The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  These animals with dull glass eyes hopped to and fro in a frenzy: one had to stack them up into a corner, from which they escaped, causing the children to become noisily nervous. But when Cook, pale in the face, reported that one of the creatures had all of a sudden leaped into a marmalade jar, the mother’s hilarity gave way to the housewife’s carefulness. During the afternoon, the rabbits multiplied in a worrisome manner. They seemed to lurk in every corner, erupt from the cracks in the floorboards; they sat on all the moldings and doorframes; they sprang blindly everywhere, so that the general amusement quickly ceased, while a murmur of disapprobation filled the house.

  The mayor, fleeing from the nuisance, went to his club through a twilight peppered with hopping white smudges. There he met friends who, as perplexed as he, had convened to discuss the phenomenon, while rabbits, in ever increasing numbers, came to disrupt the men’s reflections. From time to time, Joseph, the club’s barman, swept the animals out of the rooms, but the next minute, the things shot up from every corner, leaping at one another, their glass eyes red and bulging. Upon the reading table, the creatures deviled the sacred placement of the newspapers. The gentlemen traded furious glances, deeply disturbed by this aggravating intrusion, and left as soon as it appeared that Joseph and his broom were unable to get rid of the vermin.

  That same evening, the mayor felt a hard lump under his bedclothes, and, when he anxiously groped for it, his hand came up filled with a rabbit that stared at him stupidly. Cursing, he threw the thing, but the animal contented itself with uttering a weak, high-pitched scream, like a struck instrument, and then resumed hopping. At this proof of resilience, the mayor flipped his lid, and the effects of his anger troubled his sleep as his dreams teemed with rabbits. Written in letters that reached the sky, the terrible word INDESTRUCTIBLE loomed in the midst of a crowd of rabbits, which went up and down the sign, as agile as the proverbial enchanted cats. The red eyes converged on the same point, the mayor, who lay paralyzed in bed.

  When he decided to wash away the sweat caused by the nightmare, the man found the top of his washing stand invaded by rabbits, and one of them, with its fur thin and dull, twitched pitifully at the bottom of his pitcher. With a satisfying malignant pleasure, he hurled the creature to the floor, but the rabbit slowly straightened and resumed hopping with the usual enthusiasm.

  In the streets, the passersby could not take a step without stumbling upon one of the little monsters, which survived the most incredible torments applied by urchins, and even the passage of the heaviest trucks. Rabbits on the steps of the city hall. Rabbits in every corridor. Perching on the highest folders, they glanced down at the poor mayor, who passed among his employees fighting against more rabbits to enter his office. Thirteen rabbits welcomed him from his desk, causing the papers to rustle and scattering them in splendid disarray. The mayor let himself fall into his armchair, invoking all the destroying powers. He cried out in anguish when his hands landed on soft fur. It seemed to him that over the vacuous muzzles hovered an expression resembling a smile. Thanks to the multiplication, the smile seemed to amplify, growing stronger, and finally the mayor had the impression of seeing Hopkins’s grin repeated a hundred thousand times.

  Mustering all his energy, the mayor called Vorderteil. Aghast, they gazed at each other for some time, until the mayor recovered a shade of dignity.

  “This Mr. Hopkins…,” he began.

  “Yes, this Mr. Hopkins,” Vorderteil said.

  “A billion automated rabbits…”

  “Indestructible…indestructible,” Vorderteil confirmed.

  “It’s horrible…A billion automated ra—” The mayor had to brush away a rabbit that had brusquely leaped onto his shoulder and wanted to climb his head. “Damned mechanics!” he cried, on the brink of tears.

  “Yes, yes, but I don’t understand…”

  “What is it that you don’t understand?”

  “My factory has never produced so many rabbits before.”

  “Where do they come from then?”

  Vorderteil was unable to answer as he found himself inundated by the red ink a rabbit had just spilled. His elegant black trousers were ruined. The mayor laughed convulsively.

