The swarm

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Der Schwarm , published in 2004, is the sixth and most successful novel by the German writer Frank Schätzing . Theme of science fiction - thriller is the existential threat to mankind by an unknown, intelligent marine life.

Lettering

Genre and structure

The book The Swarm belongs to the genre of the montage novel . The text is composed of five “parts”, a “ prologue ” and an “ epilogue ”. Passages are assembled in which the plot (see below) is driven forward, with discussions partly by the protagonists, partly by the omniscient narrator. However, the narrative technique of the experienced speech predominates . Uncommented quotations and fictitious texts that the protagonists are supposed to have written are also incorporated into the text. It is a montage insofar as different parts of the text are separated from each other by hard cuts (as in the film). With subheadings with dates and places and blank lines, Schätzing prevents the reader from losing track of the frequent rapid changes in place and topic.

The presentation is chronological. Dates in subheadings (without specifying the respective year) inform the reader about the passage of time. The action starts on January 14th and ends on August 15th of the same year. The novel ends with an epilogue dated on the first anniversary of the following year. From statements about real historical events it can be concluded that the event should take place in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, i.e. the real time the novel was written.

action

Summary

In the prologue and the “First Part” of the novel, people all over the world are increasingly exposed to attacks from the sea in various locations, especially by marine animals that suddenly show abnormal behavior in abundance. Initially, there are only small, seemingly unrelated incidents, swimmers are attacked by sharks or swarms of jellyfish, ships capsize without the cause being obvious. On Canada's west coast, the whales are unusually aggressive and sink entire ships. Later the situation got more and more out of control. In Norway, worm colonies are destabilizing the continental slope , which could result in a devastating tsunami.

A crisis team made up of scientists and the military comes to the conclusion that we are dealing with a previously unknown intelligence from the depths of the sea, which has set itself the goal of driving humanity from the oceans or even wiping them out. An expedition is started to prevent a disaster.

Detailed storyline

Part one - anomalies

The biologist Sigur Johanson is asked by a good friend, Tina Lund, who works for the Norwegian oil company Statoil , for help with something that initially seems harmless: She shows him a deep-sea worm that her company discovered during construction work in the depths of the North Sea. At first he is only moderately interested in the animals, but makes inquiries from colleagues as it appears to be a new species or mutation . His interest grew when, during a research expedition with the research vessels Thorvaldson and Sonne in the deep sea , it was discovered that these worms had colonized the methane hydrate deposits on the Norwegian continental slope within a short period of time and apparently introduced methane-degrading bacteria into the methane hydrate. At the same time, an unidentifiable, blue glowing creature can be seen briefly on the video of a Victor diving robot.

Together with the German geologist Gerhard Bohrmann from the GEOMAR Institute , he found that the release of methane from the methane hydrate destabilized the continental slope of the Norwegian shelf . Johanson flies with a helicopter to the Shetland Islands to pick up Karen Weaver, who, together with a German marine researcher, has dealt with anomalies in the ocean currents in the North Atlantic, Johanson suspects a connection there with the worms. While GEOMAR is still discussing the timing of a possible submarine landslide , the slope begins to slide and causes a tsunami that destroys large parts of the coasts in Northern Europe and kills many people (including Tina Lund, to whom Johanson has a close connection). Johanson and Weaver escape the tsunami by a hair's breadth.

Meanwhile, events escalate: poisonous jellyfish are popping up along many coasts, clams infesting ships in large quantities and capsizing them, and in France, infected lobsters caught by fishermen are carrying a deadly Pfiesteria epidemic to coastal cities.

In a parallel storyline, the intelligence researcher Anawak, who also works for a whale-watching station in Tofino on the Canadian west coast, has to do with another, initially equally harmless problem: The whales on the Canadian west coast stay away. When they appear after a delay, they then appear unusually aggressive and hostile towards people. On a tour, Anawak's boat (on which there is also a student named Alicia Delaware) is sunk in a coordinated attack by orcas, gray whales and humpback whales. The radical environmentalist and self-proclaimed Indian Jack “Greywolf” O'Bannon, who is demonstrating against whale watching together with a small group, initially comes in handy, as he sees the attack as nature's revenge on humans - but his group is also unexpected attacked by the whales, two ships are sunk and numerous people are killed. Scientists discover the remains of a gelatinous substance in the brain of one of the dead whales, but it quickly breaks down.

