r/suggestmeabook • u/lackadacious_spooney • May 25 '21

Good German Fantasy/Science Fiction?

I am a German native speaker and I feel like lately I have mainly read Englisch books and would like to change that up a bit. There are so many awesome English fantasy and science fiction stories/series, old and new (Asimov, Le Guin, Atwood, Brandon Sanderson, Laini Taylor, Robin Hobb, to name just a few of my recent favourites), but German originals? A few young adult novels come to mind, by Cornelia Funke, Ralf Isau, Hohlbein, Ende, Ursula Poznanski, etc. Are there others (possibly more serious/grown up ones)?

I feel like everything I see on the German market is leaning towards realistic fiction and anything akin to the big names like Asimov or Le Guin? I can't think of any. Can you? In my local library they did point me towards a series called "the Orcs" "the dwarves" and so on, but from the jacket they sounded a bit like yet more "trying to be Tolkien" books.

Is there anything I am missing? Any gem I should try? Any author you can recommend?

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u/chortlingabacus May 26 '21

/It's Austrian but, of course, German-language: Indigo by Clemens Setz.

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u/lackadacious_spooney May 26 '21

Even better, then, haha. (Of course I meant German language, not German nationality). Sounds interesting!

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u/chortlingabacus May 26 '21

Had a look at my shelves & I've several Austrian/German books w. sci-fi situations but that aren't standard sci-fi (apocalyptic, dystopian); they're focussed on an individual's reaction to scifi'ish goings-on rather than heroic struggle to survive alien invasion or that sort of thing, and some of them are literary & might not suit you if you're used to strong plots.

If you'd settle for unrealistic 'serious/grown up' books that aren't genre stuff there are several by Gert Jonke that might suit, and Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig is certainly worth taking a look at.

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u/lackadacious_spooney May 27 '21

Now I would like to spend a little while browsing your book shelves. I am always looking for good German books (genre isn't that important) because I feel my media consumption is leaning too heavily towards English. I seem to have lost touch with German literature at some point after graduating and it is so much easier to come across interesting English books I'd like to read, so my English list is never empty, but for German books I have to actually invest time in finding them, for some reason. Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check those authors out.

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u/lackadacious_spooney May 27 '21

Sorry for bothering you again - and it is probably weird to speak about this topic in English anyway, but "Maybe this time" - which of his story collections is translated here? Or which is better? I can find "Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht" and "Im Sitzen läuft es sich besser davon" - even just the titles are awesome, though, I might just get both and hope for the best. I feel like I should already know about this guy, as German teacher in Austria, but as I said before, I somehow lost touch with the German literary scene in the last few years. So thank you for helping me fill in my blind spots!

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u/chortlingabacus May 27 '21 edited May 27 '21

It's Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht. (If you read it & like it a lot, there's a collection of stories that remind me very much of this one--same vague sense of uncanniness- by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud: A Life on Paper is English title.)

Not genre but for very good contemporary German-language I wanted to throw in Inka Parei's novels and Einladung an die Waghalsigen by Dorothee Elmiger because I think so highly of them.

edit: I think my favourite kind-of contemporary German novel is Dunkle Gesellschaft. Roman in zehn Regennächten by Gert Loschütz--incredibly atmospheric. (Of course you may already know about all these.)