SOURCE: Fickert, Kurt J. “The Mystery of Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel.” In Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, edited by Jan Hodenson and Howard Pearce, pp. 219-25. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Fickert discusses the central role of the glass bead game to Das Glasperlenspiel.

The fantasy underlying Hermann Hesse's futuristic novel Das Glasperlenspiel is rather limited in scope. The world in the twenty-third century, as Hesse envisions it, has not changed in essence from what it is in the twentieth. As a matter of fact, means of transportation seem to have retrogressed: Locomotion on foot prevails, and travel by air is not even mentioned. Only in respect to the book's two central symbols has Hesse essayed an imaginative approach to the future. He has invented a country, Castalia, where an intellectual elite harbor...