for adventure, research and extraordinary experiences. The framework and basis of the novel is technology and science, especially astronomy, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Friedrich Wilhelm Mader tries to convey respect and esteem for nature to the reader and shows helpful and friendly interaction between people. Wherever the tour group encounters strange, intelligent beings, the first contact is peaceful, never militant. The conversations in the act, when it comes to religious issues, always have a positive attitude towards God and Christianity as an institution.
A list of people at the beginning of the book introduces all characters. The six main characters are all already known as protagonists from other Maders adventure novels, and accordingly there are frequent references to adventures in Africa and Australia that have already been overcome, for example when the dwarf planet Tipekitanga is named after a pygmy princess (In the Land of the Dwarfs) or the revolutionary battery technology is explained in Flitmore's world ship as a development of Münchhausen ( The King of the Unapproachable Mountains ). Despite this embedding in Mader's complete work, the book is also completely understandable as a stand-alone work.
The novel is written in simple and easily understandable German. The plot follows simple narrative patterns. Mysterious phenomena and challenges are resolved in the same chapter. So everything is easy to understand, the division into 56 chapters is consistent. Didactic inserts, mostly by the professor, explain, among other things, gravitation and celestial mechanics , the Martian channels as an optical illusion , the Copernican view of the world compared to the Ptolemaic , the North Pole meteorites recovered from Peary or the comet of 1881 , the Titius-Bode "law" and the four moons of Jupiter or astronomical terms such as albedo , aberration , parallax and light year . The descriptions of the fictitious future technology used, however, remain vague, their possibilities are not described in as much detail as, for example, with Jules Verne . At the end of the book there is a list of sources for further literature and the places where Mader got the knowledge that he puts into the mouth of his protagonists.
meaning
Wunderwelten is one of the first science fiction by a German with a focus on space travel. It is particularly interesting that the plot is also located outside the solar system , which was a novelty in German. As evidence for the existence of extrasolar planets , Mader already stated that the stars Mira and Beta Lyrae change their brightness.
The science- didactic background, which clearly identifies the novel as science fiction , must be emphasized . The ignorant but curious John Rieger in particular is taught by the rest of the expedition participants. When it comes to secured scientific as well as cultural knowledge of its time, the novel offers a youth-friendly approach that encompasses a large part of the work and was also very well received by contemporary critics. Fantastic descriptions of the worlds explored and the adventurous plot fill the rest of the book. When it comes to things that come from his imagination, the author is definitely wrong, but the fantastic descriptions are usually neatly separated from the didactic excursions.
According to the popular idea in Mader's time, the novel represents the ether theory , according to which space is filled with breathable but extremely thin air. Weightlessness is unknown, earth gravity also prevails in the world ship; Life in the form of flora and fauna can be found in every world, the pastor Mader lets his assembled protagonists disparage the idea of evolution and Ernst Haeckel in several places in the book; specifically related to the incomprehensibility of the universe, the publications by Hermann Joseph Klein and Carl Snyder are juxtaposed and commented on on the one hand with approval, on the other hand with contempt.
It is Mader's only work in which the adventures take place in space. Because of this setting, his latent colonial chauvinism does not come to light here.
Editions, illustrations, binding and changes
The novel was first published in 1911 by the publishing house for folk art / Rich. Keutel / Stuttgart. From the second edition, the novel was published by Union Deutscher Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart, Berlin and Leipzig. From edition two, which appeared in 1921, Friedrich Wilhelm Mader corrected the content in a few places. In the new version of the novel, some errors that were particularly noticed by experts and scientists have been changed. Hypotheses and fictions that continue to appear in the story that have not yet been explored form the backbone of the book, as in the first version. Thirteen editions are known (there may be more editions) that have been published by the Union Deutscher Verlagsgesellschaft. In 1987 Heyne-Verlag published the novel in paperback and used the version from 1911. The illustrations in the first edition are by W. Egel, they are simple black and white drawings, some are slightly yellow in some places to emphasize areas. From the second edition onwards, more elaborate colored pictures (8 tone prints) have been used for illustration. The cover of the first edition is simply green with only the title of the book, from the second edition the cover has a colored cover image and the author is named next to the book title.
Parallels to Jules Verne's novels
It is believed that Mader was influenced by Jules Verne's novels . This can be seen particularly in his novel Wunderwelten , in which there are similarities in some areas with Verne's novel Hector Servadac (published in 1877, German title Reise durch die Sonnenwelt ). This includes, for example, the idea that a comet pulls people into space and that the journey goes through our solar system. These are the most striking similarities. The novel by Friedrich Wilhelm Mader is completely different from the novel Hector Servadac in terms of plot and structure , one can only speak of the influence in a few details.
expenditure
- Friedrich Wilhelm Mader: Wonder Worlds. How Lord Flitmore undertakes a strange journey to the planets and is kidnapped by a comet into the world of the fixed stars . Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1911.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Mader: Wonder Worlds. a classic science fiction novel . Heyne, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-453-31374-7 (reprint of the Stuttgart 1911 edition, edited by Wolfgang Jeschke , with an afterword by Dieter Hasselblatt ).
- Audiobook at LibriVox
Notes and individual references
- ↑ Mader counted the asteroid belt as the 5th planetary orbit of the solar system.
- ↑ Dieter Hasselblatt in the afterword of the new edition 1987
- ↑ Compare: Helmut Müller on Mader in: Lexikon der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (Editor: Doderer / Müller), Volume 2; Weinheim and Basel, 1984. ISBN 3-407-56512-7 .