Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel by Paul Scheerbart (review)

An interesting first approach to Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel is to acknowledge its influence on prominent early 20th-century thinkers and artists. Its author, Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915), was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draughtsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. His ideas inspired avant-garde art and architectural circles, especially the so-called Glass Chain movement, a group that included architects Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut and Hans Scharoun. His ideas also influenced the mystical and Romantic strains of early Expressionism, Futurism, Bauhaus, German Dada and German science-fiction literature. Gershom Scholem presented as a wedding present a copy of Lesabéndio to philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, who, in a glowing review, lauded Scheerbart’s serene vision and called him a humorist who never forgets that Earth is a heavenly body.

For Benjamin, technology sped up the process of turning its artifacts into commodities, along with the workers who produced them, thus alienating people from each other and from the fruit of their labor. Says Benjamin, instead of accumulating experiences or wisdom, societies so affected by technology spend all their time filtering continuous, discrete bits of disconnected information, distracted in their reaction to rapidly changing social structures.

In Lesabéndio, however, the inhabitants of the imaginary star Pallas make no rigid dichotomy between technology and nature, between themselves and technology, or between themselves and the surrounding natural world. Rather, they follow two preconditions Benjamin thought essential for humans on Earth: disregard of the belief that it is our task to exploit the forces of nature and belief that technology, by liberating human beings, will liberate the whole of creation.

The star Pallas is a rugged, mountainous topography overlaid with an urban metropolis highlighted by many lighthouses. Moving beltways provide transportation between the northern and southern halves of Pallas. A glowing cobweb-cloud surrounds the planet and provides its light source. Pallasians are organic parts of their home star. They have one rubber-like leg, with a suction cup at its end, convenient for attaching themselves to any surface. They expand and shrink various parts of their bodies in order to see at a distance, shelter themselves at night and propel themselves via a method of high-speed bouncing. They smoke bubble weed in mushroom meadows until they fall asleep under violet skies and green stars.

And, thus, we have another way to conceptualize the novel: as an ecological science fiction story. Lesabéndio, the hero of the novel, persuades all Pallasians to build a 44-mile-high tower, utilizing newly discovered Kaddimohn steel, in order to connect the two halves of their double star. An unintended effect is that the height of the tower alters Pallas’s center of gravity, which in turn changes the Pallasians’ internal nature as well as the form and function of the star on which they live. As a result, Lesabéndio achieves a nearly unimaginable level of consciousness, sensory perception and communication abilities, heretofore only experienced by astronomical entities like stars, asteroids and the Central Sun of his local galaxy.

Lesabéndio, the novel, was ecological before ecology was a discipline, and science fiction before it was a literary genre. But the novel may also be read as a political parable about the dangers and necessities of conflict. For example, Peka, an artist who believes in art for art’s sake, wants to decorate the tower. Lesabéndio, on the other hand, wants to use the tower to aid and transform Pallas. Peka loses to Lesabéndio, who absorbs Peka through his pores, nonviolently making Peka a part of himself. This highlights Scheerbart’s idea that technology must be integrated into the natural world and subordinated to values greater than itself in order for humans to live in a world that is at once harmonious and worthwhile. Rather than a tool for altering and reconfiguring both nature...