REVIEW-ARTICLES
BOOKS IN REVIEW
REVIEW ARTICLES
Franz Rottensteiner
Some German Writings on Science Fiction
Since I last reported here on German books about SF (see SFS
No. 4: 1974), they have swollen to a veritable flood. Leaving aside those that I have
edited or contributed to,1 I might begin by mentioning two
translations, which may be more accessible to some readers in German than in the original
languages. The first is Julij Kagarlizki's Was ist Phantastik? (What is SF?, [East]
Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 1977. 339p. 12 Mark), the only book on SF to appear in the German
Democratic Republic so far. This popularizing and unsystematic history-cum-philosophy of
SF (reviewed in SFS No. 6: 1975) by a well-known Russian scholar
is far less dogmatic than some of the studies by West German Marxists referred to later;
in fact, Kagarlizki finds even some words in defense of Heinlein. The other is volume one
of Stanislaw Lem's Phantastik und Futurologie (SF and Futurology, Frankfurt:
Insel Verlag, 1977. 478p. DM 34), as part of Lem's German-language Collected Works; it
is a difficult and complex attempt at a theory of SF and a sometimes vitriolic attack on
SF as it is (a translation of Lem's chapter on the time-travel story appeared in
SFS No. 3). Volume two, which is even more massive, is to follow in
1979.
Dieter Hasselblatt's
Grune Männchen vom Mars: Science Fiction fur Leser und Macher
(Little
Green Men From Mars: SF for Readers and Writers, Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1977.
234p. DM 26) is a popular introduction to SF by the man responsible for the production of
many SF radio-plays, first in Cologne, and now with Bayerische Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio)
in Munich. He has also often written on SF in the German press, lectured on it, edited a
series of juvenile SF for Thienemann Verlag, and himself begun writing it. His book is an
anecdotal, wide-ranging, richly documented, but not very well organized survey of SF, with
particular stress on market conditions, packaging, advertising, and spin-offs of the
written product. Considering SF as a market commodity, he summarizes and criticizes a
small number of SF stories and writers, following no discernible plan: Orwell's
1984,
e.g., is lumped together with politico-technological potboilers of a German "hard
SF" writer between the World Wars like Hans Dominik on the thin pretext that they are
both somehow "prophetic." The book also contains much advice, mostly sound, to
novices on how to construct an effective story. What the book has to say about theory is
to be found in a few short chapters on the difference between SF, utopia, and futurology.
Though they distinguish between symbolic and literal models of future situations, these
chapters are more epigrammatic than analytic. Lem is often quoted, but whereas Lem is
deeply worried about the state of and trends in SF, Hasselblatt is (like Leslie Fiedler)
quite satisfied with the kind of fiction that the masses "really want to read."
He does not establish any standards, and frequently attacks modern literature as well as
the supposedly arrogant defenders of "high literature" -- views that are
somewhat surprising for someone whose doctoral thesis was on Franz Kafka. For Hasselblatt,
SF is just another product in the market place. He quotes a good deal from other books and
newspaper articles on SF, including much material that is difficult to find, and for this
his entertaining and popularly written book is valuable; but its aims are unfocussed, and
its critical value strictly limited.
Die deformierte Zukunft:
Untersuchungen zur Science Fiction, edited by Reimer
Jehmlich and Hartmut Lück (The Deformed Future: Studies in SF.
208p.
DM 22), comprises six essays by the editors and two SF fans. Jehmlich is a teacher (now
writing a full-length study of SF), while Lück is an extremely leftist Communist critic.
The introduction to SF by Reimer Jehmlich, "Es war einmal im Jahre 17,000,"
tries to give a capsule history of the genre, describe its characteristics, define it, and
show what differentiates it from other genres; it also lists the weaknesses of SF, and
gives suggestions for its improvement. All this is perhaps too much for a short essay,
many of whose facts are wrong or at least misleading (e.g., his discussion of the economic
situation of SF writers does not specify to which time his statements may have applied).
