News SF
East German Science Fiction between Censorship and Self-Censorship
At April 10, 2025, we presented at The Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany our new collection of essays Looking Back at a Bright Tomorrow. Co-host was Science Fiction Club Andymon. You ca...
In May 2025, an Italian translation of our novel Andymon has appeared. The publishing house Del Vecchio Editore invited us to present the book at the Turin book fair (Salone del Libro di Torino), in the Casa delle traduzioni at Rome and in bookshops in Macerata and Florence. We discussed th...
Anticipations of a Bright Tomorrow is an exploration of the image of the future in East German science fiction. In the present volume, Looking Back at the Bright Tomorrow, we have a closer look at specific questions: How did censorship – and self-censorship – work in the field of science fiction? W...
Escapades. Fantasies and Fictions by Erik Simon and Angela & Karlheinz Steinmüller
»What Smith & Wesson are among the handguns, Simon & Steinmüller are among the headguns.« – Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective
»This volume is proof that you can recall future lives. Otherwise, I had not been abl...
The third volume of essays Vorgriff auf das Lichte Morgen is focussed on the early years of East-German science fiction, the 1950ies and 1960ies. All the books of this period are characterized by a rather uniform optimistic image of a bright future. This image corresponded well to the official cul...
With volume 6 “Computerdämmerung”, the new edition of the collected works by Memoranda Publ. has been completed, at least for a while. A new preface “Of punched cards and the end of the computer age” connects the stories of the volume to real developmental stages of information technology. Two of th...
Science fiction operates frequently with biomedical visions: inhalation of Radium gases to kill all harmful bacteria in Gernsback’s Ralph 24C21+, micro submarines in human blood vessels (movie Fantastic Voyage), and gentech reconstruction of man, just to mention a few. But was there really an im...
The second collection of essays includes eleven pieces that cover quite different topics of science fiction: from Atlantis to nanotechnology and alternative history, from language (or linguistic) utopias to the end of the world. Two of them – about the future of the homo sapiens and on alien animals...
The first volume of Steinmüller essays appeared in August 2021. Its title “Streifzüge” translates as forages into the history of science fiction. These expeditions into fantastic pasts cover more than three centuries: from utopian voyages in the late 17th century to alternative histories of the pres...
The story “Marslandschaften” (Martian Landscapes) from the collection with the same title has been awarded the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis (Kurd Laßwitz Award) for “the best German SF story of 2020”. It is already the fourth KLP awarded to the Steinmüllers. One of the earlier KLPs went to Angela, another...
In March 2021, a new and enlarged edition of the “planetary novel” Pulaster was published by Memoranda as volume 5 of the collected works of Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller. This new edition comprises not only the appendix “All about Pulaster” of the last edition but also maps of the planet and o...
Vol 10 Marslandschaften
For what reasons do some people wear a digital aura? What is the connection of Mr Putin with the “biomechanicals”? Who brought fake news to Ancient Egypt? Why is Siemens responsible for the sinking of Atlantis? What are aliens doing in an East German fridge? Is goulash rea...
What if the Berlin Wall never came down? 30 years after the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, East Germany - the GDR (German Democratic Republic) - regained a certain popularity. Media like Antenne Mecklenburg-Vorpommern perform "thought experiments" (see podcast Gedankenexperiment) about a fictional c...
What if your image on all digital devices suddenly obtains a kind of aura? Who does this – and why? These are the question, the hero of a new story of the Steinmüllers asks himself. The answers may be disturbing … In March 2019, the story „Die Aura oder Im Zustand der Gnade“ appeared at Tor-Onlin...
Where is the demarcation line between science fiction, serious futures studies, and much less serious futurism? What is the difference between wild and tamed futures? Questions like these are analysed in the essay "Zukunftsphantstik der einen und der anderen Art" by Karlheinz Steinmüller, which ap...