Greywolf can stage himself as a hero because he saves some of the whale tourists. Later there is a reconciliation between him and Anawak. Greywolf and Delaware begin a love affair.

Anawak is approached by a shipowner on whose cargo ship the rudder was apparently blocked by swarms of mussels and which was only barely able to escape into port. The ships involved in the rescue operation were attacked by whales. During a dive to the stern of the ship, he discovers a glowing blue creature, which can escape in the harbor basin. The mussels turn out to be a mutation of zebra mussels.

Anawak and his colleagues find out that only migrating whales behave aggressively, so-called transients. Whales living permanently off the coast, residents, do not appear to be affected by the change in behavior. They manage to attach a transmitter to one of the aggressive whales, and Anawak barely escapes with his life. During a whale dive, a camera detects contact with a blue, pulsating cloud. When Anawak wants to do further research, however, he is blocked from various sides: Apparently they want to keep him out of something. When he made another dive on his own to the rudder of the clam-infested cargo ship, he was caught by the US military.

Part two - Château Disaster

In the second part of the book, a team of international scientists from different disciplines and from different nations is formed under the leadership of the USA to counter the threat. A strictly isolated conference is being organized in the luxury Canadian hotel Château Whistler . In addition to Johanson, Anawak, Weaver and Bohrmann, the team is joined by biologists Mick Rubin and Sue Oliveira, geologist Stanley Frost, sonar specialist Murray Shankar and later also SETI scientist Samantha Crowe. The organizers are the US military under the leadership of US Navy personnel Judith Li and her assistant Salomon Sal Peak, and the CIA under the direction of the corpulent, unsympathetic Jack Vanderbilt. He initially suspects terrorists from the Middle or Far East to be behind the incidents.

However, thanks mainly to Johanson, the group arrives at the theory that behind the global catastrophes and the aggressive behavior of sea creatures lies an unknown intelligent power that has begun to defend itself against the threat of human destruction of the oceanic habitat. It is decided to name this unknown intelligence or being Yrr (a sequence of letters that Johanson typed randomly). The scientists recognize that the global climate is influenced by the greenhouse effect of methane and that without a successful counter-strategy humanity would be threatened with extinction.

Meanwhile, New York and other places on the east coast of the United States are overrun by crab armies, which may seem harmless, but contain a mutated version of the deadly Pfiesteria alga. The city is declared a disaster area.

In a subplot the death of Anawak's father is reported. Anawak then flies to his hometown Cape Dorset and deals with his origins.

Third part - Independence

It is decided, secretly monitored by Li and Vanderbilt, to make contact with the previously unknown intelligence in the sea and meet on the helicopter carrier USS Independence . Crowe and Shankar send a simple math problem into the sea, which is answered immediately. In a second message, information about humanity is sent into the sea. The Yrr respond with an approximately 180 million year old picture of the supercontinent Pangea . It is possible to make contact with the Yrr. However, the attacks on humanity continue.

Johanson and Oliveira dissect one of the New York crabs and find, in addition to the pfiesteria, a second, unknown DNA in the animals: They suspect that the Yrr could be a single cell. Meanwhile, a large, blue ring from Yrr is gathering around Independence . At the last moment, the dolphin squadron trained by Greywolf and Delaware can be brought back to the ship. Rubin sees a chance to get a larger amount from the Yrr: He opens the lock gates again, whereupon an orca enters the well deck and tears up Delaware. At the last moment, Li can stop Greywolf from strangling Rubin for it. At the same time, a large number of Yrr penetrate the ship and attack the crew. In this case, the Yrr mass can be defeated by draining the water. Rubin succeeds in securing large quantities of Yrr for research. Since Rubin shows up less and less in the following years, the slightly drunk Johanson decides to shadow him. Johanson wakes up the next morning in the hospital with no memory.

Nevertheless, he, Anawak and Weaver can continue their research on the unicellular organisms. With a computer model by Raymond Kurzweil , the Yrr's way of thinking can be analyzed to a large extent: It is a collective mind that is created by connecting the unicellular organisms. Memories of the collective are stored in hypervariable areas of the DNA of the unicellular organisms and this over millions of years. In addition, a chemical messenger is discovered that causes the unicellular organisms to fuse.

