Simone Weinmann
In this gripping dystopian novel, Simone Weinmann tells of a world that only faintly resembles ours. What would people rely on if they were to lose all technological advances, if there no longer was electricity? Would they cling onto faith or would they, driven by curiosity, take their future into their own hands? Calm and tentative but so much the more striking, Simone Weinmann tells of an archaic life, in which the consequences of a loss of social and technological progress become strikingly obvious.
2045. A catastrophe has caused human life to be thrown back into a meagre rural existence. Many find solace in faith, but the two teenagers Nathanael and Vanessa don’t wish to resign themselves to religion and so they run away. Their teacher, still remembering life before the incidence, is sent out to find them and all three of them find themselves on a journey across treacherous terrain.
Nathanael is fifteen when his parents decide to take him out of school, against his desire to become a doctor and despite his thirst for knowledge and aptitude as a student. His mother has decided for him to become a priest. And anyway, universities no longer exist. Or do they? Nathanael has heard of a polytechnic institute in Italy and decides to make his way there. His classmate Vanessa also wants to escape the constricting village life and so they decide to use the darkness of the night to run away. When their absence is noticed, their teacher Ludwig is sent after them. Unlike his students, Ludwig can still remember the times before the catastrophe and has lost all hope for the future, but he just can’t forsake the teenagers on their dangerous journey through lawless territory.
Simone Weinmann attained a PhD in astrophysics under Prof. Ben Moore in Zurich. She spent several years working at the Max-Planck Institute near Munich and at the Observatory Sterrewacht in Leiden. She now teaches physics in Zurich, where she lives ...
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