The Cusanus game

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The Cusanus Game is a science fiction novel by Wolfgang Jeschke that was published in 2005 and was awarded both the Kurd-Laßwitz Prize and the German Science Fiction Prize .

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Domenica Ligrina, a young botanist , receives a mysterious, if tempting, offer shortly after completing her studies. A Vatican institute called Rinascita della Creazione would like to give her an assignment, about which she will not be given details until she has accepted.

In view of the state in which the world and Europe are, she has little doubt that she will accept the offer. In the year 2052 global warming led to global refugee flows, the Maldives are flooded, the Sahara takes up almost all of Africa. In Germany, a nuclear accident at the Cattenom nuclear power plant radioactively contaminated large parts of central Germany, and the EU broke apart, also under the onslaught of climate refugees. The familiar order has perished, Europe has become a patchwork of small nationalistic states. The Pope has moved the Vatican to Salzburg to be safe from contamination and the resurgent fascism.

After thorough examinations, Domenica learns that she should travel back in time to collect the seeds of long-extinct plants in 15th century Germany. These are to be made at home again in the present and so mitigate the effects of the nuclear catastrophe. The time travel technology itself dates back to the future and can be used, but not understood.

Domenica has strict rules of conduct, because she must not change the past at any price so that the future (i.e. the present of 2052) does not get mixed up. Arriving in the 15th century, she is arrested as a witch and writes letters to Nikolaus Cusanus to ask for help. Here it becomes clear that time travel is more than just a journey from one year to another: Domenica has visions of her own death in a witch burning. Apparently there is not just one timeline, not just one future, not just one universe, but several of them. The story of Cusanus and Domenica has several, completely different endings. A parallel universe , perhaps created as a result of the information given by Domenica Cusanus, suffers from pollution and climate change a hundred years earlier, because in it the Church never hindered science, but promoted it. And there are beings who, as it were, reach into time from the outside and correct their processes. Because not all universes can survive.

criticism

  • "The Cusanus game is a great success in science fiction in every respect ..."

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Rottensteiner in: Quarber Merkur , vol. 103/104, p. 222. ISBN 3-932621-91-3