Johanson gradually regains his memory, suspecting that the plan for a peaceful understanding is not the only strategy pursued by the military under General Li. The research findings are used in secret to develop a poison against the Yrr. Johanson finds out that there is another laboratory in which apparently they are working on the destruction of the Yrr using a manipulated protein that causes programmed cell death . He consults with Weaver and later confronts Rubin and Li, whom he distrusted from the start, about it. Li persuades him not to tell the team about the military's plans, but to be on the safe side, she assigns Vanderbilt and CIA man Anderson to take out Johanson and make it look like an accident.

Meanwhile, Frost and Bohrmann try to prevent the Cumbre-Vieja volcano from slipping off La Palma : worms have destabilized the methane hydrate at the base. The worms are sucked in with a huge underwater vacuum cleaner. But the machine breaks down and Bohrmann and Frost have to take a dive to repair the proboscis. They are attacked by Yrr-controlled hammerheads . Frost loses his life in the process, and Bohrmann can hide in a crevice until he is brought back to the surface by a rescue team.

Fourth part - downwards

Vanderbilt tries to push Johanson overboard, but Anawak and Greywolf come to the rescue at the last minute. Vanderbilt goes overboard, but Greywolf is fatally hit by a pistol shot.

The conflict between scientists and the military on Independence is escalating and is overshadowed by a devastating attack by the Yrr on the USS Independence : The Deepflight , an airplane-like submersible, which sank during the orca attack (the description in the novel is similar to the Deepflight II ), along with a gas cloud of methane, sent back to the surface of the sea, where it collides with the Independence and the torpedoes of the submersible explode. In the chaos that then breaks out on board the wrecked ship, both sides are trying to save humanity from impending annihilation in their own way: the scientists through a chemical message that describes humans and Yrr as a unit, the military through the Poison for the Yrr to exterminate. The extermination of the Yrr is seen by scientists as potentially fatal to all life in the world; General Li considers the chemical embassy unsuitable because it runs counter to their own interests and those of the United States.

During a hostage-taking in the laboratory (Weaver wants to know everything about the poison Rubin has stowed in two torpedoes), Li shoots Oliveira, and Rubin is killed by released Yrr, which has combined to form a muscle-like mass. Weaver, Anawak and Johanson inject large amounts of the Yrr messenger substance into the dead ruby: The Yrr should think that Rubin (and thus all humans) belong to their species and stop the attacks against humanity, so the hope of the three. Rubin's corpse is stowed in one of the deepflights and Weaver sets off for the Abyssal . Meanwhile, Anawak tries to save Crowe, who is still on the burning deck.

Meanwhile, Li gets Rubin's poison and wants to take it with one of the remaining deepflights to the Yrr, where it is supposed to extinguish them in a kind of chain reaction. Since Peak wants to dismiss her because of her reckless behavior, she kills him too. She meets Johanson, whom she shoots. He remains seriously injured in deep flight. When Li starts the submersible, he activates a torpedo and kills them both.

Anawak finds Crowe, and shortly after they leave Independence , the helicopter carrier sinks.

Fifth part - contact

Weaver meets the Yrr collective in the depths near the ocean floor and drops Rubin's body into the water. The Yrr begins to scan Rubin and the Deepflight. When it discovers the messenger substance in Rubin, it lets deepflight go. Shortly afterwards, all attacks by the sea against the people are stopped.

In the end, almost all of the protagonists are dead. The novel ends with a fragile truce between the Yrr and the humans. It is uncertain whether this will last in the long term. However, there is a chance to rebuild the severely damaged infrastructure of the countries and to reconsider the survivors.

background

The novel is scientifically well written, but also understandable for the layman due to the detailed descriptions. It provides insight into questions about marine biology , geology , behavioral research and artificial intelligence . A central theme of the novel is marine pollution , which usually also provides the framework for various critical philosophical - theological discussions about human anthropocentrism . The novel repeatedly criticizes the clichédness of Hollywood films and the narrow-mindedness of American politicians with regard to, for example, the world domination of the USA.