More modest but more informative is Gerd Hallenberger's survey of SF
"Amateurzeitschriften" or fanzines. He discusses a number of select fanzines and
academic journals on SF: Foundation, Extrapolation, Quarber Merkur, the German Science
Fiction
Times, The Riverside Quarterly, SF Commentary, and Speculation.
Jehmlich's second, and better, essay is a discussion of SF treatments of war and armed
conflicts, "Das andere ist Handarbeit: Martialische Science Fiction." Dealing
with the notion advanced by some German Marxist critics that SF is indoctrination, a
conscious attempt to cement the ideology of capitalism (and some more sinister isms), he
points out that SF situations and characters are far too unreal to allow an easy
identification that would lead to political action. Nonetheless, the simplifications and
black-white polarizations of SF do falsify reality and tempt the reader to accept
simplistic solutions; furthermore, SF uncritically presents violence as a legitimate means
for the solution of real conflicts. Therein lies its danger, not in any conscious or overt
political indoctrination. This strikes me as a balanced assessment of the effect of
fiction.
In "Vom galaktischen Geist und seinen Propheten: Theologische Elemente in der
Science Fiction" Harmut Lück discusses the role of religion in writers like Asimov,
Clarke, Blish, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and a few others; as a materialist he deplores such
remnants of metaphysics, believing that it is their destiny to die out, and that it is
necessary to change those situations of Earth that make metaphysical justifications
necessary.
Hans Joachim Alpers' essay "Weltuntergangsvisionen in der Science Fiction" is
a disappointment. Alpers discusses several end-of-the-world and post-atomic stories by
Wyndham, Christopher, Ballard, and others, and interprets the cataclysms described--which
unite mankind against a common threat--as an escape from facing the real nature of
conflicts in our society, i.e. the struggle between social classes. In such an approach,
there is to my mind no place for literary values, and logically Alpers find that there is
really nothing to choose between the various cataclysmic stories, however good or bad they
may be.
Lück's second essay, "Der 'Grosse Ring' der Galaxis: Tendenzen der
wissenschaftlich- fantastischen Literatur in der Sowjetunion," is a short survey of
Soviet SF. He sees it as something radically different from the Western variety -- as
socially more conscious and more responsible. He discusses in some detail Bogdanov's
Red
Star (1907), Alexei Tolstoi's Aelita, and Efremov. The latter's Andromeda is presented as approaching the ideal of Soviet SF, and
The Hour of the
Bull as a political tract -- crude political propaganda -- that takes the Soviet side
in the Sino-Soviet conflict. Zamiatim, of course, is discussed only as a counter-
revolutionary.
Lück is also the
author of a full study of Soviet SF, Fantastik, Science
Fiction, Utopie: Das Realismusproblem in der utopisch-fantastischen Literatur (Fantasy,
SF, Utopia: The Problem of Realism, D-6300 Giessen, Box 2328: Focus Verlag, 1977.
355p. DM 24, 80), a revised version of his doctoral dissertation, "Utopie und
Prognose" (Bremen Univ., 1975). Focus Verlag is one of several small Marxist
publishers in West Germany, and the work a long exposition of Lück's extremely dogmatic
views on SF. For him, SF from socialist countries is something utterly different from both
utopias and Western SF. It is a politically committed literature which is socially based
on the development towards socialism and deals with social and technological problems of
the future. "Scientific" in his sense means based on "scientific
socialism" and materialism. He uses the fathers of Marxism to arrive at his very
narrow and personal definition of what is true realism in literature. The trouble with
such views, which revolve around subtle points of dogma culled from obsolete writings, is
that violent quarrels about them ensue even (and especially) between Marxist critics. Thus
Lück polemicizes not just against non-Marxist critics but also against all other Marxists
who have written on SF. It should also be noted that this dogmatism seems to be a
particular trait of the apostolic West German leftists, who give themselves airs of being
the sole possessors of the real truth in political and literary matters. The best critics
from actual Communist countries write much more subtly and less Teutonically: the Soviet
critics' references to Marxism often appear as a necessary exercise, while from some
critics in other Warsaw Pact countries you would not guess that Marx or Lenin ever
existed.
