Simulacron-3

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Simulacron-3 is the title of a science fiction novel by the American author Daniel F. Galouye , which was first published in 1964. In the United Kingdom , the novel was also published under the alternative title Counterfeit World .

action

The work is about the operator of a simulated city ​​that is used for market research purposes. The gigantic computer of the so-called TEAG (Test AG) makes this possible. In its storerooms there is a simulated city that, together with its thousands of residents, is designed absolutely and down to the smallest detail. The simulation is so good that the residents have their own consciousness and do not even notice that they only exist as software in a computer . Over time, the protagonist realizesDouglas Hall, the technical director of the plant, said more and more that his world is not real either, but also only exists as a simulation in a higher reality . With the help of Jinx, an administrator of the system there who “descended” from this higher reality, he finally succeeds not only in saving his own simulated world from being destroyed by the “great simulatronics engineer” of the higher world, but at the same time keeping his own spirit in transferring his body, which was perfectly modeled on his exterior, and hurling the great simulatronic technician onto the simulated level of the computer, where his old body is destroyed in the course of a popular uprising directed against the political and economic abuse of the TEAG. The love story between Jinx and Douglas, told very carefully, forms the emotional background of the story.

background

Simulacron-3 (from the Latin simulacrum = illusion) can be regarded as one of the first descriptions of simulated reality , even if the subject of the illusory nature of the world was treated by Plato with his allegory of the cave more than two thousand years ago . René Descartes provided another philosophical basis with his maxim “I think, therefore I am”. In the course of the novel, it also plays a very important role in Hall's reflections, which slowly and analytically steer towards the truth.

Film adaptations

The novel was filmed twice, first in 1973 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a two-part television film entitled Welt am Draht , which opposes the deep pessimism and fatalism of the novel. In 1999 Roland Emmerich produced a second version under the direction of Josef Rusnak under the title The 13th Floor - Are you what you think? . Although it is not a film adaptation in the strictest sense, the film Matrix (1999) also adopts elements of the basic idea of ​​Galouye's novel.

criticism

“How else, perhaps, only Philip K. Dick, Daniel F. Galouye questions reality with this novel: Is everything just an appearance, aren't we completely at the mercy of an incontestable fate, against which we cannot have a say? Galouye's novel is deeply pessimistic: when Hall penetrates actual reality, it turns out to be grayer and more colorless than the illusion. What does the reality in which we have to live really look like? "

- Uwe Anton

expenditure

  • Counterfeit World , London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1964
  • Simulacron-3 , New York: Bantam Books 1964
  • Welt am Draht , Munich: Goldmann 1965, ISBN 3-442-23057-8
  • Simulacron Drei , Munich: Heyne 1983, ISBN 3-453-30904-9 (Library of Science Fiction Literature, Vol. 16)
  • The Thirteenth Floor (German), Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1999, ISBN 3-462-02826-X

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reclam's Science Fiction Guide , p. 167. Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-15-010312-6 .
  2. ↑ In: Wolfgang Jeschke (Ed.): The Science Fiction Year 1986 , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag Munich, ISBN 3-453-31233-3 , p. 601.

Web links