Elements of science fiction and sometimes also of a romance novel are woven into the plot in the style of an action film . The apparently genderless, only "the common fight against the Yrr" committed to both sexes, which the apparently distant narrator always refers to (with the exception of "Greywolf" O'Bannon) only by the surname, prove to be susceptible to romances of all kinds.

Locations

Schätzing placed the plot in places in Great Britain , Canada and Norway as well as Kiel because of the GEOMAR research center there , where people like Gerhard Bohrmann and Erwin Suess work. The protagonists Sigur Johanson and Karen Weaver meet on the Shetland Islands and narrowly escape a tsunami ; in Tofino , western Canada, on the edge of Clayoquot Sound, there is the whale watching station where Leon Anawak works; in Whistler , the crisis team is set up in the chateau of the same name . Sigur Johanson lives in Trondheim , Norway ; Tina Lund wants to meet her boyfriend in Sveggesundet on the island of Averøy and is killed by the tsunami. The Troisgros restaurant is located in Roanne , France .

characters

Leon Anawak

Anawak is a PhD in Zoology and a specialist in whales . His actual job is to observe and classify the whales off Vancouver Island . He also organizes whale watching tours to show people the fascination of these animals. In doing so, he often comes into conflict with the self-proclaimed whale protector Greywolf , who dismisses this as commerce. Anawak is an Inuk who finds himself in an identity conflict regarding his origin after his father renounced the old traditions and became an alcoholic. Only at his father's funeral is Anawak ready to deal with his own roots again. It is his job to find out how the Yrr control other beings, which he mainly works on together with Oliviera. He survived the attack of the Yrr on the helicopter carrier , rescues Samantha Crowe and escapes with her in a motorized rubber dinghy from the sinking USS Independence .

Sigur Johanson

Johanson is a Norwegian biology professor and an avid connoisseur of beautiful things. Its task is to identify and classify the alien intelligence, the Yrr, together with the others. He is also the first to recognize a system behind the attacks and to suspect an intelligent, non-human life form behind the attacks, which is why he is also the one who gives the Yrr their name. While preparing to escape from the sinking USS Independence , he is shot by Li, falling into one of the submersibles , whereupon he is believed dead by Li. She uses the submarine to try to poison the Yrr, but finds out too late that Johanson is still alive. This takes control of the submersible, fires a torpedo inside the USS Independence , killing himself and Li, and destroying the poison.

Judith Li

Li is "General Commander" of the US Navy and coordinator of the American response to the attacks by the Yrr. It is also she who gathers the team of scientists and brings them to the ship. On the face of it, she just wants to get in touch with the Yrr, in reality she has her own scientist named Mick Rubin collate the results of his colleagues and develop a poison against the Yrr. When Johanson discovers her plan and the ship is attacked by Yrr at the same time, she kills everyone who gets in her way, including her deputy Major Salomon Peak, when he wants to dismiss her for repeated murders. She dies when Johanson blows up her submersible.

Jack "Greywolf" O'Bannon

The giant gray wolf is a crazy existence. His mother is half-Indian, the father of Irish descent, so he does not feel comfortable in either of the two worlds. Since he behaves like a cliché Indian , he often clashes with Anawak, who is of Indian origin but denies this. Nevertheless, the two characters share a kind of love-hate relationship, which towards the end of the novel develops more and more into mutual trust. Greywolf was a combat swimmer and dolphin trainer in the Navy, but submitted his departure when the Navy began to torture the animals. He then became an environmental activist and whale conservationist. His job is to look after the dolphins that are on board the USS Independence as security . During an attack by the Yrr, his girlfriend, Alicia Delaware, a biology student, is killed by a rigged orca . He then sinks into a phase of depression and stirs up his hatred of Rubin, who accepted the death of his girlfriend in order to capture a Yrr complex. Greywolf dies when he saves Anawak and Johanson from Jack Vanderbilt and another CIA agent disguised as a crew member of the USS Independence , is shot by Vanderbilt and falls overboard. He ends up on a safety net, but plunges himself into the depths so that Anawak doesn't try to save him, as life has no meaning for him (since Alicia Delaware's death). In his last few seconds he realizes that there is no better death for an Indian than to return to the cycle of nature. He finds his peace before he drowns by deciding when to let the water into his lungs.