The upshot in Lück is a highly artificial ideal construct of what SF should be, but in
reality never was -- not even in its Communist versions. For Lück, the main purpose of SF
is criticism of the existing social order and the prognosis of an alternative future
order, both based on a "scientific" socialism which is materialist and not
positivist or phenomenological (Lem, e.g., is branded by Lück as positivistic and
theological). This highly idiosyncratic theoretical part is followed by a brief polemic
with "bourgeois" and Soviet SF criticism. Then he proceeds to the discussion of
the texts themselves: Bellamy, Morris, a German Marxist utopia of the 1930's (Utopolis
by Werner Illing), and some Western SF Asimov and Walter M. Miller, Jr., amongst
others--in which he notes theories of Social Darwinism, symbols of god, and apocalypses.
Part three, the actual discussion of Soviet SF, fails to show that its social commitment
is indeed as central as Lück claims. Also, l would say that the actual state of SF and SF
publishing in the Warsaw Pact countries has little in common with his lofty ideas.
In addition to Lück's, two more West German doctoral theses
on Soviet SF have been published. The better of the two is
Bernd
Rullkötter's
Die Wissenschaftliche Phantastik der
Sowjetunion: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung der spekulativen literatur in Ost und West,
European University Papers, Series XVIII, Comparative Literature, vol. 5 (Bern:
Herbert Lang, and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1974. 303p. SFr. 45, 60). His well-researched
study, rich in material, gives a comparative history and overview of Soviet SF, noting
that SF is more highly regarded in the USSR than in the West and more socially oriented,
but not necessarily better: it is primarily a "better behaved sister" of Western
SF. Both use the same clichés -- such as robots, time travel, contact with aliens --
although with some significant differences. The real consequences of time travel
paradoxes, e.g., are rarely considered -- and a story, say, in which the October
Revolution did not take place or one in which communism lost out to capitalism could not
get published -- in the Soviet Union. Therefore the authors escape from the narrow limits
of what is possible as social critique into superficial paradoxes, satires of the class
enemy or harmless jokes. Most valuable in this book are perhaps the segments that discuss
the well-known anti-utopias and the influence of Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor"
on SF. Typical for the mass of Soviet SF is the positive, integrated, non-alienated hero;
there are no indecisive and doubting Dostoevskian individuals or nineteeth-century
"superfluous people" in Soviet literature. But such heroes reappear to some
extent in Soviet SF by means of confronting convinced communists with feudal and bourgeois
states on other planets, where they necessarily feel out of place. The problems with
Soviet authorities begin when the heroes -- as in some novels of the Strugatskys, notably
in The Snail on the Slope -- feel alienated in a communist society too.
The other book on Russian SF is
Hans
Földeak's Neuere Tendenzen der sowjetischen Science
Fiction, Slavistische Beiträge No. 88 (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1975.
208p. DM 21), a solid, though not brilliant thesis. Its first part is again a not terribly
original discussion of the "structure of SF," oriented to a large extent towards
Suvin (sometimes polemically, especially as regards Suvin's views on
"estrangement") and his extrapolative and analogical models of SF. Földeak
distinguishes between "realistic-speculative" (extrapolative and autonomous)
models and "signaling" models of SF (models with transposition in space, with
playful estrangement, and encoded models). The main part of his book presents analyses,
more detailed than in either Rullkötter or Lück, of selected works of Soviet SF, which
are discussed under headings supposedly typical for a kind of Soviet SF. Thus the section
"Positive Didactism" discusses under "space travel" the Strugatsky's
Land
of the Purple Clouds, under "social modeling" Efremov's Andromeda, and
under "moral-philosophical didactism" the Strugatskys' Far Rainbow; while
"Negative Didacticism" comprises "ideological didacticism" (Efremov's
The
Hour of the Bull), "socio-political criticism" (the Strugatskys'
Final
Circle of Paradise), "philosophical fantasy" (Gennadiy Gor), "playful
satire" (the Strugatskys' Monday Begins on Saturday and the humorous
writings of llya Varshavsky), and finally SF as the expression of an existentialist
experience (the Strugatskys' Snail on the Slope). A third part of Földeak's book
gives another capsule history of the genre in the Soviet Union, sometimes under captions
that reflect Soviet literary politics--either tactics employed by reviewers to defend the
genre, or fetters prepared by officials: "Scientific Dreams in Literary Form,"
"Literature About the Bright Future," "SF as an Ideological Weapon."
