Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries by Ingo Cornils (review)

Anyone who spends time thinking about science fiction and German Studies may notice a couple of conspicuous omissions: that of German-language work from popular canons of global science fiction, and that of science fiction studies from German Studies and Germanistik. Ingo Cornils sets out to address this dual deficit in his new book, which poses three guiding research questions: how has German science fiction responded to the rapid scientific and technological change of the past 125 years, what is distinct about German science fiction, and how might it help a global audience think about the future? The book posits “that German SF is an ongoing project of Zukunftsbewältigung to help us cope with the impact of scientific and technological advances that promise us Promethean capabilities but require us to make far-reaching ethical choices” (9). (If that recurring, universalizing “us” strikes you as confusing in a work of historical literary scholarship, which would typically track specific, shifting, and often competing readerships, publics, and literary communities, hold that thought for a moment.)

Beyond Tomorrow consists of an introduction and a conclusion, as well as eighteen short chapters: the first four map out cognate discourses (utopian thought, futurology, utopian/dystopian fiction) and their relationships to science fiction; the fifth sketches an overview of German science fiction; and each of the remaining thirteen chapters considers a common motif, trope, or theme of science fiction, from AI to space travel to surveillance, with exemplary novels and films illustrating the theme. Canonical German science-fiction authors and works such as Kurd Laßwitz and Frau im Mond are discussed, as are more recent writers such as Thomas Lehr, Juli Zeh, Dietmar Dath, Andreas Eschbach, Karen Duve, Wolfgang Jeschke, and others. The capaciousness of the study is impressive: Cornils cuts a wide swath through the offerings of German science fiction while situating it within its global context. He considers the reasons why German science fiction might be both distinct and undernourished by its literary and academic establishments—reasons including the centrality of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in German literary discourse, the fate of Zukunftsromane in the Nazi period, the jingoism of much popular science fiction in the early 20^th century, and the relative endurance in Germany of the border between high and mass culture—yet Cornils also rejects the possibility of a Sonderweg for German science fiction. Against readings that insist that German science fiction continues, often in a dystopian mode, to be determined by the legacy of the Nazi period and the Holocaust, Cornils argues that this work, in critically engaging with issues of global concern, imagining possible futures, and occasionally modeling potential solutions, has pivoted to face the future, such that it would be unduly constrictive to read German science fiction merely as a series of exorcizing allegories of the traumatic twentieth century. A thoughtful engagement with the discourses of futurology and utopian scholarship buttresses the claim that science fiction is not merely a variety of genre literature, but also has the epistemological merit of being a prominent way in which people have grappled with the future. As exhortative, minatory, predictive, or speculative discourses of the future, futurology, utopias, dystopias, and science fiction aim to help readers anticipate what that future might, could, or should look like; science fiction, for Cornils, is tasked with playfully trying these various future visions out, both cognitively and emotionally. As he rightfully points out, the emotional, affective dimension of science fiction’s representations of the future is often neglected, and his emphasis on it is welcome. Clearly written and widely researched, Beyond Tomorrow makes a convincing case that German science fiction is a field worth exploring, both by readers of science fiction and by practitioners of German Studies.

Yet it also shortchanges some important questions. This is understandable: as a survey of a wide range of texts, the book...