Science Fiktion

Author:   Franz Fuhmann ,  Andrew B B Hamilton ,  Claire Van Den Broek
Publisher:   Seagull Books London Ltd
ISBN:  

9780857426017


Pages:   280
Publication Date:   15 November 2018
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Science Fiktion


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Overview

A German twist on an Anglophone tradition, Science Fiktion provides a disturbing vision of the future from the other side of the Berlin Wall. When a young reader once asked Franz Fühmann if he considered his work to be science fiction, he was quick to deny it: he wanted nothing to do with the genre. As he began writing the stories that make up this volume, however, he found himself coming around to the idea of a hybrid genre—what he calls in German Saiäns-Fiktschen, ""science fiktion"" with a k.   In seven interlocking stories, Science Fiktion offers a steampunk takedown of the logic of the Cold War. In this imagined future, two nations compete for global dominance: Uniterr, an exaggeration of the Eastern Bloc, in which personal freedom is curtailed and life regulated with cartoonish strictness; and Libroterr, in which the decadence of the West has been pushed beyond all reason. The stories follow three young citizens of Uniterr: Jirro, a young neutrinologist whose life is forever changed by a year spent abroad in Libroterr; Janno, a causologist condemned to a life of mediocrity in Uniterr’s bureaucracy for the briefest of impure thoughts; and Pavlo, an inventor and a drunkard, whose mind pushes against the limits of what his world allows. Through these three lives, Fühmann gradually unfolds the contours of their bizarre world in a master class of understated world-making. As the reader is swept up in the madness of Libroterr’s predator ads (which grab you on the street) and Uniterr’s mandatory mind readings, Fühmann’s dark comedy from the last century comes to seem all the more prescient in ours.

Full Product Details

Author:   Franz Fuhmann ,  Andrew B B Hamilton ,  Claire Van Den Broek
Publisher:   Seagull Books London Ltd
Imprint:   Seagull Books London Ltd
ISBN:  

9780857426017


ISBN 10:   085742601
Pages:   280
Publication Date:   15 November 2018
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Franz Fühmann (1922-84) is one of modern Germany's most fascinating literary figures, and the author of dozens of novels, short stories, essays, poems, ballets, and children's books. Andrew B. B. Hamilton is visiting assistant professor of German at Bowdoin College and author of several works on modern German and Austrian literature. Claire Y. van den Broek is an adjunct professor of literature at Southern New Hampshire University. Her previous translations include the work of Moroccan-Dutch authors Hafid Bouazza and Abdelkader Benali.

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