Another group of German works deals specifically with
Anglo-American SF. The most detailed of them is perhaps
Martin
Schäfer's Science Fiction als Ideologiekritik?:
Utopische Spuren in der amerikanischen SF-Literatur 1940-1955, American
Studies, vol. 48 (SF as Ideological Critique? Utopian Traces in US SF, Stuttgart:
Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1977. 329p. DM 39. 50). This study traces the survival of
the utopian impulse in current SF. It tidily begins with general chapters on the problems
and the history of utopian and similar fiction. The Gothic romances, in which a
revolutionary-enlightening strand is apparent, are particularly stressed, and the
anti-utopias briefly discussed. This is followed by a short and generally accurate
description of the US publication forms and market conditions in 1940-55. The main thrust
is an investigation of SF views on technology especially apparent in the texts of
Heinlein, De Camp, Kuttner, and other Astounding writers. Schäfer diagnoses a
preference for technological efficiency, the smooth functioning of social mechanism
(typically expressed in Heinlein's story "The Roads Must Roll"), and a
libertarian individualism, combined with a deep distrust of the dumb masses. Power belongs
rightfully to a technologically competent elite, and liberty is stressed as a necessary
prerequisite for the success of the competent. The test for the competence of the
technological elite is that, given a free play of forces, it emerges as the guardian of
efficiency. Writers like Leiber, Kuttner, and Sturgeon are seen as forming a certain
opposition to the common Astounding philosophy; at some times--in particular,
immediately after the war and the atomic bomb--a sort of theory of the convergence of
social systems was being advanced, in the sense that ruthless efforts to meet the danger
posed by a warlike enemy would destroy liberty just as surely. Later, The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy provided a forum for these more
critical and ironical writers, but the greatest public success was the nostalgic
sentimentality of a Ray Bradbury. Schäfer also discusses some rather tame SF polemics
against McCarthy that sometimes offered an escape into space as salvation. The highest
praise is lavished on Philip K. Dick, even in whose earliest work Schäfer finds a genuine
political consciousness and an individual way of discussing critical concerns. But he also
ascribes certain utopian tendencies--although largely submerged, and hardly articulated --
even to mass market SF. They appear on four different levels: in unconscious or
half-conscious dreams and childish fantasies; in certain literary techniques and utopian
cliches (such as the notion of a perfectible future world); in the narrative pattern of
the disrupted world order that is to be restored; and in conscious (albeit mostly
technocratic) utopianism, social criticism, and (far too seldom) the construction of
future societies. Schäfer's analyses are far more detailed than is usual in German
writings on SF, but they too focus on the ideological content of SF, and the actual
presentation is often involved and hard to follow.
In sheer size, the hugest work on SF so far in German is
Science Fiction Literatur in den USA: Vorstudien fur eine
materialistische Paraliteraturwissenschaft (Giessen: Focus Verlag,
1978. 519p. DM 32) by
Horst Schröder, a
German author and translator living in Scandinavia, and in contact with Swedish fandom.
Like Hasselblatt. he considers SF from the point of view of popular fiction,
"paraliterature" as he neutrally calls it; like Lück, he is a Marxist, though
not so doctrinaire. He is especially concerned with market conditions and commercial forms
of SF; he has talked with authors, and presents data on circulation (which do not seem
very reliable to me), magazines, books, publishers, readers, authors, the packaging and
marketing of SF. In the third and longest part of his book he studies the "Ideology
of SF" in chapters whose headings are self-explanatory: "Occult Lightning From
the Sky," "Scientific Rhetorics," "Mythological Capitalism,"
"False Realities," and "Sexual Politics" are some among them. In
"False Realities," for instance, he discusses racial struggles, anti-communism
in SF, McCarthyism, and the Vietnam war. Sub-chapters explicate individual authors or
typical or relevant works. Cordwainer Smith is discussed as "comforting terror,"
Poul Anderson's Tau Zero as "Darwinist proof by testing," Philip K.
