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(1892-1972) Czech government official and author whose literary career began after active service during World War One in the Austria-Hungary army on the Russian front, where he was captured and became a prisoner of war; his wartime experiences dominate his first books. Weiss is of sf interest initially for Dům o 1000 patrech (1929; trans Alexandra Büchler as The House of a Thousand Floors 2014), an allegory-tinted novel whose protagonist, suffering from Amnesia, awakens into a surreally depicted technolatrous Dystopia dominated by the eponymous tower; his mission – for which a mysterious agency has granted him a month's Invisibility – is to progress upwards, storey by storey, examining the micro-worlds housed at various levels en route, until he finds the totalitarian ruler of this land, and kills him. The tale is told within a dream-frame, a device whose tiresomeness may have impeded its translation until recently, though Weiss generates a sense of vertiginous ambivalence about its use here. A later pre-War tale, Spáč ve zvěrokruhu ["The Sleeper in the Zodiac"] (1937), describes the life of a schoolteacher whose metabolism shifts with the seasons.
After World War Two, Weiss remained for a while a prominent Czech literary figure, publishing several volumes of sf stories (not translated into English) before silenced by quasi-official disapproval in 1964. [JC]
born Jilemnice, Austria-Hungary [now Czech Republic]: 10 May 1892
died Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]: 7 March 1972
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 04:51 am on 13 January 2025.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/weiss_jan>