By Cora Buhlert: The winners of the 2021 Deutscher Science Fiction Preis have been announced.
BEST GERMAN LANGUAGE SHORT STORY
- “Wagners Stimme” (Wagner’s Voice) by Carsten Schmitt, in Wie künstlich ist Intelligenz? (How artificial is intelligence?), edited by Klaus N. Frick, publisher: Plan9
Klaus N. Frick is also the current editor of the Perry Rhodan series. I sometimes chat with him on Twitter.
BEST GERMAN LANGUAGE NOVEL
- Die Sprache der Blumen (The Language of Flowers) by Sven Haupt, publisher: Mystic Verlag
Here’s an interesting addendum regarding the winners of the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis.
It is a well-known problem that the gender ratio of winners of the two major German SF awards (Deutscher Science Fiction Preis and Kurd Laßwitz Preis) is seriously skewed.
German writer, fan and conrunner Norbert Fiks has created a graphic of winners of the two awards in the fiction categories since 1980, showing just how skewed the gender ratio really is.
[“Frauenanteil” translates “Proportion of women.”]
Norbert Fiks also created this graphic, which is even more depressing. Because marked in orange are the awards that a single author, Andreas Eschbach, a male writer, has won:
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
In case it’s not clear, Andreas Eschbach, who has won eleven Kurd Laßwitz Preise for best novel, is a male writer.
Meanwhile, the lone female winner of the Kurd Laßwitz Preis for Best Novel is Gudrun Pausewang for her post-apocalyptic novel “Die Wolke” (The Cloud), which came out in 1988 or so, i.e. over thirty years ago.
I like the work of Andreas Eschbach but Cora is right, this is very ridicolous.
Referring to the charts: If Roman is novel and Kurzgeschichte is short story, what’s an Erzählung? The college German that I recall tells me it’s a “storytelling” or tale, but here does it refer to an in-between length such as a novella or novelette?
You’re right, Erzählung is something in-between. We don’t have exact categories for the length of a text such as novel, novella, etc. in Germany. So something unspecific was needed. But in the end it was too unspecific and the category Erzählung was canceled.
Correction: not Erzählung was canceled for the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis but Kurzgeschichte (short story) what is a bit strange because now there a different names for the same category of the two awards.
Cora Buhlert: So the word for “science fiction”in German is “science fiction?”
I recently learned that the French for “science fiction” is ‘science fiction.”
@Martin Wooster: We had a try with other words, like Zukunftsromane or utopische Romane but Science Fiction is what is used regulary.
We have a few people who are angry that often we use English words or fabricate now words that sound like English (Denglish is that called) if good German words exist. (I don’t think this is a very popular thought in fandom).
German Science Fiction was seen in the 50s as very much behind to the American One, I know of one case where a writer fabricated American Science Fiction Novels, that he “translated” to get published.
That was Walter Ernsting a.k.a. Clark Dalton, co-creator of Perry Rhodan, who could only get his stories published initially by inventing a fictional American SF author he translated.
And this was the reason that a lot of people believed that Perry Rhodan was a German/American co-creation.