Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, but for speculative literature his key work is The Glass Bead Game (1943), set in a far-future province devoted to a sublime synthesis of all human knowledge and art. Its imagined future civilisation and meditative depth make it a singular contribution to the utopian and philosophical strands of the genre.