Dick as a "petty-bourgeois." Nevertheless, Schröder's book presents a wealth of
data, and his value judgements, undoubtedly informed by his politics, are too often
justified.
A thesis both more neutral and more specialized
is
Dieter Wessels's Welt im
Chaos: Straktur und Funktion des Welthatastrophenmotirs in der neueren Science Fiction,
Studien zur Anglistik (World in Chaos: The Catastrophe Motif in Modern SF, Frankfurt:
Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1974. 332p. DM 32), a survey of cataclysmic stories in
modern SF. Wessel divides his subject into typological sections, such as natural
catastrophes, threats posed by aliens and monsters, science and technology, war,
population explosion, atomic war. He considers factors such as cultural pessimism,
escapism, and provocation, as well as horror effects. Structurally, he distinguishes
between the catastrophe as a historical event, catastrophe as a process, and tales of the
end of time; he considers time and space as structural elements, as well as the
plausibility of catastrophes. Catastrophic stories may function as a warning against
science and technology, as a description of the behavior of human beings in catastrophes
and also as social criticism and the expression of eschatological longing. In many tales
the desire for a simpler world, to be rebuilt out of the ruins of our world, becomes
apparent: the catastrophe is a purging of mankind. Foremost among the books discussed are
those by John Wyndham, Disch's The Genocides, and some books by J.G. Ballard
(which are vastly different from the usual catastrophic SF story). Wessels's book strikes
me as a run-of-the-mill thesis on SF; it supplies a convenient summary of a prominent SF
theme, but not much more, and could have included many more samples.
In Germany, "high" literature has come under attack
as an elitist pastime for a few well-to-do people, so that attention is beginning to be
paid to what is actually read by the masses and to the ideological content of their
reading matter. What was earlier dismissed as trash and tripe has now been given more
neutral terms such as popular fiction, paraliterature, mass literature; within it, much
attention has focused on the most successful SF series ever, Perry Rhodan. Its
publisher boasts now of a world circulation of 500 million copies, a record that will be
hard to beat. There are translations in France, Brazil, The Netherlands, Sweden, Japan,
the USA, and England. In Germany, the 4th reprint of this dime-novel series is reputedly
outselling the current numbers (now well over 800), a new Perry Rhodan magazine
is a huge success, and a recent edition of several Perry Rhodan adventures,
rewritten in book form, sold 70,000 copies, despite a price tag of more that $10. There
are also many highly profitable spin-offs of the series, Perry Rhodan has been
extensively commented on in the German press and on TV, mostly in inimical form (these
attacks have also boosted its circulation), and there are now also some books on it. The
first of them is
Perry Rhodan: Untersuchung einer
Science Fiction-Heftromanserie (Giessen: Anabas Verlag, 1976. 152p.
DM 14.80) by
Beate and Jürgen Ellerbrock and Frank Thiesse,
a volume produced with an eye for the teacher of German literature who sometimes stoops to
consider paraliterary genres. The aim of this very leftist book is to contribute to the
formation of a critical consciousness, i.e. one aware of the "class struggle."
It concentrates mostly on a description of the publications and their spin-offs, with
examples of the texts and long content summaries of four typical Perry Rhodan novels,
on the audience of the series, etc. The publishers of Perry Rhodan plug it as
liberal and fostering tolerance: in its universe, they say, all races and peoples are
equal, and war is only the last resort after all peaceful and diplomatic means for the
solving of conflicts have been exhausted; there are no military conquests. Between these
publicly proclaimed aims and what is actually described in the series there is a deep
divide, so that the critics are finding in it the basic motifs of the fascist ideology,
such as the emphasis on togetherness (including nationalism), property, certain
anticapitalist slogans directed against the large monopolies, a philosophy of the
scapegoat explaining all the evils of this world, and finally a militarism that prepares
the masses to accept war. So far, so good; the evidence for this in Perry Rhodan
cannot
be questioned. But the authors also add some heavily ideological comment (in the jargon of
the German left) on the situation in West Germany.
