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Laurence A. Rickels, Germany: A Science Fiction (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2015, 269 pp, £9.99)
Germany: A Science Fiction begins with a preface in which Rickels mentions the 'provincialism' with which sections of the sf fan community reacted to his previous I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (2010), although it - and indeed Germany - has also been extravagantly praised. Part of the problem is that neither are works of conventional literary criticism. Rather, they are explorations of social psychotherapy, which means that they are very specific and particular readings of texts designed to tease out theoretically-focused explanations of what these texts might mean. While I suspect that Rickels might view that summary with suspicion as denoting the writer's unfamiliarity with the field - and in this case he would be right - that is not to suggest an automatic hostility. The title suggests a particular realization of Nazi Germany as a culmination of certain kinds of science fiction, which leads to a troubling response, almost a denial of the 'German' strand: 'Because Nazi Germany appeared so closely associated with specific science fictions as their realization, after WWII the genre had to delete the recent past and begin again within the new Cold War opposition'. This kind of attribution of 'National' psychoanalysis, though frequent in popular accounts of why political movements and wars happen, is, however, troubling in itself, and Rickels' meaning needs teasing out. He is neither undertaking a collective analysis of the 'German psyche' nor - which is what I picked up the book for - precisely giving us a history of the German contribution to science fiction which we can see not only in the books of Kurd Lasswitz and Thea von Harbou and the films of Fritz Lang (scripted by von Harbou) but also many of the early stories in Amazing.
As such, it is a complicated book, both in its engagement with complex ideas and in the way it is written as a kind of word association or Rorschach test, with ideas echoing and re-echoing through a network of references and examples. Chapter 2 for instance moves between Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Robert Bramkamp's Prufstand 7 and the director's own book on his film (which cites Rickels' own work in an...