The writing monkey

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The writing monkey from 1911 is a future novel by the German writer Carl Grunert (1865–1918).

style

It is a humorous short story , novella or short story from the genre of future literature . Grunert himself called his works future novels.

content

During excavations from the late Babylonian period, Professor Ziegel finds clay tablets that shed new light on the ongoing dispute between the two scholars Monkey and Schalk. According to this, Deinam, an ambitious prince from Babylon, should have landed on an unknown coast of Africa and tried to teach beings to write. The scholars' dispute revolves around the translation of the term “essence” from the ancient cuneiform script; one translates it as "ape" or "ape", the other as "native" or "native". The dispute is further fueled by the discovery of a French explorer who was traveling in a dirigible airship in the interior of Africa. This Africa explorer has seen monkeys describing a palm leaf with a kind of reed pen. A photograph was taken of the palm leaf. Professor Schalk and the Africa researcher meet and agree to go on the next expedition to the writing monkeys in Africa together. It is established that there is a relationship between the palm leaf and the cuneiform script from Babylon. The scholar Schalk suspects that the writing monkeys are descendants of the monkeys that Deinam taught to write at the time. Schalk also assumes that Deinam had been excluded from the line of succession and bitterly sought new allies among the great apes in order to form them and possibly to take action against humans with them.

Professor Schalk and the French Africa researcher Frédéric are in the airship over Africa looking for the writing monkeys. Eventually they find a group that actually contains one. They catch him and discover Professor Monkey under the monkey costume. He tried to find out through experiments whether it was possible to teach the monkeys to write by making use of their urge to imitate. Monkey tells the French researcher and Professor Schalk that there really is a writing monkey and that the palm leaf they found came from this monkey. It is the last descendant of the apes trained by Deinam.

construction

The story is only a few pages long and divided into three sections.

Publications

  • Reclam's universe
  • The Theodulos Energeios machine , TES Reprint 2000, published by Gerd-Michael Rose
  • Utopian-technical future novellas , 2005, edited by Dieter von Reeken u. a.