Tina Lund

Tina Lund is Sigur Johanson's best friend and works on behalf of Statoil to check the conditions on the Norwegian Continental Shelf . The Norwegian company is dedicated to the development of oil reserves at greater depths. In the methane hydrate fields on the shelf, Tina discovers a strikingly large number of mutated drillworms whose existence was previously unknown. She is also the one who asks Sigur to examine the worms more closely, thereby making him aware of the strange changes in the marine depths for the first time. The relationship between Tina and Sigur is initially unclear, as they engage in an interplay between romance and friendship, but ultimately they decide to finally agree on a friendly relationship. Tina Lund eventually dies trying to save her great love Kare Sverdrup during the tsunami caused by the underwater worms.

Jack Vanderbilt

Vanderbilt is assistant director of the CIA and Li's partner in finding a cure for the Yrr. Although he and Li hate each other, they work together. When Johanson finds the secret laboratory on board the USS Independence where the poison is developed, Vanderbilt receives an order from Li to kill Johanson. While trying to carry out this mission, he is thrown overboard by Greywolf and killed by an orca.

Samantha Crowe

Crowe is a senior employee of SETI and has the task of establishing contact with the Yrr, which she manages. She escapes with Anawak from the sinking USS Independence and interprets in a diary that is quoted verbatim in the "Epilogue", what happened on the first anniversary after the sinking of the USS Independence , which gives her "the last word" in the novel. The character Samantha Crowe is similar to Jill Tarter .

Karen Weaver

Karen Weaver is a scientific journalist whose job it is to gather information. Her parents died early in a diving accident, which made them hate the sea. However, she later recognized the beauty of the water and has been committed to exploring the oceans ever since. In a monologue, the reader learns that she went through a difficult childhood in which she took drugs and went on the street. Weaver worked as a PR representative and assistant for the German researcher Lukas Bauer, whose research ship was sunk by a " methane blowout " when Weaver was not on board. Sigur Johanson wanted to meet with Weaver in the Shetland Islands to talk about the researcher's discoveries related to the Gulf Stream and methane deposits . The helicopter in which Johanson arrived there both managed to escape the tsunami. In the end, Karen Weaver implements the plan to bring about the decisive breakthrough using a corpse (ruby) prepared with pheromone . You manage to move the Yrr to retreat from the offensive in favor of humanity. While on the USS Independence, she and Leon Anawak fall in love. In the Samantha Crowe epilogue it is reported that Karen Weaver and Leon Anawak are now living together. She is also one of the few survivors among the protagonists.

Gerhard Bohrmann

Bohrmann is a deep-sea biologist and an expert on worms at the Geomar Institute in Kiel. He is contacted by Johanson because he can simulate the activities of worms in methane hydrate in the institute's deep-sea simulator. Together with Frost he oversees the use of a diamond suction hose that has been converted into worm suction from a special platform in front of La Palma. While Frost is killed by hammerhead sharks during a deep-sea repair, he survives hidden in a deep-sea crevice.

Murray Shankar

The sonar expert Murray Shankar analyzes all unknown noises that come from the depths of the sea and can assign some of them to the Yrr. He also decodes their frequency , which allows Crowe to make contact. He is killed in a helicopter crash during the sinking of the USS Independence .

Bernard Roche and Sue Oliviera

Roche from France and Oliviera from the research institute in Nanaimo are molecular biologists . Oliviera is the laboratory manager there. Together they decipher a Yrr attack weapon: a poisonous alga. Oliviera also manages to extract the pheromone that the Yrr use to communicate. Oliviera is shot by Li.

Stanley Frost

The volcanologist Stanley Frost recognizes the connections between the occurrence of the worms and the tsunamis. He is killed in the deep sea off La Palma ( Canary Islands ) by a huge, manipulated hammerhead shark .

