The Glass Bees
In The Glass Bees the celebrated German writer Ernst junger presents a disconcerting vision of the future. Zapparoni, a brilliant businessman, has turned his advanced understanding of technology and his strategic command of the information and entertainment industries into a discrete form of global domination. But Zapparoni is worried that the scientists he depends on might sell his secrets. He needs a chief of security, and Richard, a veteran and war hero, is ready for the job. However, when he arrives at the beautiful country compound that is Zapparoni's headquarters, he finds himself subjected to an unexpected ordeal. Soon he is led to question his past, his character, and even his senses... When The Glass Bees was first published in 1960, junger's German critics dismissed the book's vision as lacking contemporary relevance. Today, however, the future it imagines seems very much like the present we now know.
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What Hacker News says
- Right out of Ernst Junger's best book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bees (1957)
- I quite like Junger. The Glass Bees is a really interesting parable about technology. It predicts parts of the modern tech industry quite accurately.
Most of the potshots in the article are cheap. I like this quote from Jean Cocteau about Junger and World War II: "Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Junger had no hands".
- Brooklyn Public Library suffers from its own cultural preconceptions. If you want something that speaks for workers rights you could do worse than read B. Traven, but his work is barely available. Hollywood made the Treasure of the Sierra Madre into a film, so that one cannot be censored, however you can't grab the Mahogany cycle or the Wobbly - if you did the children might ask why the rent is too high!
And those of a more conservative bent will be disappointed, too. No Ernst Jünger for you! Yes, you can get the Rain of Steel, it's too well known to be suppressed, but not the Adventurous Heart or the (very topical) Glass Bees. And heaven forfend you read the Marble Cliffs!
But genderqueer stuff on top of genderqueer stuff, and the rent is still too high.
- I am currently reading "The Glass Bees", Ernst Junger's scifi novel from 1957. It's about a former cavalryman fallen on hard times who goes for a shady job interview with a technology mogul. Its kind of an extended meditation on changing times and technology; the protagonist contrasting his military life with the high-tech world he is about to enter.
The novel's tech mogul Zapparoni (described in Bruce Sterling's introduction as a cross between Walt Disney and Bill Gates) made his fortune making movies that you "entered like a garden" (This has to be one of the earliest references to video games in literature?) and manufactures tiny insect-like robots which work together "like a telephone exchange", performing such tasks as cleaning the pollen from the air. As Bruce Sterling notes, this sounds more like something from our own internet age than 50s scifi. I think its a remarkable book.
Junger is an interesting personality. I can't figure him out or get close to him at all. I really want to read "Drogen und Rausch", his book about his drug experiences.
What happens when a former WW1 stormtrooper takes LSD? Unfortunately there's no English translation.
- The idea that The Glass Bees is "little-known" is ... curious. It was republished by New York Review Books, not exactly a small little press no one's ever heard of.
