Venus wins
Venus siegt is a novel written by Dietmar Dath that contains elements from science fiction and fantasy . It was published in 2015 by Hablizel-Verlag and in 2016 by Fischer Tor in a version extended by 150 pages.
action
Venus is settled. Several hundred years after the 20th century of the old earth, a revolutionary social experiment is running on Venus, which is populated with agriculture and floating cities: the Bundwerk. The Venusian society of humans, robots ("D /") and net-based artificial intelligences ("K /") is, however, characterized by conflicts. The general development is based on the utopia of the "Freiwerk". On the old earth, however, there is a fascist dictator whose attack is feared for some time in the future. Nikolas Helander, the protagonist and first-person narrator, grows up in the shadow of the chairwoman of the Bundwerk Leona Christensen, who is at the head of a revolutionary regime. His life, his love and his political path between loyalty, opposition and war are part of the great story of liberation and terror, coercion and emancipation under the conditions of the most highly developed technology. Helander experiences the contradictions of the social development project, which on the one hand wants to advance the liberation of the subjects and the mutual recognition of the various intelligences, but on the other hand is limited by scarcity of resources and threatened by an external threat and is driven into terror.
The extended conclusion: Venus is alive
The 150-page epilogue "Venus is alive" added to the new edition of Fischer Tor 2016 shows how something unforeseeable becomes out of his legacy long after Helander's death, as a decision of old battles and as a solution to deadly puzzles.
Historical reference
The novel depicts a historical period on the future: It is about an epoch in the history of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution , the civil war and a short period of consolidation and reconstruction until after the Second World War . Figures appear that are strongly reminiscent of actual historical figures. With the figures, Dath also relaxes the epoch-defining problem constellations and debates. He updates the latter by placing it in a science fiction context and thus saves the arguments for future new starts with similar social experiments.
| Fictional character | Function in the novel | historical figure | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christensen, Leona "Lily" | Supreme delegate of the Bundwerk | Joseph Stalin | |
| Vuletic, Edmund | Bundwerk Army organizer (45) | Leon Trotsky | |
| Samito, Arjen | Dictator on earth with a desire to expand (94) | Adolf Hitler | |
| Hsü Chen | |||
| Laukkanen, Maren | mythically inflated founder figure, is no longer alive at the time of the plot | Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | |
| Bathnagar, Karman | "Darling of the covenant" | Nikolai Bukharin | |
| Singh, Daniel | |||
| Helander, Arthur | "sometimes right, sometimes left hand" (12) by Christensen | Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov | |
| Helander, Mona | one of the most important "topos" programmers in the construction of Venus (17), already dead at the time of the action | ||
| Thalberg, Domenico | Governor of Laukkanen City (55) | Sergei Mironovich Kirov |
The page numbers refer to the Tor edition.
Individual evidence
expenditure
- Venus wins . Novel. Lohmar: Hablizel Verlag 2015 ISBN 978-3941978188
- Venus wins . Novel. Revised edition, expanded by 150 pages. Frankfurt / Main: Fischer Tor 2016 ISBN 978-3-596-29658-3
Web links
- Venus wins in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
- Review notes on Venus wins at perlentaucher.de