A second study of the Perry Rhodan series is much more
thoroughgoing and generally superior, but has the annoying habit of pretending to be a
study of SF as a whole. This is Klaus-Peter Klein's
Zukunftzwischen Trauma und Mythos: Science-fiction: Zur Wirkungsästhetik,
Sozialpsychologie und Didaktik eines literarischen Massenphänomens,
Literaturwissenschaft-Gesellschaftswissenschaft.
Materialien und Untersuchungen zur Literatursoziologie, No. 19 (The Future Between
Trauma and Myth, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett 1976. 248p. DM 19.80). Although the author
begins, in the academic tradition, with a discussion of previous German writings on SF,
his book deals in effect only with Perry Rhodan, and what few quotations from
other dime novels it contains are just thrown in for an alibi (such as a
"fascist" quote from Poul Anderson). He concedes that other SF is not quite so
sterile in sexual matters as is Rhodan, but that is all. This is extremely
misleading, for the symptoms of fascism that he naturally enough discovers in Perry
Rhodan would be hard to confirm from a statistical sample of better SF. Once it is
set aside, Klein's is a quite useful analysis of the Perry Rhodan universe, under
the aspects of ideology, technology, science, work, the professions, erotics and
sexuality, religion and mythology, war and conflicts, politics, economics, and so on.
Klein finds that the series masquerades behind a claim to human intelligence which has no
basis in the actuality of the texts themselves, since the authors employ an inept,
pseudo-sophisticated vocabulary, pretending to a knowledge that they do not have. Klein
diagnoses in the series militarism, adherence to the Führer principle, imperialism,
colonialism, racism, biologism, escapism, and a regression into myth. The book
concentrates on the ideological analysis, which is generally more useful than the short
chapters on narrative structures, metaphors, and composition of the novels. One cannot
help feeling, however, that a study of such length of a series that is morally and in
other ways so objectionable is quite a waste of time.
The only single-author studies available in German are devoted to
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915), an outsider in German literature. Scheerbart was not an SF
writer in the strict or "hard" sense, but he was also unlike other fantasy
writers. In his books, written in a quite simple, almost childlike style, he created
mostly cosmic and oriental worlds, indulging in excesses of forms and colors. He favored
overflowing cosmic wonders, constantly metamorphosing. In his literary cosmos stars,
comets, and planets are sentient beings, and everything is divorced from any terrestrial
-- physical or social -- gravity and stands in total opposition to Earth and its misery. A
recent full-length study of his work is Christian Ruosch's Die phantastisch-surreale Welt im Werke Paul Scheerbart
(European
University Papers, Series 1, German language and literature, vol. 42 (Bern: Herber Lang,
1970. 136p. SFr. 19.80). Ruosch expounds especially the similarities between Scheerbart
and earlier artists of the grotesque and the surreal, such as Brueghel, da Vinci's
apocalyptic paintings, Dürer, Rafael, Michelangelo, Arcimboldi, and the contemporary
Viennese painter Ernst Fuchs, but also mystic, cosmic, and gnostic authors like Athanasius
Kircher and Cyrano (one of the writers admired by Scheerbart); he also notes certain
similarities with Jung's archetypes. Ruosch discusses in detail Scheerbart's new
aesthetics, arrived at by putting together old and familiar elements, his literature of
"otherness," his continually changing and metamorphosing world of cosmic beauty,
his playing with language, and the paradises envisioned: a lost paradise, the Oriental
paradise, an artificial, and a future paradise. This is a work that covers much ground,
quotes extensively from Scheerbart's work, and manages to give a comprehensive picture of
the unique literary universe of this strange writer.
