"'Whenever I think back to that dreadful experience, I feel as if an ice-cold dead man's hand is stroking my back, while at the same time my brain is giving up the third dimension between the buffers of freight trains being switched.'"

So exclaims the narrator in this story by Otto Willi Gail, The Missing Clock Hands: An Implausible Happening, translated by Mike Mitchell and originally published in Germany in 1929.

Science fiction began to appear in Germany around the turn of the century in what were called "novels of the future," or "utopian-technical novels." A major early figure was Kurd Lasswitz, a mathematician, philosopher, and poet whose short story "The Universal Library" -- about a system wherein everything that is written can be stored in a finite number of volumes using a small number of signs --  inspired Argentine Jorge Luis  Borges to write "The Library of Babel." (And who knows what Google that inspired.)

For the most part however, German-language science fiction was untranslated and therefore unknown. Franz Rottensteiner, editor of the critical science fiction magazine Quaber Merkur, here brings together for the first time an historical sampling indicating the development of the genre. Spanning 137 years, this anthology, translated by Mike Mitchell, provides a fascinating glimpse into the past and present minds of the future.

The Black Mirror & Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany and Australia
Edited by Franz Rottensteiner
Translated by Mike Mitchell
Wesleyan University Press, 978-0-8195-6831-1