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Cornils, Ingo. Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. pp. 332. Hardcover. 9781640140356. $99.
Given the impressive depth and breadth of German utopian thought, it should come as no surprise that an academic study of the discourse in relation to Germany's literary and cinematic science fiction tradition should be wide-ranging and complex. In Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Ingo Cornils valiantly attempts to wrangle that many-tentacled subject into a coherent exploration of how German science fiction and film has processed the nightmarish experiences of the twentieth century to point a path forward for humanity as a whole. Divided into two parts and further subdivided into eighteen chapters, Beyond Tomorrow offers readers and scholars a fresh perspective on a tradition that is, unfortunately, not studied nearly enough in the Anglophone world. And while the subject of this book seems to strain against the confines of a monograph, it gestures toward the useful work to be done going forward in understanding German science fiction.
Indeed, the Anglophone sf tradition itself (especially from the US and UK) is important to Cornils's argument here since the author compares and contrasts it with its German counterpart in an effort to push back against the overwhelming influence of Anglophone sf around the world in the twentieth century. And yet, unlike the speculative fiction that emerged in the US, UK, and elsewhere, Germany's version was specifically influenced by the country's role in World War II and the Holocaust, as well as its experience as a divided nation between 1945 and 1989. The utopian tradition in German thought, however, stretches back to earlier centuries and continues into our own in its considerations of new technologies and the future of the human race.
Speaking of the future: Cornils opens Beyond Tomorrow with the question, "Can literature tell us anything meaningful about the future?" (1). Out of this comes multiple hypotheses that draw upon three specific discourses: "utopian thought (how the world should be), futurology (how the world is likely to be), and utopian fiction (how the world could be)" (9). One overarching hypothesis, Cornils explains early on, is that science fiction, which emerged...