Wie erzählt man im kosmischen Maßstab? : Science-Fiction und extraterrestrische Wende

Hárs, Endre (2024) Wie erzählt man im kosmischen Maßstab? : Science-Fiction und extraterrestrische Wende. JAHRBUCH DER UNGARISCHEN GERMANISTIK, 2023. pp. 7-21. ISSN 1217-0216

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Abstract

In his book „Die Überschreitung der Gegenwart – Science Fiction als evolutionäre Spekulation‟ (2018), Wolfgang Neuhaus quotes the opinion that „general literature writes everything about nothing, while science fiction says nothing about everything‟ (Neuhaus 2018: 107). If, in the case of „general literature‟, this statement simply refers to fictionality, regarding of SF, it covers the scope and scale of possible themes. In the exchange between (popular) science and (scientific-fantastic) literature, this scale is set „cosmically‟ and – in line with post- and transhumanist narratives – understood as the „self-exaltation of man‟ (Neuhaus 2018: 118). This raises the question of the perceptibility of the „maximum stranger‟ (Schetsche/Anton 2019: 16–17), or the problem of its narratability. The so-called ‚extraterrestrial turn‛ leads – if only for the relevance of collective symbolic patterns of interpretation – to literary questions, which also include the reaction to the cosmic sublime („sense of wonder‟), the coping with and articulation of the (scientifically proven) unimaginable. The article sheds light on the problem through theoretical considerations and German-language examples of „extraterrestrial literature‟ (Theisohn 2022).

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