  Then Vorderteil said, “I think Hopkins has hoarded all the latest orders. That man is the devil incarnate…and he’s out to get us…but…”

  And, ignoring the red tide that continued to spill out between them, he whispered: “But I’m thinking of something even more terrible….”

  “What?”

  “Have you noticed that two generations of rabbits have presented themselves?”

  Yes. It was true. Among the twenty-three rabbits that frolicked on the mayor’s desk, a few seemed to be smaller, more delicate…younger than the others. Even though all of them hopped about, eyeing the world with the same fixed, stupid gaze, smiling the same hideous smile.

  “You see, when Hopkins was still working for us, he alluded to some revolutionary process, something…a kind of natural reproduction of mechanical rabbits, which he called ‘asexual reproduction.’ We made fun of him at the time, but now, apparently, he is using this process. It’s clear now: he’s using it to terrorize us. Yes. These rabbits are admirable replicas of life. They’re reproducing, and tonight we’ll see the third generation. Tomorrow morning, we’ll welcome the fifth, and the day after tomorrow, we will sail toward two billion beasts….”

  This conversation met a quick and strange conclusion, which also ended the discreet dealings between the two men. Seized by the irrepressible desire to avoid going insane, and maybe a combination of rage and desperation, the mayor grabbed by the neck the author of this disaster, spun him around, and had him thrown out. Unfortunately, this violent act brought no resolution to the problem of the rampant rabbits. When they had appeared, the town was amused, and then enraged, but now the general sentiment was horror and disgust. White beasties hopped among the dishes on the tables. They could be destroyed only with axes and fire. With the magistrate’s authorization, bonfires were lit on the streets, and rabbits were brought in buckets, aprons, and hutches. But despite these measures, the number of rabbits increased by the hour until the town’s population gave up. The fires consumed, a reek of burned fur stank up the air. Without anything to keep them at bay, the rabbits destroyed every trade, jammed the traffic, invaded all activities, and even insinuated themselves into the secret of amorous passions.

  But it happened that in a region nearby, in Switzerland, a woman gave birth to a stillborn child. The terror experienced by the mother had caused this premature birth, and the child had on its face a mark in the shape of a rabbit. Indignation erupted, and city hall was almost assailed by a rioting, armed crowd. In this crucial moment, the mayor remembered Napoléon III, who succeeded in calming the miserable masses with raucous parties. Fighting an internal disquiet with external actions seemed the right solution, even more so since he had glimpsed the fifth generation of monsters in his own house. So he ordered festivities of the greatest splendor commemorating the poet Schiller. Like a captain casting a last glance from the mast of his floundering ship, the mayor contemplated his town from the highest spot of the city hall. Even though the month was September, the rooftops, the streets, and the parks seemed to disappear under layers of snow, but this peculiar blanket twitched, decomposed, and recomposed. It was only the billion rabbits—as promised. Like an old man, the mayor stepped down from the tower, slipping over the soft backs of a few thousand rabbits, and, as soon as he reached the ground floor, he heard the report of a policeman he’d sent to Hopkins’s home. The man was nowhere to be found, which did not surprise the mayor in the slightest.

  That evening, the townspeople gathered for the commemoration, after braving the mountains of rabbits filling the streets, particularly the crossroads, where the beasties superposed in double and triple layers. Even inside, it was difficult to move about as the rabbits leaped among the revelers’ legs, occupied the chairs, and filed up and down the galleries, like a bas-r
elief conceived by a mad sculptor.

  An eminent professor who had considerably contributed to the town’s intellectual life delivered a speech, and when he extracted a rabbit from his suit pocket to toss it away, the gesture seemed to punctuate his words in a customary manner. A more lugubrious impression occurred when the trumpets released a discordant tune, caused by the rabbits obstructing the instruments. Only the young dramatic singer Beate Vogl created a harmonious atmosphere when she sang a lied in Schiller’s honor. Until a terrible scream broke the crystalline sounds as the singer extracted a rabbit from her cleavage. A rabbit, yes, with nine more newborn rabbits hanging from it. The turmoil had reached a peak when a powerful voice rose above the din.