The Yrr

The Yrr are a fictional, maritime, unicellular form of life consisting of gelatinous mass that appears in the book as an "opponent" of humanity. The name is invented by one of the novel's protagonists, the Norwegian scientist Sigur Johanson , while playing with his fingers on his laptop . Every single Yrr can think (within a certain framework). Via the hypervariable areas in their DNA , they can store information on a genetic basis by means of targeted non-repair of their DNA structure. This information is then passed on to other Yrr when several unicellular organisms come together with the help of pheromone as a messenger substance, in that the hypervariable areas take over the information stored in the DNA sequence. In this way, the Yrr cells “update” each other in their level of knowledge and, through the genetic transfer of information, can memorize and communicate all possible events, including those millions of years ago. However, they only have the ability to manipulate and control the will of other living beings in a collective, i.e. in a cellular network. They then have “ collective consciousness ” and “ collective intelligence ” and can think strategically. Morality , in the human sense, does not play a role for them, this makes them an intelligent way of life that is difficult for mankind to calculate. Through their knowledge of their environment, which they have acquired over millions of years, they are able to reproduce their body shapes in addition to the ability to control other living things.

Karen Weaver finally succeeds in making contact with the "queen" of a Yrr swarm using pheromones. This ultimately initiates a kind of temporary “armistice” that ends the attacks on the people for the time being.

Real people as character templates

For several of the characters in the novel, real people served as models: Gerhard Bohrmann and Heiko Sahling are geologists, Erwin Suess is a geochemist and oceanographer. Samantha Crowe is similar to the SETI director Jill Tarter , who already served as a template for Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster in the film Contact . Raymond Kurzweil is a researcher and visionary who has distinguished himself as an author u. a. busy with neuron computers. General Commander Judith Li is similar to the former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice . Like Rice, she is one of the few women to hold a leading position in security policy; she has excellent relations with the US president, is not of pure white origin and loves to play the piano. In addition to the characters in the novel with reference to real people, the research vessels Sonne , Polarstern and Meteor mentioned in the novel actually exist . The USS Independence is strongly reminiscent of the USS Makin Island , the template for the Heerema was the ships of Heerema Marine Contractors (e.g. Hermod and Balder ).

Relation to the works of other authors

The core idea of ​​the novel, the existence of a species of collectively conscious and intelligent individual beings or unicellular beings who are hostile to humans, already appears in the science fiction novels Niezwyciężony (1964, The Invincible ) by Stanisław Lem , in Nemesis by Isaac Asimov and also in Michael Crichton's Prey (2002, German booty ). The settlement of this collective consciousness in the hydrosphere is also reminiscent of a work by Lem, Solaris , in which an intelligent ocean occurs. In his novel, Schätzing explicitly uses the term “ intelligent oceans ” when describing the Yrr , although strictly speaking this does not apply (since the Yrr are a collective of living beings that inhabit the ocean and not an awareness of the ocean himself, as in Lem's novel). Many parallels can also be found in the chapter "Guardians" from George RR Martin's novel Planet Wanderer from 1985: On the planet Namor described there, people kill and eat a collective and networked marine life form that is highly advanced in genetic engineering called mud pots in ignorance of its intelligence. This then considers people to be particularly cunning predatory beings, without suspecting an intelligent species in them, and almost successfully exterminates them with newly created life forms.

There are also similarities with Karel Čapek's novel The War with the Newts from 1936 and Alan Dean Foster's Cachalot from 1983.

According to its own statements, Schätzing researched the book for five years and wrote it for two years. In April 2005, allegations of plagiarism were raised ; the marine biologist and science journalist Thomas Orthmann filed a criminal complaint for copyright infringement. The author has taken literal formulations from Orthmann's website. The allegations were rejected by the author and publisher as ordinary research. In November 2005, the public prosecutor's office stopped the criminal investigation.

Book edition

The book edition produced in the Thuringian print shop GGP Media was the first black and white book printed on paper with the FSC label and the largest FSC-certified book project in Europe to date. The book was number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for 7 weeks in 2004 and 2005 .

radio play

In August 2004 Der Hörverlag brought out a radio play version of the novel. An abridged version of the book is read by various speakers on ten CDs for 723 minutes.

Speaker:

Directed by Loy Wesselburg and Frank Schätzing

In 2014 Hörverlag published an unabridged audio book version with a length of 38 hours and 10 minutes, read by Stefan Kaminski .

Non-fiction

Since Schätzing could not fully use the extensive research for the book, he wrote a non-fiction book thematically based on The Swarm with the title News from an Unknown Universe with the remaining material .

filming

In March 2006, on the sidelines of the Leipzig Book Fair , Frank Schätzing told the Leipziger Volkszeitung that Hollywood was trying to make the bestseller into a film. The contract negotiations with the Paramount film studio are about to be concluded, according to Schätzing. According to press reports, shooting should start in 2009 and the film Christmas 2010 will be released in cinemas, but these assumptions have not been confirmed. The director was Ridley Scott , who was responsible for productions such as Alien - The uncanny creature from a strange world (1979) or the multiple Oscar-winning work Gladiator (2000).

