Dietmar Daths enzyklopädische Science Fiction

AbstractIn contemporary German literature, Dietmar Dath (born 1970) is arguably the most prolific encyclopaedic author – a designation that refers not only to the amount of scientific, discursive and popular knowledge included in his books, but also to their shere volume. Since the mid-1990s, Dath has published a huge amount of fiction and non-fiction, with manifold transitions between these two categories. I propose to read Dath’s novels – especially „Für immer in Honig“ (2005, revised edition 2008) and „Die Abschaffung der Arten“ (2008) – as encyclopaedic Science Fiction: a kind of literary knowledge presentation that is at the same time extremely polyhistoric, highly entertaining, and strictly progress oriented in the vein of classical Marxism-Leninism. After sketching these programmatic aspects of Dath’s writing, I examine some of his crucial political and scientific issues and the way in which they figure in the aforementioned novels: posthumanism, scientific socialism, and mathematical category theory. To conclude, I discuss Dath’s preoccupation with the narrative integration of the multifarious elements of his writing, which is also the attempt of including them into a coherent narrative of his own authorship.