The second and even larger book on Paul Scheerbart in the same
series, Hubertus von Gemmingen's Paul Scheerbarts astrale Literatur,
Series I, German
language and literature, vol. 173 (Bern: Herbert Lang, and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1976.
253p. 36 SFr), is an analysis of Lesabéndio (1913). Often called Scheerbart's
best novel, this text develops a conflict between the more technologically and the more
artistically minded factions among the inhabitants of the fairy-tale world on the asteroid
Pallas. Lesabéndio is a leader bent on building a high tower and achieving communication
with the greater cosmos beyond his world through a contact with the "head
system" of his asteroid, hidden by a luminous cloud. Von Gemmingen provides a
scrupulous and detailed description of the novel, seeing the movement between above and
below as the decisive device of the novel. He also investigates the book's relationship
with other utopias and fantasies. His work, however, seems to me more industrious than
insightful.
Finally, one should mention that the best German periodical is still Science
Fiction Times, a semi-professional magazine appearing about four times a year from Bremerhaven, published by the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Spekulative Thematik" (6
issues may be ordered for DM 22 from H.J. Alpers, Weissenburger Str. 6, D-2850
Bremerhaven, West Germany). The magazine has improved much in recent years. Each issue
features a number of longish, usually thoughtful and critical, essays and many shorter
reviews, as well as current bibliography and news on the SF and fantasy scene in West
Germany and abroad. Some numbers have been devoted to special subjects or themes - such as
comics or films, on which Science Fiction Times is particularly strong.2
NOTES
1. Nonetheless, the SFS editors feel that Dr. Rottensteiner's
modesty should not deprive our readers of essential information. The other critical
anthologies are:
-- Weigand, Jörg. Die triviale Phantasie: Beiträge zur Verwertbarkeit von Science
Fiction. Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Asgard-Verlag Dr. Werner Hippe KG. 1976. I 60pp. DM 20.
Essays by Wolfgang Jeschke, Hans Joachim Alpers, Franz Rottensteiner, Jörg Weigand,
Herbert W. Franke, Dieter Hasselblatt, Jürgen vom Scheidt, Rudolf Stefen (4 of them
translated in SFS Nos. 13 and 14).
--Weigand, Jörg, ed. Vorbildliches Morgen: Experten stellen ausgewählte
Science
Fiction-Stories vor. Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Asgard Verlag, 1978. 132pp. DM 17.80. Hans
Joachim Alpers, Eike Barmeyer, Walter Ernsting, Jörg Weigand, Jürgen vom Scheid, Franz
Rottensteiner, Thomas Le Blanc, Heinrich Vormweg and Herbert W. Franke select and comment
on stories by Ballard, Bradbury, Clarke, Franke, Klaus Lea, Lem, Pohl, Tenn, and Zelazny.
--Rottensteiner, Franz, ed. Polaris 3. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1974 266pp, DM
7. An anthology of Russian SF, containing essays by Rafail Nudelman and Darko Suvin.
--Rottensteiner, Franz, ed. Polaris 3. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1975 239pp, DM
7. Includes essays by Uwe Japp, Hans Joachim Piechotta, A. Lebedev, and Ion Hobana.
--Rottensteiner, Franz, ed. Polaris 4. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978 188pp,
DM 6. Devoted to French SF, includes essays by Ion Hobana, J.-P. Vernier, Jorg Kirchbaum
& Rein A. Zondergeld, and Jörg Weigand (the Vernier essay taken from SFS No. 6). - DS
2. Franz Rottensteiner publishes the irregularly appearing
periodical Quarber Merkur (usually 4 issues of large dittoed format yearly, ca.
55,000 words per issue; available from the publisher Alpers at his above address at DM 3
per issue). It has to be mentioned here as undoubtedly the most important journal of SF
and fantasy criticism on the European continent. Its particular strength is that it covers
SF from all over Europe and America. It contains criticism translated from English and
Eastern-European languages; it has pioneered the recognition of Scheerbart, Lem, the
Strugatsky Brothers, etc. It is strongly recommended to anyone wishing to be in contact
with European SF criticism. --
DS
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