I don’t normally write a foreword for the books in this series, but this time I thought I’d give you all a little warning. In this book, I’m going to be heavily referencing an author utterly unheard of in the US: Karl May. This 19th-century German writer of American Westerns is the bestselling writer of all time in Germany. His books, particularly Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, Old Surehand, and Old Firehand, are still widely in print. Many movies have been made from them (mostly using the Czech Republic as a stand-in for the American Southwest, and Italian actors as Native Americans). There are Karl May Festivals all over Germany every year, where avid fans watch reenactments and plays based on the books and dress as their favorite characters, not unlike Western-themed, outdoor versions of American SF conventions. Karl May mania has created over a century’s worth of fans just as rabid as any would-be Jedi or Trekker.

Karl May’s closest contemporary counterpart is probably J. K. Rowling, but it remains to be seen whether the popularity of Harry Potter will persist for 150 years, as the popularity of Winnetou has in Germany.

I have no explanation for this. We’re not exactly talking Shakespeare, here. Karl May literally writes himself as the hero of the Old Shatterhand series. The books themselves are incredibly self-indulgent; May’s heroes never, ever put a foot wrong. Old Shatterhand is such a powerful puncher that he levels his opponents with a single blow; never having faced a grizzly before, he kills one with a knife; never having seen a buffalo, he takes down an enormous bull with a single shot to the heart! Winnetou is the noblest of “noble savages,” and is so accurate in predicting the movements of his enemies that you’d suspect psychic powers. May strongly encouraged his readers to believe that he, personally, was the hero of his works, despite never once having set foot on US soil, much less gone as far as the West, a fact that is painfully obvious to anyone who reads the original German or the one good translation I was able to find. He wrote in the first person, named his hero “Charlie” (the English version of Karl), then dressed as Charlie and encouraged all his fans to assume Charlie’s adventures were his own. And yet hundreds of thousands of Germans read and reread the books obsessively, and no less a personage than Albert Einstein said that the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand brightened his childhood.