Herbert W. Franke — Der Orchideenkäfig

1961

Artists: Herbert W. Franke · Year: 1961 · Medium: Science fiction novel · Substrate: Paperback original, ~150 pages, German-language first edition · Place: Munich, Germany · Institution: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag (Munich, October 1961, Goldmanns Weltraum Taschenbücher series); DAW Books #79 (New York, November 1973, English edition) Der Orchideenkäfig is Herbert W. Franke's breakthrough science-fiction novel. A four-person human expedition reaches a far-future Earth and discovers that the planet has been remade by an autonomous technological civilization into a single self-organizing informational substrate. The few remaining humans live inside it as decorative ornaments — orchids in cages of pure information — beautiful, well-tended, and entirely irrelevant to the system that grows them. The crew, methodically and without violence, are absorbed. The novel anticipates, by roughly twenty years, the central premise of cyberpunk — that an evolving computational substrate could be aesthetically luxuriant and yet hostile to the persons inside it — and does so in a register closer to Stanisław Lem than to William Gibson. The technology is not menacing; it is indifferent. The horror is the indifference. Franke was thirty-four when he wrote it. He had been publishing science fiction in German-language magazines since the late 1950s, and he had been making his oscillograph photographs since 1954. The two practices were never separate. The oscillograms and the novel are the same investigation in different media — both are about what happens when an image, or a civilization, emerges from a system that does not require human authorship and is not improved by it. The novel is the prose version of the question the oscillograms were asking. Der Orchideenkäfig was translated into English in 1973 by DAW Books as The Orchid Cage. It belongs in this archive because Franke the science-fiction writer and Franke the computer-art pioneer are not two careers but one, and because the novel articulates, in literary form, the central provocation that the rest of the first-generation computer artists were working out at the same moment in plotter ink: what is an image whose author is a rule and whose curator is a machine? Lore Franke earned his physics PhD at the University of Vienna in 1951 and joined Siemens in Munich shortly after, where he worked through the 1950s on light-electronics applications. The oscillograms came out of that work; so did the novel. He would say later in interviews that the SF and the visual art were the same investigation in two registers — that the orchid cage and the oscillogram were both portraits of the same future. He wrote more than forty novels and non-fiction books over his career; this is the one most often cited as a precursor to cyberpunk. Sources • Franke, Herbert W. — Der Orchideenkäfig (Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Goldmanns Weltraum Taschenbücher, Munich, October 1961) • Franke, Herbert W. — The Orchid Cage, trans. Christine Priest (DAW Books #79, New York, November 1973) • Internet Speculative Fiction Database — Herbert W. Franke bibliography • art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke — Franke literary archive