The Abolition of Species - Softcover

Dath, Dietmar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0998777099 ISBN 13: 9780998777092

Publisher: DoppelHouse Press, 2018

Synopsis

"Political allegory, rich with the sort of grandeur not seen since Russian science fiction of the mid-20th century. The novel of big ideas isn’t dead." – Library Journal

The world as we know it is over. Man's reign on earth has come to an end, and the reign of the animals has begun. The indifferently wise Cyrus Golden the Lion rules the three-city state that is now what remains of Europe. Yet, other forces stir while the king of beasts sleeps--the last struggling human resistance, the Atlanteans with their mysterious undersea plans; the factions of Badger, Fox and Lynx within the empire itself; and, in the jungles across the ocean, a ceramic form of postbiological life. Welcome to the setting of Dietmar Dath's futuristic novel, The Abolition of Species, presenting an imaginative and highly original take on the decline and rebirth of civilization.

Cyrus the Lion sends the wolf Dmitri Stepanovich on a diplomatic mission, and in the course of his journey he discovers truths about natural history, war, and politics for which he was unprepared. The subsequent war that breaks out in The Abolition of Species will come to span three planets and thousands of years--encompassing treachery and massacres, music and mathematics, savagery and decadence, as well as the terraformation of Mars and Venus and the manipulation of time itself. By turns grandiose, horrific, erotic, scathing, and visionary, The Abolition of Species is a tale of love and war after the fall of man and an epic meditation on the theory of evolution unlike any other.

One of Germany's most celebrated contemporary writers, Dath has distinguished himself through works that deftly combine popular culture--particularly music--with left-wing politics and the fantastic. The Abolition of Species embodies the best of what Dath is known for and will cement his reputation among English readers excited to discover one of the freshest voices in contemporary literature.

About this title

About the Author

Dietmar Dath (b. 1970) is an author, translator, dramaturge, lyricist, and presently, the film critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In the past he was the chief editor of the rock magazine Spex before becoming the feuilleton editor for FAZ from 2001 to 2007. Dietmar Dath has written fifteen novels, as well as books and essays on scientific, aesthetic and political topics, including Maschinenwinter (2008), the biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2010) and his prize-winning sci-fi novel Pulsarnacht (2013). The German original of The Abolition of Species won the Kurd Lasswitz Prize for Science Fiction in 2009, was staged at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in the same year, and was short-listed for the German Book Prize. One of Germany's most celebrated contemporary writers, Dath has distinguished himself through works that deftly combine popular culture -- particularly music -- with left-wing politics and the fantastic. The Abolition of Species embodies the best of what Dath is known for and will cement his reputation among English readers excited to discover one of the freshest voices in contemporary literature.

Samuel P. Willcocks was the 2010 winner of the German Ambassador's Award for Literary Translation (London). He translates from Czech, German, Romanian and Slovene into English and lives in Giurgiu on the Danube with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

first movement
CONTRA NATURAM
[ALLEGRO MODERATO]

Iz: Well then, who are we, who are the Gente? And what sets us apart from men? Leaving aside our shapes ... these could just be masks, after all, disguises. What is the most noticeable change since the Liberation, the most obvious, the most notable?
Cy: The business with smells, I think. Scent. The fact that it's everywhere and that we can be anywhere in the world and can always know what is happening elsewhere ...
Iz: Because of non-locality at the level of the pherinfonic field system.
Cy: Yes. Except, of course, that mankind already knew about non-locality. Take two electrons, a pair. Their total spin, so to speak, is zero. You don't know though how much spin a single electron has. Quantum theory--and even mankind got this far--says that you can't know this until you measure it. Exactly then, you shoot them away from one another, so to speak, until one is a good long way from the other, gone forever. Then you measure the first one. And as soon as you've done that and the electron you're measuring collapses into a specific state, then the state of the other electron is its opposite. Straightaway. With no signal transmitted. This is electron resonance, and it happens faster than light, faster than anything, because both electrons are part of an entangled system. They match up non-locally--;there's no datum traveling along any kind of path, the information is available there just as soon as its counterpart is produced here.
Iz: Because the two particles are ... entangled.
Cy: Absolutely. And our trick was to ... well, even though this process normally happens well below the atomic scale, we found a way to make it observable in molecules, which ...
Iz: Transmitters. Which we can smell.
Cy: Exactly. Quantum scents. That's how pherinfonics began.
Iz: And nowadays they even use it for astronomy, don't they?
Cy:Of course. It's all out there, you know ... even alcohol . . .
Iz: (laughs).
From the Conversations with the Lion, IV/ 65

THE DOOM THAT CAME TO THE THREE CITIES
1. YOU'RE REALLY NOT HELPING
While the pack hunted on down the coastline, a few stray wolves stayed behind and rested.
Four or five ravens had flown with them for a while, and now began to tease them. Each bird would dive-bomb one wolf, strafing the head or tail. The wolf ducked out of the way at first, and then leapt at the bird.
Sometimes it looked like a hunt. The ravens flew a little way above the wolves' heads, and then one hopped along the ground towards a resting wolf to peck at his tail, jumping smartly aside when the beast snapped at it.
When a wolf wanted revenge and followed the raven who taunted it, stalking, the bird would let him get within a few yards and take flight when it was almost too late.
Then it would land a few feet away and begin the fun all over again.

2. HE THAT WILL NOT HEAR
"Why," the dragonfly Philomena asked her dearest friend, Izquierda the bat, "did it actually happen to mankind the way that it happened? "That was in summer, when by day cloudless blue depths opened up above the slopes of the highest peak of the Three Cities, and by night the farthest galaxies shone with pinpoint clarity and in the swamp south of Landers the rushes shot up as if from nowhere, though the sheer heat had left hardly a drop of moisture.
Reeds without water: a riddle.
While the badgers' pelts bristled in the heat and the iguanas' scales shimmered as though stars were hidden beneath, many were asking, "Why did what happened to mankind, happen the way that it did?"
Early in the year, a few of them, mostly apes, had still believed that it might have had something to do with love. "They always had to deal with that," Stanz the ape explained to his acolytes, in front of a picture that he had painted to illustrate the theme,"this nonsense about love. Nothing but trouble. If l understand things correctly, it doesn't bother us."
Then the Lion made sure that voices spoke against the ape in all forums (or had the dragonfly make sure--he had long ago become too self-absorbed to walk amongst the Gente). "We have love, just as we have language. Perhaps we call it otherwise--although the wolves call it love also, and why shouldn't they? It's the same instinct for beauty, the same passion, the same old sacred guff we couldn't live without."
Heavens above! Beauty, that's right. Even Stanz the ape had to admit as much. Those who now owned the earth after mankind were susceptible to beauty, to the same flowery, queasy, cosmic feelings and emotions that it had caused in mankind. There was the ecstasy of creation, the concern to preserve what had been made, to cherish; there was desire and the urge to own something precious, even the lust for destruction (because treasures have a magnetic pull of their own and bring on ruin too).
But if it had not been love that led to mankind's downfall, then why had their noisy, stinking, rapacious tenancy of this earth come to such a bloody end? Would their culture have been able to endure after its basis had been lost, like rushes that grew without mire, and reeds without water. If you looked in the archives this culture could still be found, lingering in a kind of melancholic last flowering, a memory in texts. But before you could pick the bloom and gather it, it had already withered. The greatest talent of these destructive geniuses had been hope, and when this was cut off, their trust had perished, their ambition was a spider's web on books that no one would ever open again.
They had leant upon their house but it did not stand. They were green before the sun, and their branches shot forth in their gardens. Their roots were wrapped around the heap and saw the place of stones. Yet, they had been destroyed from their place, which denied them, saying, "I have not seen them."

The dragonfly's best friend smelt of laurel and apricot, in those days the usual fragrance of scholars in all Three Cities. Her wings looked waxy in the soft twilight at the cave entrance. A ring of silver light spiraled round her copper claws. Her gaze glistened darkly, thick honey in the eye sockets. The cunning old bat laughed, showing needle-sharp teeth.
Then she selected a short silent film and played it on the cavern wall, explaining to the dragonfly as it flickered past. "Look, there, that mass of bubbles, do you recognize it? It's a mold fungus."
"Looks like a slime," said the dragonfly.
She was skeptical. What was this supposed to prove? Her friend gnashed her teeth, settled on a dry patch on the rock and said, "That's what it is. A very special kind of slime, though. The old name was Dictyostelium discoideum. Very interesting life cycle, just watch."
The film's colors were worn and faded. On the cavern wall something twitched, molten, gooey. The dragonfly buzzed faintly, skepticism gave way to cautious interest.

