The beauty of that distant city
The Beauty of That Distant City (Original Title: A Scientific Romance ) is a dystopian science fiction novel by the Canadian historian and writer Ronald Wright from 1997 and a sequel to The Time Machine by HG Wells .
Central elements of the novel are the downfall of civilization, climate change , as well as the effects of BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease both on the personal environment of the protagonist and on civilization as a whole. The novel describes in the form of posthumous letters in a bottle from the protagonist David Lambert to his two alienated childhood friends Bird and Anita, how Lambert came into possession of Wells' time machine in London in the months before the turn of the millennium, as well as his as a mixture of Odyssey and Robinsonad- advised journey through a post-apocalyptic tropical Great Britain in the year 2500. The novel was a bestseller in Canada and was largely positively received by English-language critics; he won the British David Higham Prize for Fiction in 1998 . In the German-speaking countries, it was translated by Lutz-Werner Wolff in 1998, largely unnoticed, and reviews of later new editions were mixed. While it was sometimes referred to as “literary elaborate” and yet “spanned”, other critics describe the book as a failure due to its ambitious structure. The idea of the book would be “in the further course of the meticulously precise and often irrelevant for the actual plot Letters writing protagonists talked flat ”. The English original title A Scientific Romance is derived from a contemporary name for the genre of early science fiction works of the 19th century: Scientific Romance .
action
The book is divided into four different sections. The first “The Wells Device” or “A Letter from the Past” introduces the character of David Lambert and his relationship to the two addressees Bird, a jazz musician, and Anita, and he also explains how Lambert came into possession of the time machine. The section is a letter to Bird. Lambert is a lonely archaeologist specializing in the London of industrialization, especially the second half of the 19th century, and a specialist in the work of HG Wells. As such, a letter is presented to him for assessment in which Wells predicts the return of his real time machine, which Lambert will bring, at the turn of the millennium. He was close friends with Bird and Anita during their studies, both men had a relationship with Anita one after the other, but lost sight of each other in the 90s and Anita died shortly before the time machine was found. While Lampert is researching the machine, he learns that it almost certainly died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and finds similar symptoms in himself. The final decision to try the time machine for himself follows from his desire to gain a cure for the disease in the future.
The three remaining parts "Past London" or "To London", "The Scottish Play" or "The Scottish Play" and " Tithonus " are diary-like letters to the dead Anita and deal with Lampert's journey through depopulated Great Britain 500 years ago the future. From London - now a tropical swamp - he follows his and the common past with Anita through Great Britain and discovers a surviving culture in Scotland. Through archaeological finds of the future past, he recognizes in fragments how civilization fell. In addition to a devastating Creutzfeldt-Jakob epidemic, there were other diseases that, together with the ever increasing climate change, caused British society to collapse via a police state and euthanasia death stations for the sick.
After London there is an odyssey à la Robinson with a tame black puma. Since the city had been evacuated to the north before the fall, Lampert sets out north in the hope of finding survivors. The whole of England consists of swamps, virgin forests and strips of transgenic super lawns on the routes of the old motorways. The Scottish play begins when he finds a relatively new graffito of a MacBeath in the ruins of Edinburgh , pointing him to survivors around Loch Ness . The title of the section and also the name of the clans of most of the survivors MacBeth allude to Shakespeare's drama. The last section describes Lampert's escape from Scotland on a boat back to his time machine in London, named after the Greek legendary figure Tithonos , who asked the gods for eternal life but forgot eternal youth. In the final section there are small indications that the entire story could only be Lampert's feverish dream in a clinic, but this remains open.
expenditure
Original edition:
- Ronald Wright: A Scientific Romance. Anchor Books 1997, ISBN 1862300119 (352 pages)
German translation:
- Ronald Wright: The beauty of that distant city. Translated from English by Lutz-Werner Wolff, Dtv 1997, ISBN 3423208414
Web links
- [1] the first chapter of the English original edition as a reading sample.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b John Vernon : There'll Always Be ... But the England of the future is a very different place. In: The New York Times on the Web. March 15, 1998, accessed January 19, 2010 .
- ^ A b c d e f Jenny Hughes and Jean Andrey: Narratives as an Educational Tool: A Review of A Scientific Romance. (PDF file; 73 kB) (No longer available online.) In: Climate Change Education through Science Fiction - Paper on the Climate Change Communication Conference. June 5, 2000, pp. 1-9 , archived from the original on February 3, 2010 ; accessed on January 19, 2010 ( PDF ). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b c d e Kolja Mensing: Suspected case. In: TAZ . February 1, 2001, accessed January 19, 2010 .
- ^ A b c Marco Durrer: No book for the future. (No longer available online.) In: Das Netzmagazin , No. 138. December 2005, pp. 1–9 , formerly in the original ; Retrieved January 19, 2010 . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b James Schellenberg: Review of Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance. In: Challenging Destiny. January 7, 2000, accessed January 19, 2010 .
- ↑ In the original panther , which in American can designate both the puma and black forms of leopard and jaguar. However, black shapes of the puma are unknown, so probably a translation error.
