When strong voices quieten, they approach their innermost secrets.

For example, Herbert W. Franke whispered his hyper-dense radio play “Signale aus dem Dunkelfeld” (1980) for the print version in the Suhrkamp volume “Keine Spur von Leben .

.

.” followed by a few remarks, formulated in brittle systems-theoretical slang, but flowing from an open heart, as a confession of the knowledge “that the chance of survival and functioning is best preserved when the system consists of different, independently operating units who may also differ from one another in terms of different 'talents'”.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The author of this phrase, when he wrote this, had already demonstrated his aptitude for "surviving and functioning" as an electron optician, a tech company advertiser, a short story fireworker, a laconic novelist, a popular science educator, and theorist of the arts, all making money and earning some respect, but also found time along the way to shine down into bat-infested cave depths and to experiment with computer graphics.

The genre "Science Fiction", a paradoxical enterprise of perpetual amazement, owes a great deal to him in the German-speaking world: Sixty to thirty years ago, when the large paperback publishers in the Federal Republic of Germany, from Heyne to Goldmann to Suhrkamp, ​​afforded carefully curated series of fantastically speculative literature,

Along with people like Thomas Le Blanc and the incomparable Wolfgang Jeschke, he was one of the responsible enablers of native writing and reading styles of the genre.

Franke's novel "School for Supermen", published in the year "Signals from the Dark Field" was first broadcast, begins with an advertisement looking for people of his type: "astronauts, aquanauts, speleonauts".

speculative head

As the further course of the novel makes clear, the adventurous subjects in which one is supposed to excel are clear names that illustrate the big, hidden variable of the most abstract thirst for adventure, of curiosity per se.

Their "nautics" does not want to measure the sea, the cosmos or the interior of the earth, but to find the general law of the whole;

it is, after the Greek word "nomos" for "law", actually: nomonautics.

As a speculative mind, good spirit of "Ars Electronica" and benevolent observer of "cellular automata", i.e. primitive-robust calculation rules with unexpected results, Franke finally christened this nomos with characteristic

understatement

"Program" and in 1995 dedicated the idea that such a program can be derived from measurable things to a non-fiction book called "The P-Principle - Natural Laws in the Calculating Space", which is still very stimulating today.

As a narrator he followed a different program, which can be reconstructed from his most important books, The Glass Trap (1962, revised 1981), The Ivory Tower (1965) and Zone Zero (1970): Art, Research and Technology Must learn a lot before they know what questions to ask.

His long life was this work;

Herbert W. Franke died on Saturday at the age of ninety-five in Egling, Upper Bavaria.