Beyond the bulging cave entrance, workers were busy installing ladders and walkways for those Gente who could not fly. They were well ahead of schedule and would be done with building these platforms and galleries within weeks. Months ago, trained groups of tiny scuttling creatures had taken apart the wasp factory between the meadows and the high forest, to use the beams for the new building work here inside the cave.
Now it paid off. Nearly all the wasps had set out for Landers in the meantime.
Watching Izquierda's film, Philomena could hear the workers, newts and field mice, laughing as they worked, singing too, telling jokes. There had been none of that in the first years after the Liberation. Now they were happy with their work. That was good.
All things considered, things were getting better all the time. Soon, it was said, they would be able to live on sunlight alone.
"Mankind," continued the dragonfly's best friend, "only discovered what you see here quite late, at the end of their dominance. They never truly understood it. Now look here, at the close-up: this is the vegetative phase of the life cycle. Single cells. A random collection of unconnected units."
"They look like, I don't know ... swarming amoebae?"
"In a way, yes. Mankind called them Myxamoebae. They live on bacteria. As long as there's any around, as long as that food source is available, the cells grow and reproduce. But now, have a look--we take away their microbes."
"Ah-hmm. Oh-ho! What's all this then? They ... the single cells are budging together, tottering towards one another. They're jostling ... clumping. Kneading one another."
"Yes. Odd, isn't it? They are taking on another form. Like a living tissue. Mankind called that Pseudoplasmodium."
"It moves, by itself! I can't ... is that a new organism? Distinct?"
"Hard to say, dearie. Single cells organizing together ... what should I call the result? If I observe it, pretty soon I can see that it's looking for food, clearly independently. A tiny little slug. It's attracted by light and reacts to temperature differentials, to moisture ..."
"Hunts for food. Like we do."
"Quite right. Here, let's speed up the process. Look, a new food source. It's feeding. And next . . ."
"Another metamorphosis! What is that now, a plant? It's got a stem, a stalk, then a fruit up there . . ."
"Spore capsule. And once the spores are dispersed, the whole cycle restarts.We can see, scattered about the place ..."
"More Myxamoebae. Fresh single-cells."
"Right. Do you understand?"

The dragonfly thought about it in silence for a moment. The facets of her eyes gleamed staccato while she thought, as though they were tiny beacons, sending messages coded in light. Then she said, "Because they couldn't do anything like that. Mankind. That's why what happened to them, happened. That's why we overtook them. Because they couldn't do what the Myxamoebae . . ."
Izquierda twitched her ears and shook her head. "Nonsense. Their downfall was not that they couldn't form a slug, rather, that they constantly tried to do so without being properly equipped. It's a confusion. People are not Myxamoebae, whether these people are humans or Gente."
The film stopped.
The dragonfly laughed softly. She had understood.
A fearful redemption was underway.

3. SHORTLY BEFORE ESPRIT
The wind had lain down to sleep by the cool whitewashed walls, behind gigantic cathedrals of archives. This was no act of protest, merely reasonable conduct in the face of an afternoon stretched out for centuries, a costly peace between reason and nature. This long after the Liberation, everyone only wanted peace and quiet--Gente, those humans who still survived, all those possessed of language. At least, so they thought. But thought is not action, the wind knows this.
Sticks and kindling cackled into flame in metal barrels placed around the mouths of rusty rainy drainpipes. The slender wolves kissed swans, stroking their feathers with moist, black muzzles and lay down with them to sleep when the moon rose, impudently pink, above the gabled roofs of Capeside.
No one was afraid of teeth or claws any longer, the vestiges of bad habits that might have been useful perhaps during the Monotony, but no use for anything now. Weapons had become ornament in the end, and ornament, mere caprice.

Battalions of badgers stood watch over borders that, gradually, were no longer any such thing.
They patrolled at a leisurely pace in the few remaining un-pacified border regions, here padding on their paws, there scolding and chiding. Wherever you might look, selection was the order of the day. Encoded in pherinfones, transmitted by interferons and interleukins, messages written in scent proclaimed the new state down to its minutest laws, the great text of all living beings. Thus an order arose, content to laze and to gaze ahead, to glaze and to gleam.
The Gente sniffed and snuffed at their ease: what did sage, lilac, elder, hashish, urine know about the inheritance of Man, what did ramson know about burning tires, the metal stench of blood? And in the songs of scent, the blossoming melodies, the angry days of late summer waited for their hour to come.

What did the last human beings think here?
Because their heads were done in, they thought, Can't speak. Can't talk. Can't do anything Gente want. Can't hide. Can't change the Lion's mind. Gonna live with my soul, it's stitched inside. Can't stop for the reeling cause, it twists and turns and falls, can't stop for love. I told 'em all about it. Can't talk, 'cause I'm already lost. Can't think. Can't cry. Keep thinking of a suicide. It's so hard. I just can't forget it. Gonna fade 'cause I'm already dead. Can't think. Can't dream. Don't care if I live or die. Don't talk to me. I just can't believe it. Gonna fade 'cause I'm already dead. Can't think . Can't dream. Can't believe a thing I see. I won't have it. I've gotta get out of here, or I'll regret it. Can't speak. Can't lie. Can't go anywhere to hide. Can't think. Can't cry. Still thinking of a suicide. End quote, skull bone, Danzig my father, the harbor in flames, number four black, good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Shantih shantih shantih

Edition details

• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0998777099
• ISBN 13: 9780998777092
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384