So it's taken me a while to get back.

Origins didn't happen in 2020.

Very important historical fact.

And when it came back in 2021, no one knew what to do.

So, you know, we...

I guess I should say I co-founded Games on Demand here at Origins.

I mean...

Yeah, it's like impossible to make a decent, like... experience of like i want to go somewhere eat with some people and come back

Mm-hmm.

... um, author, who really wrote across five or six different areas of human endeavor, so science fiction being just one, next to philosophy, uh, social critique, uh, dark humor, and some other areas.

So, um, given that backdrop, um, the book on which this is based is called, I believe it's The Magellanic Cloud, and that is a 1955 text, uh, written shortly after, um, his Astronauty, which was adapted to Silent Star, previ- previously discussed on this particular podcast.

Um, Magellanic Cloud was an inspiration, um, in particular, it is e- an exploration of the psychological effects on a human crew going all the way out to, um, what would then become Alpha Centauri, um, and that, uh, that particular voyage would last longer than human lifetimes.

So Stanislaw Lem imagines what would happen in the 32nd century if you have a kind of humanity that is ready for this sort of voyage, and how not really ready we are anyway for that.

(laughs)

Yeah, I, I mean, the, the, the science is again, um, when you have a science fiction travel narrative like this, uh, what they are doing is akin to magic.... everything from, uh, gravity working on the ship to, uh, solving radiation problems, solving long-term, um, uh, fuel storage costs and everything.

So, uh, they have the time dilation effect, which I think puts them in space for maybe four months before they then find the planet with life on it.

Mm-hmm.

And that of course raises the question of what is or isn't political.

So fast-forward to West Germany, I think that those thoughts are still around, uh, especially regarding space travel, but no one has the money to get a proper space film going in the 1950s.

Uh, the East German film industry is way more developed in terms of at least film studio space, whereas in the West, they're much more of a hodgepodge of different private companies that are often seeking, uh, transnational co-productions, and this only accelerates in the '60s and '70s where, you know, you have regular German-Italian, French-German, uh, co-productions and, uh, of course Silent Star is its own co-production.

They couldn't make it without, uh, multiple cl- countries being involved.

So I think in the West, um, the geopolitical fictions take ahead again.

There is a, uh, Robert Stemla film from 1948 called The Ballad of Berlin which actually starts off with a future idea from i- around the year 2000 of what, uh, the, the architectural landscape will, will look like.

Hm.