  Hopkins stood onstage, beside the unconscious singer. He waved his impeccable top hat and bowed to the audience.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you to please pay attention to what I have to say. The painful events visited on you these last days could have been avoided if the authorities had been able to grasp the meaning of the word billion, also showing greater consideration for the accomplishments of modern technology. I desire nothing more than putting an end to these disagreements. The rabbits will disappear as soon as my request is accepted. Although, if my projects should meet more obstacles, then, and only then, would I, against my desire, rest assured, make your situation a little worse.”

  Smiling, Hopkins fished a squirming rabbit out of his pocket and held it up by the ears. “So far, you’ve seen an innocuous species of rabbit, but, tomorrow at midday, you’ll encounter a new variety: the rabbit that can eat.”

  With these words, he presented the animal with a bunch of clover.

  The silent crowd watched in consternation as the animal’s muzzle twitched and turned toward the vegetable to swallow it with mechanical delight.

  Everyone pictured an army of indestructible, voracious rabbits devouring everything in sight. Dread crushed the assembly. Nobody dared utter a sound.

  That night, an extraordinary meeting of the city council was called, and, come morning, an employee was dispatched to the American’s house with an invitation to the mayor’s office. This time, Hopkins was at home.

  The inventor, upon hearing the decision that gave him permission to build his factory, listened gravely to the question he surely expected.

  The mayor, tired and pensive, his face expressing a deep doubt, said:

  “Tell me now.” His hand caressed his forehead as if wanting to dispel an oppressive impression. “I get most of your science. There’s something, though, I don’t understand. It’s the fact that, thanks to your savoir-faire in mechanics, by mastering the process of life, you have created rabbits that can eat. How is it possible? The rabbit you showed us…”

  Hopkins gave a smile that was more bitter than usual and tipped his impeccable top hat. “Well, that one…,” he said. “That rabbit, Mayor, the one I showed you, was, quite exceptionally, a real, living rabbit.”

  * * *

  * Translator’s note: Deutsche Reichspatent.

  The New Overworld

  PAUL SCHEERBART

  Translated by Daniel Ableev and Sarah Kassem

  Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a multitalented German author and artist of fantasy and science fiction (under his own name and the pseudonym “Kuno Küfer”) who could legitimately be called an eccentric genius. In addition to his art, fiction, and poetry, Scheerbart envisioned vast idealistic engineering and architectural projects aimed at creating a better world, and he also tried to create a perpetual-motion machine. Blurring the lines between fact and fancy, Scheerbart incorporated all his interests into both his fiction and his nonfiction. Like Bengali women’s rights advocate Begum Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain, the impish French proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry, and other early science fiction writers, Scheerbart was influenced by the contes philosophiques, and thus this blurring had a basis in literary history.

  An alcoholic who spent most of his life in poverty before he died in World War I, Scheerbart founded the Verlag Deutscher Phantasten (Publishers of German Fantasists) in 1892. At university, Scheerbart studied art history and philosophy, which fed into the beginnings of a serious attempt at a poetry career (and also, perhaps, his attempts to invent perpetual-motion machines). In 1914, Scheerbart published the work best-known during his lifetime, Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture), which, shamefully, was not published in English until 1972. These fantastical essays and poems about glass architecture influenced noted theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin on his Arcades Project, an impressionistic glimpse in fragments of the streets of Paris. None of Scheerbart’s other work had been published in English prior to Glass Architecture, and even today he remains little known in the English-language world, despite a sumptuous retrospective and several translations since 2001.

  The most relevant translation for science fiction readers is the novel Lesabéndio (2012). Lesabéndio, in episodic chapters, details the workings of an alien civilization. The novel embodied the Utopian ideals Scheerbart had embraced and that he firmly believed would be the salvation of humankind. It also includes, well ahead of its time, treatment of environmental themes that compare favorably to modern theory.

