The erased world
The deleted world (OT: The Gone-Away World ) is the first novel by the British writer Nick Harkaway from 2008. The German translation was published in 2009.
Harkaway offered the manuscript to various publishers under the title The Wages of Gonzo Lubitsch , and Heinemann-Verlag from the Random House group finally acquired the rights for a payment of £ 300,000.
action
The story begins in a shabby bar. A group of specialists is hired to put out a major fire in an important industrial facility. The nameless narrator and his comrades set off with trucks provided . On the way it becomes apparent that the world is out of joint and that large areas are subject to strange, dangerous changes. In a long flashback, the narrator's youth are portrayed, who met one of the other truckers, Gonzo Lubitsch, as a child. The two are inseparable until college, then lose sight of each other and only meet again in the war that breaks out in a mountainous Asian state to which various great powers lay claim. By using a new type of weapon, which is supposed to remove all stored information from matter and thus simply make the enemy disappear, the world is falling into chaos . The informationless matter called stuff absorbs the smallest of suggestions and thus creates a constantly changing reality . The effect is spreading, large parts of the world become unstable and change continuously or disappear.
After the war the Jorgmund Company was established, which was able to stabilize the information of matter through the mysterious FOX . The partially movable Jorgmund pipes distribute the FOX and thus create zones of stability in which the population can live more or less normally. Gonzo and the others are now on their way to extinguish the fire of such a pipe . In this attempt, Gonzo and the narrator are showered with a wave of stuff .
When the narrator returns home, he discovers that his wife is apparently married to Gonzo and that old friends no longer recognize him. Shortly thereafter, Gonzo tries to shoot him and then throws him out of the moving truck. The injured person is nursed to health and joins a group of roaming outsiders as he tries to find out what happened to him. Little by little he realizes that all of his memories are false and that he is just a stuff- generated manifestation of Gonzo's suppressed personality aspects, fears and dreams. He reveals this to Gonzo's parents who survived the war. They accept him and because they understand that Gonzo is now missing a part of himself, they ask him to help Gonzo, who has since been recruited again by managers of the Jorgmund Company.
Reception and criticism
The erased world received mostly positive reviews. Ed King called the book " an impressive feat of imagination and a wildly exuberant ride" in his review , but warned that "the narrative is about to collapse under the weight of its own exaggeration "(" the narrative threatens to collapse under the weight of its own excess "). The book was nominated for a Locus Award in 2008 and a British Science Fiction Association Award in 2009.
literature
- Sebastian Pirling: The deleted world , in: The Science Fiction Year 2010 , edited by Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke , Heyne, Munich 2010, pp. 916–919. ISBN 978-3-453-52681-5
Web links
- Gone Away World . Website for the book with interviews and excerpts from Nick Harkaway.
- The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway . Book review in the London Evening Standard, June 19, 2008
Individual evidence
- ↑ Written in his stars: son of Le Carré gets £ 300,000 for first novel . The Independent, June 6, 2007
- ↑ What happens after reality ends ( memento from October 18, 2008 on WebCite ). Book review in Telegraph, June 22, 2008
- ↑ The LOCUS Index to SF Awards ( Memento of the original from October 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) 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.