In May 2007 it became known that the film rights had been sold to the actress Uma Thurman and the German producers Ica Souvignier , Michael Souvignier and Till Grönemeyer . Thurman was also supposed to play a bigger role in the film. The screenplay was written by Oscar winner Ted Tally , and the late Dino De Laurentiis was named as co-producer.

In September 2010, in the October issue of Arte magazine, Schätzing said he was confident that shooting would start in 2011. At the moment, the financing of the film has not yet been fully clarified, according to Schätzing.

When asked that he wrote his books in such a way that they could easily be made into a film, Frank Schätzing replied: “People believe that I write the books so that they can be made into a film. It's the other way around. I write down my inner films. "

On August 30, 2018, the ZDF, in cooperation with Schätzing, announced a series adaptation of the novel in an international co-production. 8 episodes of 45 minutes each are planned; the start of shooting has been announced for 2019. Alan Taylor was hired as a director .

Awards

expenditure

  • Svärmen. Ekologisk thriller. (Swedish, translated by Frederik Sjögren), Bazar, Stockholm 2007, ISBN 978-91-7028-063-4 .
  • Il quinto giorno. (Italian, translated by Sergio Vicini), Nord, Milan 2005.
  • The swarm. A novel of the deep. (English, translated by Sally-Ann Spencer), Hodder & Stoughton, London 2006, ISBN 978-03-4089-523-8 .
  • Vzpoura oceánů. (Czech, translated by Vítězslav Čížek), Knižní klub, Prague 2006.
  • El quinto día. (Spanish, translated by Griselda Mársico), Planeta, Barcelona 2006.
  • O quinto dia. (Portuguese, translated by Dora Reis), Dom Quixote, Lisbon 2007, ISBN 978-972-20-3237-7 .
  • Pedot. (Finnish, translated by Heli Naski), Bazar, Helsinki 2007, ISBN 978-951-9107-57-8 .
  • Abysses. (French, translated by Danièle Darneau), Presses de la cité, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-258-06775-2 .
  • Odwet oceanu. (Polish, translated by Anna Wziątek), Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, Wrocław 2006, ISBN 978-83-7384-580-0 .
  • Raj. (Hungarian, translated by Losonc Csaba), Athenaeum 2000 Kiadó, Budapest 2005, ISBN 978-963-9471-29-0 .

Reviews

literature

  • Berbeli Wanning: Yrrsinn or the rebellion of nature. Cultural-ecological considerations on “The Swarm” by Frank Schätzing. In: cultural ecology and literature. Contributions to a transdisciplinary paradigm of literary studies , edited by Hubert Zapf , Heidelberg 2008, pp. 339–357, ISBN 978-3-8253-5486-2 .
  • Patrick Ramponi: Globes, floods, swarms. The cultural knowledge of maritime globalization using the example of Frank Schätzing's “The Swarm”. In: Walter Delabar, Frauke Schlieckau (Ed.): Bluescreen. Visions, dreams, nightmares and reflections of the fantastic and utopian. Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 2010, ISBN 978-3-89528-769-5 , pp. 262-273.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "A hero as he is in the book" , Technology Review 9/2004
  2. ^ "Expensive research - criminal complaint against bestselling author Frank Schätzing" ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), ozeane.de
  3. ↑ "Can research be a sin?" , Interview on allegations of plagiarism, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , April 7, 2005
  4. ^ "The detective and the mercenaries" , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 17, 2008
  5. ↑ "The Swarm: Scriptwriter found for the bestseller film" , www.moviegod.de
  6. ^ "High voltage in a double pack" , Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , May 16, 2008
  7. ^ Peter Unfried: Show by the author Frank Schätzing. This could be the future. In: taz . March 5, 2010
  8. ↑ ZDF press release on the series adaptation of Der Schwarm
  9. ↑ ZDF hires “Game of Thrones” director for new series , haz.de , April 8, 2019, accessed on April 8, 2019