Leichter als Vakuum

Die Zwystein-Manuskripte. Die Größte Reise
(Lighter Than Vacuum. The Zwystein Manuskripts. The Ultimate Voyage)

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By Erik Simon and Angela & Karlheinz Steinmüller
Golkonda Publishers, Imprint Memoranda, Berlin 2017
Collected Works, Vol. 8

“It’s history, but not as we knew it”, would Captain Kirk comment. We believe to know history, but what historians describe is full of gaps and disturbed by societal filters. Since more than thirty years, Simon Zwystein is engaged in closing gaps in official historiography. He collects rare and irritating documents that fell into his hands mostly by pure chance. Regularly he discovers links and connections that have escaped the attention of others and that shed new light on pivotal ages of history.

  • Why got the population of Malta extinct at the end of the Tarxien age?
  • Was there a real chance for collaboration between Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid?
  • Was the first man to put his feet on the Moon a German – in 1935?

Zwystein’s most prominent achievement is most probably the rediscovery of a German SF novella, allegedly first published in the US in 1909. This story “The Ultimate Voyage” could have given, as Zwystein supposes, a decisive head start for the development of SF – if it had reached sufficient circulation at its time.

Content

  • Report of the Slave

  • The Germelshausen Manuscripts

  • Lighter than Vacuum

  • Up to the Sea and Beyond
    I. Thalassa! Thalassa! (by Erik Simon)
    II. The Herb of the Immortals (by Gundula Sell)
    III. Wikimak and the Turtle-Man (by A. & K. Steinmüller)

  • The Maltese Clay Tablets

  • The Ultimate Voyage

  • Appendix

    • Alexander Golze: Ernst Wegbreiter – Forgotten German Utopist (by Michael Stöhr)
    • Sources and Comments (by Erik Simon)

If not otherwise indicated, all texts are collaborations of Erik Simon and A. & K. Steinmüller.

More information on the website of Memoranda.