Science Fiction Trivia

[Lestradae]

Ha! Hans Dominik, "Die Macht der Drei"?

... Edit: Yeah, that's it.

Had to use Wikipedia to identify it. Englishspeakers never had a chance, as the entry is only available in german:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Macht_der_Drei

[Commander McLane]

Yes, you finally found him. Congratulations!

Will a superweapon, controlled by three philanthropic individuals, be able to force the UK and the US to abstain from a bloody war against each other?

Author and title of this quite early SF-novel, please.

It is "Die Macht der Drei", the first of Dominik's SF-novels, published in 1921 (although he had written a considerable amount of fiction and non-fiction in the 20 years before that).

The superweapon, by the way, is kind of an energy ray which can be focused on any point of the Earth and which there is no defense against. So it is very lucky that it doesn't fall into the hands of one of the parties at war...

The author was long dead when the first Hugo was awarded, so he never got one. But he published an essay once in a magazine edited by Hugo Gernsback, although it wasn't Amazing Stories, and it wasn't a story.

The essay I was referring to is called "Airports for World Traffic" and published in Air Wonder Stories, a magazine edited by Gernsback. It seems to be the only thing ever published in English during Dominik's lifetime. I stumbled across a short story of his available in a collection on Google Books here.

The author was originally an electrical engineer, working for an important company at his time. Because not only his engineering, but also his literary skills became obvious, he was placed in their literary office. Later he was working as a journalist specializing in writing popular articles about science. But only with his first SF-novel about 20 years later he fully became a free lance writer.

Dominik was working for Siemens & Halske from 1900 to 1905, and then again during the First World War. As an electrical engineer he held a couple of patents, but his literary skills seemed even more valuable for the company. He only could make a living as a freelance writer from 1924 onwards.

The novel I am looking for is a stand-alone, but also has a sequel, which however can also be read as a stand-alone. The sequel deals with another worldwide crisis, in fact with climate change in the northern hemisphere, which was caused by one of the major powers diverting the gulf stream in a rather spectacular way.

The sequel is called "Atlantis" (1924/25). America blows up the isthmus in Panama through a nuclear detonation, and as a consequence the gulf stream flows into the Pacific Ocean, leading to the beginning of a new ice age in Europe.

The writer I am looking for is (or at least was) absolutely famous in Germany, being the pioneer of SF-literature in the country. Somewhere I've read that his combined oevre sold in the region of above 2 million (!) copies. And it is still ubiquitous in the Youth and SF sections of German public libraries. The English Wikipedia-entry on him, however, is a stub with just two lines, and I don't think that any of his books was ever published outside Germany or translated into any other language. Especially US-publishers seem to be not at all interested in foreign literature apart from a few best-sellers, which is why (among other things) German SF (or Stanislaw Lem, for that matter) is so obscure for anglophone people.

While browsing the SF (and also the "Youth Novels") section in the public library in my home town in the seventies and eighties I couldn't help stumbling across Dominik a lot. I wonder whether this was the same in Vienna, Lestradae?

Anyway, it's your turn again. But it was fun to find out just how obscure Dominik is for everybody here.

[Rxke]

Looks like he had decent plots, too...

[Lestradae]

While browsing the SF (and also the "Youth Novels") section in the public library in my home town in the seventies and eighties I couldn't help stumbling across Dominik a lot. I wonder whether this was the same in Vienna, Lestradae?

Actually, nope. I did dig around in german (as far as language is concerned) libraries end of the 1970s and in the 1980s for scifi literature, but I have to admit that to the best of my knowledge I'd never heard of Hans Dominik before.

Even the one inkling about three scientists and a superweapon I had I could trace back to "Die Physiker" from Friedrich Dürrenmatt - something completely different.

OK, I'll try to find something not that obscure or you and I have to do this contest amongst ourselves with german SciFi

Hm, perhaps this: It's a story from a book that has 23 thematically linked stories in them which all have to do with the moon. In this story, an ex-astronaut who once went to the moon finds clues in a mysterious cathedral that the 20th century was not the first time humans managed to reach the moon and get back again ...

Name story, book, and author.

[Selezen]

Damn you, Lestradae!!! I've just trawled through the ENTIRE list (well, A-D) of the "German Writer Stubs" page of Wikipedia to find the guy's name, then read German pages to find the right page then translated it to find the english version of the title and while I was doing all that, YOU BEAT ME TO IT!!!

Darn you to heck.

Hey, it was fun learning about German Sci-Fi though. It sounds much more Science-related than most english-speaking stuff, so I might give it a try (if I can find translated versions).

After that, I think this one might be simpler. I'll try first with Robert Silverberg's "Phases of the Moon".

[Lestradae]

Damn you, Lestradae!!! I've just trawled through the ENTIRE list (well, A-D) of the "German Writer Stubs" page of Wikipedia to find the guy's name, then read German pages to find the right page then translated it to find the english version of the title and while I was doing all that, YOU BEAT ME TO IT!!!

As I said: As an english speaker, you had no chance in hell - if you were on the verge of finding out, that's a colossal achievement in and of itself that merits a half-point for sure!

Still ...

I'll try first with Robert Silverberg's "Phases of the Moon".

... that's not it.

[Selezen]

I translated the very page you cited and came back on the forum to post the answer when I saw you had beaten me to the punch. Darn. So close.

Is it one of the stories from that anthology then? I just reread the question...

[Lestradae]

Is it one of the stories from that anthology then? ...

No ... wrong author. One tip: The book this story is in is not very old.

[snork]

Back then in the 80's I did get most of my SciFi not so much from libraries, but from Comic-Cafés.
They usually had a 2-for-1 policy with second (3rd, ...) hand SciFi paperbacks.

I did read few Hans Dominik titles, too, but other than being so old and thus maybe interesting for enthusiasts, I found them boring and not that recommendable.

At the libraries (1980's), SciFi was presented in two ways :
- a SciFi section in the fiction racks, consisting mostly of books published in the GDR and some really old classics.
- one or two of these turntable racks that are used to present postcards, full with unsorted SciFi paperbacks. In smaller libraries, they were mixed with crime story paperbacks.

[Lestradae]

It's a story from a book that has 23 thematically linked stories in them which all have to do with the moon. In this story, an ex-astronaut who once went to the moon finds clues in a mysterious cathedral that the 20th century was not the first time humans managed to reach the moon and get back again ...

Name story, book, and author.

OK, not completely un-obscure then.

Additional hints: The book came out in 2002, the writer is a quite well-known British author who's last name starts with the letter "B".

[Zieman]

Moon-Calf, Phase Space, Stephen Baxter?

[Lestradae]

Moon-Calf, Phase Space, Stephen Baxter?

And the point goes to ... Zieman!

Over to you

[Zieman]

Yay.

If you've read this story, you know the answer. Otherwise, it may be (I hope) somewhat hard to figure out.

The riddle:
Who are the smiling ones?

[Lestradae]

Who are the smiling ones?

We are not talking Doctor Who, series of 2010, "The Beast Below", the booth ... things?

[Zieman]

Nope.