Claës Lundin
Claës Lundin (1825-1908) was a Swedish journalist and author, best known for his contribution to the science fiction genre with his novel "Oxygen och Aromasia," published in 1878. The work presents a satirical vision of a failed utopia set several centuries in the future, incorporating popular science fiction tropes such as time travel, aliens, and spaceships. Despite being set in a distant future, Lundin’s narrative anticipated certain societal issues, particularly in the realm of journalism, foreshadowing challenges like sensationalism in news reporting that resonate with today's media landscape.
Lundin's single foray into science fiction drew inspiration from German author Kurt Lasswitz and is notable for its enduring readability, with editions still being published as late as 1974. In addition to his novel, Lundin was an influential figure in Swedish literature, serving as a mentor to playwright August Strindberg and co-authoring "Gamla Stockholm," a collection of illustrated stories about the city. His contributions are recognized as pivotal in sparking a significant science fiction movement in Sweden, which led to the creation of numerous original works and translations in the genre during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Claës Lundin
- Born: November 12, 1825
- Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden
- Died: 1908
- Place of death:
Biography
Claës Lundin was born in 1825 in Stockholm, Sweden, and worked primarily as a journalist. He wrote the science-fiction novel Oxygen och Aromasia, published in 1878, a satirical story set in a failed utopia a few hundred years in the future. He played with almost all the common tropes of science fiction, including time travel, aliens, spaceships, and temporal paradoxes. Although technology has passed some of his wonders by, Oxygen och Aromasia has remained astonishingly readable, and a new edition was published as recently as 1974.
Although Lundin’s future utopia fails to resemble contemporary society, his novel accurately predicted some aspects of modern life. For instance, his image of the future of the Swedish newspaper industry foresees the problem of continual news coverage, which has since appeared with the rise of the cable television news channels. Although Lundin was still thinking in terms of newspaper journalism and created a Stockholm jammed with newspapers, including one called News of the Hour, he foresaw the problem of needing to keep the news flowing to the point that trivial events are inflated far beyond their actual newsworthiness, with sensationalism driving out real journalism because readers’ attention spans decline with the continual demand for novelty.
Oxygen och Armomasia was Lundin’s only work of science fiction and was heavily derivative of Kurt Lasswitz’s Bilder aus den Zukunft (1878), which had been published in Breslau, Germany, a few months before the publication of Lundin’s book. Lundin is best remembered as the mentor of playwright August Strindberg, with whom he wrote Gamla Stockholm, a collection of stories about the old city of Stockholm, gorgeously illustrated with engravings. Lundin died in 1908, but his single science-fiction novel is often credited with setting off a major science-fiction movement in Sweden, leading to the production of three hundred original Swedish-language science-fiction novels and five hundred Swedish translations of works of science fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.