I picked this up simply because the plot of future technocrats attempting to colonize Greenland felt timely, but this is some of the best speculative fiction I’ve read: surpassing Dune in strangeness and literary merit, Frankenstein in its themes, and at least equal to The Book of the New Sun in its allusions, symbolism and prose.
This novel feels as if Joyce tried his hand at weird fiction or horror, as if fertility gods walked through Disco Elysium, or if Clark Ashton Smith was capable of writing something more than 50 pages.
Alfred Doblin’s novel spans the imagined future of the 21st to 27th centuries. Entire sections are dedicated to sweeping descriptions of political movements, technological innovations, Malthusian anxieties, mass displacement. Punctuating the historical prose and zooming in on more specific events are scenes of technocrats, oligarchs, scientists and their enemies. These are all mythic and almost religious in tone.
Take for instance this introduction to one tyrant, reminiscent of the Illiad’s opening lines:



