Neverstory: Science Fiction as Art- and Thinking-Machine by Dietmar Dath

Abstract

Reviewed by: Neverstory: Science Fiction as Art- and Thinking-Machineby Dietmar Dath Christoph Schmitz Thinking Through the Science Fiction Machine. Dietmar Dath. Niegeschichte: Science Fiction als Kunst- und Denkmaschine. [ Neverstory: Science Fiction as Art- and Thinking-Machine]. Matthes & Seitz, 2019. 942 pp. €38 pbk, €25,99 ebk. With Niegeschichte[Neverstory], German sf author and cultural critic Dietmar Dath presents an erudite, well-written, and stimulating account of sf as cultural history. While the book mainly focuses on literature, it also discusses other narrative forms including films, the visual arts, and even pop music. Niegeschichte, however, wants to be more than sf history. Dath balances an in-depth account of the genre's development with an ambitious interpretive approach. Two strains of theory frame the historical narrative. Readers familiar with Dath's work will not be surprised by the central role of Marxist aesthetics, and in particular the claim that "art is a form of understanding" (22, all translations mine): Dath is one of the most prominent Marxist writers in Germany. Additionally, the text deploys elements from conceptual mathematics, especially category theory, to explain the poetic relations within and among the artworks he discusses. While the theoretical explorations at times expand into the overtly abstract, they are generally well argued and detailed enough to carry Dath's arguments over nearly one thousand pages. Niegeschichteappears to be written for the casual sf reader: the dustcover blurb advertises it as an "introduction to [Dath's] favorite topic." Its chronological organization and the (mostly) canonical text selection underline the book's introductory character, as does Dath's personal investment and his talent as a writer. His honest display of excitement for many of the analyzed stories, novels, and films is often infectious, and the well-structured narrative of the historical part shows that Dath's talents as a novelist transfer seamlessly to the cultural-historical approach. Niegeschichtealso makes frequent allusions to films, literary texts, and philosophical theories from outside the genre. These references allow readers to draw parallels between sf and other areas of cultural history. But the book's analytical aspirations go far beyond introducing new readers to the sf canon. Rather, its main goal is to analyze its history in order to develop a precise understanding of its main characteristics. In this sense, Niegeschichteis a historical-materialist account. Chapter I presents both personal and analytical motivations behind the book and clarifies the grounding of Dath's poetic thinking in Marxist theories, from Marx himself via George Lukács to East German writer Peter Hacks. Dath makes clear that the references to non-sf artworks and general theories not only draw in casual readers, but also support his claim that sf presents a unique narrative mode that "opens up a cultural history of its era" (27). Dath calls sf an "Art- and Thinking-Machine," as the book's subtitle has it. A machine is "everything that replaces, supports, and expands our memory—i.e. writing, image, storage—and everything that allows us to manipulate these [End Page 172]stored data more effectively …: the alphabet, mathematical symbols, all rules to manipulate them, words, sentences, equations" (96). The historical narrative presented in Niegeschichteis also an inspection of this machine, answering the questions "What kind of machine is SF? Who constructed it? Who possesses it? Who uses it? Against what? What for?" (103). A central concept of the book is what Dath calls "Aufhebungsfunktor" ("suspension functor" 72, passim). It combines Coleridge's suspension of disbelief with Dath's ambitious program of a poetics inspired by the mathematics of category theory, of which functor is a central concept. Dath understands sf not as the accumulation of all texts that deal with future civilizations, spaceships, aliens, and/or time travel but rather as the genre's formal and functional characteristics. Category theory does not describe discrete objects or sets of them, but "when, how, where, and in which ways something can be transformed into something else" (71). And these are exactly the questions Dath poses about sf history. The suspension functor describes the suspension of our "expectation of experiencing the world" and substitutes an alternative set of rules—those that are characteristic of...