Otto Witt
1875–1923
Biography
Otto Witt (1875–1923) was a Swedish writer who worked across several popular genres in the years before and after the First World War. He was born in the Stora Kopparberg parish of Kopparberg county, in central Sweden, and died in Stockholm in 1923. He is counted among the early figures of Swedish science fiction. He published Hugin, a science periodical that gave room to speculative essays and stories, and which is sometimes called Sweden's first science fiction magazine. Hugin was also among the first magazines anywhere to carry science fiction regularly, though its influence seems to have stayed mostly within Sweden.
His output was varied. Alongside science fiction he wrote boys' adventure books, technical tales for young readers and a run of detective novels. He made his debut in the crime genre in 1914 with De svarta kulorna, and by one count he wrote eleven detective novels, two of them under the pseudonym Sam King. His science fiction includes titles such as Guldgruvan (1912) and Hur månen erövrades (1915), as well as Den underbara spegeln from 1914.
The site holds Den underbara spegeln (literally The Wonderful Mirror), published in 1914 by Förlagsaktiebolaget Västra Sverige. It belongs to the group of science fiction titles he published in the 1910s, and it is a good entry point to the early Swedish science fiction that he helped to shape. Readers who come to Witt through this book will see a writer who was at home in the imaginative and the popular at the same time.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Den Underbara Spegeln
by Otto Witt
On a blazing June day in the Berlin of 1950, as imagined in 1914, a lieutenant arrives in suspiciously high spirits, a will is read, and a plan takes shape to build a giant mirror for a telescope on a volcanic island. Otto Witt's early Swedish science fiction mixes inventions, a…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.