Whilst searching for a lost Spiegel article, the narrator in Philipp Schönthaler's new novel unexpectedly receives an invitation to a conference at the Forstell Institute in Nevada. There, in a nuclear bomb-proof archive, not only the specialist publications of natural and engineering scientists such as Wernher von Braun, Robert Oppenheimer and Norbert Wiener are stored. Their poetry, overshadowed by technical masterpieces, is also safely stored there, as if they harboured subliminal alliances between technology and literature, mathematics and fantasy, as if it took novels to land on the moon. In this web of historical events and individual biographies, technical innovations and literary writing projects, the protagonist gradually penetrates further and further to where fiction turns into reality and reality into ever new fictions and all of this becomes legible on the pages of the sky.
What prompted rocket engineer Wernher von Braun to become a science fiction author? Why did Buzz Aldrin write a novel about extraterrestrials after his return as the second man on the moon? And what is the story behind the poems of nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer?
Novel
Sample translation
English sample available
Philipp Schönthaler, born in Stuttgart in 1976, was awarded the Clemens Brentano Prize in 2012 for his narrative debut Nach oben ist das Leben offen. Matthes & Seitz Berlin has published eight of his books; the essay Portrait of the Manager as a Young Author (2016) was translated into English and Turkish. With Pages of the Sky, Schönthaler deepens his theoretical exploration of technology and literature with The Automation of Writing and Literature Counterprograms (2022) and How Rational Machines Became Romantic (2024). He lives in Berlin.
