> Well, as Hans-Peter Schwarz has pointed out, it was a bit with its > Phonophors and total information systems, in which history can be called > up as virtual reality, notions which were a little ahead of their time.
You can also add the hints at the nuclear catastrophe (war? accident?), and the sociopolitical change occurred in the world which lead to the government (rule) of the Condor. > To put it briefly, I would suggest that in "science-fiction" the > fictional exploration of the possibilities of science is the essential > feature of the genre. John, here I have to disagree. I have devoted a good part of my life to the study of Sf literature, and I can tell you that your definition covers only a region of the land of SF, the one usually labelled as "hard SF". Surely when a writer like Juenger sits at his table and begins writing a novel, he/she does not think "now I'll write science-fiction". He probably thinks "now I'll write another novel". But we, as critics, have to point out the elements belonging to a certain literary tradition in a given text. Nineteen Eighty-Four is SF (I had an interesting discussion on this issue on another mailing list devoted to SF), and its kernel is not technology but politics and sociology. If I had to classify Eumeswil I'd probably put it in the "sophisticated SF" slot--together with Orwell's, Zamjatin's, CS Lewis' and Aldous Huxley's novels. > I do not really think that this is quite the case in "Eumeswil". > On the one hand, any novel which wants to reflect on the condition > of humanity/the individual within a highly technicised and media > dominated society like ours, does deal in fictional terms with > scientific and the technical, but "Eumeswil" does not make > technical/scientific practice the centre of its interest, nor does > it depend on a fictional elaboration of this practice. The same may be said for several texts (both novels and short stories) which are currently published, sold, and read as science-fiction. There is surely a contradiction with the name of the genre, with that "science" part of the name (that's why there have been attempts to rename the genre as "speculative-fiction" et al.)--but that's not the only contradiction we can find in genre theory... > Rather - I would see the central axis of the novel as the struggle > of Venator to assert his own self, even if only internally, in the > face of political and technical domination from outside. It does > offer a bleak vision of the future, but its post-histoire scenario > is not essentially dependent on gizmos or fictionalised scientific > theory. I agree. But that is what you have, for instance, in Orwell's 1984. The style of the two writers is different; and poor Winston Smith is not as shrewd and cold-blooded as Venator, so that in the end he is crushed. But that's what is at stake in both novels. As for the post-historical scenario, that's something which is quite familiar to all Sf readers, in fact (being I in part one of them) it helped me a lot to "enter" the fictional world of Eumeswil. But maybe the more correct definition would be "post-atomic". There are several references to this in the novel, and the wilderness where Venator and the Condor go at the end of the story resembles very much the nuclear wastelands described in so many Sf novels. The truth is that good writers use whatever they need, wherever it comes from, whenever they like--whatever its name may be. Umberto Rossi "A commission is appointed To confer with a Volscian commission About perpetual peace"--and nobody told me!
