Abstract
Starting from an examination of East German cybernetician Georg Klaus (1912-1974), this essay characterizes socialism as a modern system sharing pragmatic and quantitative goals with Western capitalist societies. A central problem for the socialist literary imagination became describing the qualitative difference between socialism and its capitalist rivals-since, however one might compare the quantitative efficiency of two optimizing systems, an incommensurable qualitative difference distinguished socialist from capitalist organization. In this context, GDR writer Franz Fuhmann's 1979 science fiction story about a socialist solution to the classical Greek paradox of the sorites (quantity becoming quality) demonstrates the characteristic intensity with which socialist fiction tried to imagine its difference from capitalism, figuring this difference as an irreconcilable tension between system (quantitative) and sovereignty (qualitative).
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