  Sadly, this novel and Scheerbart’s other science fiction have not exerted much influence on German science fiction in the modern era. But in considering influence more as diaspora, it may be useful to think about connections between Scheerbart and his contemporaries, such as visionaries like Alfred Kubin, author of the masterpiece of weird fiction The Other Side, who was commissioned to create art for Lesabéndio. Kubin is the gateway to a cascade of other connections, including Kafka. Similarities in Alfred Jarry’s and Scheerbart’s approaches suggest it also may be useful to view Scheerbart’s work in light of the French tradition of fantastic literature.

  Perhaps, then, Scheerbart’s work has languished in obscurity in part because it existed adjacent to movements like the Surrealists and Decadents but occupied its own unique space. Nor is there any indication that if Scheerbart had lived past World War I, continued to write science fiction, and been translated earlier, his approach would have been much welcomed by the American pulp scene that came to define the bulk of “science fiction.” But in a wider context, his association with creators like Benjamin, Jarry, and Kubin, and the similarities in some of his work to Borges, are far more important. “The New Overworld” (1911), never before translated into English, exemplifies Scheerbart’s style and approach: light, taking liberties with science, but also unique and playful in its speculation.

  THE NEW OVERWORLD

  Paul Scheerbart

  Translated by Daniel Ableev and Sarah Kassem

  “If you can’t solve your own problems,” said the wise Knax, “then you most certainly are not very clever.”

  “Absolutely!” exclaimed his audience with a laugh. But soon, the laughter ceased; they weren’t feeling too cheerful because of their pressing worries.

  A grand fertility reigned on the star Venus. Knax and his audience lived there, and everyone suffered a lot under this ample fertility. Venus is obviously not a star which rotates around itself like Jupiter, Mars, and Earth. Venus always has the same side of its spheric body facing the sun, which makes it scorching hot. Obviously, the result is a plaguing fertility on that side of Venus. Flowery formations on the backsides of Venus’s inhabitants sprawl rapidly and develop long, whirring butterfly wings. These wings soon mass together and create an intricate fruiting body. This body grows quickly, detaches itself from the host, and thus a new Venusian emerges.

  These offspring are born without any influence of their progenitors on the flowery formations and their metamorphoses. In close proximity to the sun, procreation of species takes place in a very simple manner, without any trace of terrestrial dualism. One can imagine that this convenience of nature causes considerable inconveniences—for the elderly don’t die that quickly on Venus, which leads to a relentless increase in the number of inhabitants. This population boom obstruc
ts and diminishes the offspring’s mobility.

  Now, two contrastingly different kinds of creatures exist on the hot side of Venus. Chubby, idle inhabitants with a sort of turtle fur at their top and bottom. And twenty-armed, uncannily vital creatures with long, delicate hands, which serve as feet when bent into a fistlike form. The chubby ones always make themselves comfortable and lie idly around. They find the vitality and restlessness of the Dynamic Ones embarrassing and occasionally even excruciating.

  Knax was one of the dynamic Venusians. Every day, Knax thought deeply about that damning fertility on the sphere’s hot side. The possibility of constructing towers and free-floating bridges in order to handle the lack of space had been considered and discussed in great length and detail. And so, myriads of towers and bridges were built in valleys and on the hills. Yet the Venusians’ fertility was so yielding and abundant that all the towers and bridges didn’t suffice; there were just too many of them. The unhurried turtles covered almost every inch of the ground, calm and rest being their most valuable principles in life. They weren’t bothered much when the twenty-legged ones ran about on their backs or in their immediate proximity.

  Knax, the wise one, said gloomily: “Heavens—we don’t even have enough space to go for a walk. Where are we supposed to go? We can’t just always sit on our bridges and in our towers and paint. We need to be able to walk. It’s just not in our nature to quit walking.” Knax’s audience agreed with him, but they didn’t know how to deal with this lack of freedom. Of course, the brutal idea to just snuff out some of the expendable offspring never came up; the concept of killing was unknown to the Venusians.