Berg, Sibylle
Entry updated 20 March 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1962- ) German journalist, playwright and author, in Switzerland from 1996, active from the early 1990s; their first novel, Ein paar Leute suchen das Glück und lachen sich tot erschien ["A Few People Search for Happiness and Laugh Themselves to Death"] (1997) is a sharp gonzo Satire directed to contemporary German and worldwide culture, with a sustaining focus on the music industry. Several of her subsequent novels convey with similar gusto a sense that human civilization, as it spins out of control, has a fundamentally deracinating effect on both perpetrators (us) and the innocent (the rest of the planet).
Berg is of explicit sf interest for the GRM sequence beginning with GRM: Brainfuck (2019; trans Tim Mohr as Grime 2022), which is set in a Near Future UK devastated by Political corruption, the incompetence and venality of the governments of the West being conspicuously responsible for the coming End of the World through Ecological disasters and Climate Change in general. The narrative, though it maintains some focus on four exemplary actants in the grind of the ruins of the Media Landscape, mainly conveys its sense of how we live now through a teeming bricolage of individual portraits of folk like us making do in the pinball turbulence of a surveillance-intoxicated world. [JC]
Sibylle Berg
born Weimar, Germany: 2 June 1962
GRM
- GRM: Brainfuck (Cologne, Germany: Verlag Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2019) [GRM: binding unknown/Claus Richter]
- Grime (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 2022) [trans by Tim Mohr of the above: title of above as given here is shortened to GRM: GRM: pb/Rob Grom]
- RCE: #RemoteCodeExecution (Cologne, Germany: Verlag Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2022) [GRM: binding unknown/]
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