u/rauschsinnige

When a book gains 278 pages in translation

I often read German translations, and right now I have two editions of Iain M. Banks in front of me: the German translation and the Englisch original.

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks has 520 pages in English.

The German edition, Der Algebraist, has 798 pages.

That is 278 extra pages.

Of course, this can come down to format, typesetting, font size, paper and layout.

I have a second example: Rama II by Gentry Lee and C. Clarke. These two books show that it can be done differently. The German edition has only about 50 pages more. You can absolutely relate that to the language, because German words are often much longer, and the sentences tend to be longer as well.

In almost every translated book I read, the German edition has noticeably more pages.

Horror science fiction is one of the hardest areas to get right. Good books in this genre are rare. Truly great ones are even harder to find.

That is why I was so glad I discovered The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch.

At first, I honestly thought it would be more of a science-fiction crime novel. And that is how it begins: with a horrific, brutal murder. Shannon Moss, an investigator with the NCIS division Deep Waters, is brought onto the case. What makes it even worse for her is that the crime scene is the same place where her friend was murdered years earlier. From the beginning, this gives the book a strange, oppressive atmosphere.

But the murder is only the entry point.

Step by step, it becomes clear that there is much more going on. The story is set in the 1990s, but through a technology that makes it possible to travel into potential future timelines, it turns into a tangled science-fiction story about time, layers of reality, and an apocalyptic event moving closer.

What makes the book so strong is that it never explains everything too early. You only get the information piece by piece. Sweterlitsch connects events across different times so skillfully that the tension never drops.

And then there are the real horror moments.

If you like horror science fiction as much as I do, but rarely find anything good in the genre, you need to read this book.

At some point you know your own books by heart. You have a fresher perspective than I do.

Don't get confused by the German editions, just name the authors you think are missing.

I’m not entirely sure what kind of book Diaspora is supposed to be. I opened it, and within the first few pages, it had already turned my brain into popcorn.

What Greg Egan puts together here is so wildly out there. At its core, the book is about a digital vision of what humans could become in the future. There are still people with bodies in this world, but the real focus is on what posthuman worlds might look like.

And he has really thought this through on the deepest possible level. You can read that in every single sentence. I swear I did not fully understand it. I know what he is trying to do, but the details he describes are so far removed from anything familiar.

And then there is something very specific, especially when you consider that the book was written in 1997. He actually uses a pronoun for these digital humans because, apparently. He uses the gender-neutral pronouns “ve”, “ver” and “vis” for these digital humans because they apparently can no longer be assigned a gender. He did not invent it, but he made it famous.

I would say this book is a real challenge. But if you accept that challenge and do not let yourself be put off when you do not understand everything, and if you really stick with it, then you get this philosophical, technical, visionary work about posthuman life.

It’s set far in the future, and humanity is highly advanced. They manipulate the human body and are also able to partially digitize consciousness. So there are virtual worlds as well. In this world, vampires exist too. They live among humans, but humans are no longer their prey.

One day, alien probes arrive at Earth, the so-called “Firefall” event. These probes photograph the planet.

Humans then set out toward the sender at the edge of the solar system, in the Oort Cloud, at a place called “Big Ben.”

The ship carrying the main character, Siri Keeton, a “Synthesist,” is already the fourth mission. The others never returned.

Keeton had a difficult childhood, and the book includes flashbacks to his relationships with other people.

This first contact is actually an entire world, the alien construct “Rorschach.” It is far removed from any expectations. If it were adapted into a film, I would describe this first contact as a psycho-horror thriller science fiction.

The whole thing is a web of confusion between the people on the ship and the artifact. The crew doesn’t really trust their captain, who turns out not to be the captain after all. That role belongs to the vampire Jukka Sarasti.

This alien entity has very strange inhabitants. These “Scramblers” are hyper-intelligent, but they lack consciousness as we understand it. Watts explores the idea that consciousness might not be an evolutionary advantage, but rather a hindrance.

Overall, the book is quite gripping, sometimes confusing, but highly recommended. It presents very interesting concepts about consciousness and existence itself. For example, one crew member is referred to as a “Gang” because they consist of multiple personalities in a single body. That also adds to the confusion. 😅

At the end of the book, there are many pages explaining the scientific background.

I’d really like to see this as a film.