His first published science fiction story was ("To the Zero Point of Existence", 1871), depicting life in 2371, but he earned his reputation with his 1897 novel , which describes an encounter between humans and a
Martian civilization that is older and more advanced. The book has the Martian race running out of water, eating synthetic foods, travelling by rolling roads, and utilising space stations. His spaceships use
anti-gravity, but travel realistic orbital trajectories, and use occasional mid-course corrections in travelling between Mars and the Earth; the book depicted the technically correct transit between the orbits of two planets, something poorly understood by other early science fiction writers. It influenced
Walter Hohmann and . The book was not translated into English until 1971 (as
Two Planets), and the translation is incomplete. was his most successful novel. His last book was ("Star Dew: the Plant of Neptune's Moon", 1909). He is also known for his 1896 biography of
Gustav Fechner. For his writing (totalling around 420 works including non-fiction), Lasswitz has been called "the first utopistic-scientific writer in Germany" or even "a German
Jules Verne". A
crater on
Mars was named in his honour, as was the
asteroid 46514 Lasswitz. There also is the , an award for German-speaking as well as foreign authors of science fiction since 1981. == See also ==