YMMV / Kurd Laßwitz

• Harsher in Hindsight: The villain of Auf zwei Planeten ultimately plans to commit genocide against humanity, and when the rest of Mars finds out about this, even though they have been fighting a war of conquest against the humans for some time and believe them to be their inferiors, they decide to... react with horror and outrage to the villain's scheme and vote him and his party out of office in a landslide. This is a German novel. It's even more uncomfortable because Laßwitz genuinely believed in progress, and included the genocide subplot in order to demonstrate that the Martians are morally superior to the Earthlings not because they are without sin, but because they have advanced beyond superstition and tyranny, and will reject them if they ever try to assert themselves again.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In Auf zwei Planeten America Saves the Day, but it would take 74 years for the first American edition of the novel to be published.
• Named After Someone Famous: A crater on Mars and an asteroid (46514) are named after Kurd Laßwitz.
• Technology Marches On: Even though Marconi had conducted his first experiments two years before the publication of Auf zwei Planeten, radio telecommunication is not used in the novel. The Martians use a system of modulated light-rays for telecommunication, which obviously only works line-of-sight. Consequently communication between Mars and Earth can break down at inconvenient (or, from the narrator's point of view: convenient) moments.