Two Planets

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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 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 Schiaparelli, though more so to Percival Lowell, than did Herbert George 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.

[edit] Literary significance & criticism

This novel was popular in the Germany of its day. Wernher von Braun was inspired by reading it as a child just as Robert H. Goddard was by reading The War of the Worlds. The story did not have any impact in English-speaking countries whatsoever, as it was only translated in 1970.