Berge, Meere und Giganten (1924)

[Dave Monroe]

 http://books.google.com/books?id=D34KYdmOBkgC&pg=PA94#v=onepage&q&f=false

Alfred Döblin’s sprawling 1924 SF novel Berge Meere und Giganten
frustrates any attempt to delineate separate realms of nature and
technology, though it seems to be about nothing if not the
relationship between the two. Individual characters are not as
important, in this epic narrative stretching over several centuries,
as are the haunting recurrences of variously configured
biological-technological fusion; the reader is presented with organic
machines, wired flesh, and sentient mountains, to name only a few
examples. And just as technology is inoculated with a logic of nature,
so too is history, as the vast struggles of the novel increasingly
push geopolitics into the realm of geology, with history presented as
a naturalized pattern of ebb and flow across a landscape.

In this paper, I argue that a single logic underlies the growth of
nature both into technology and into history. The ‘thousand-named’ to
which Döblin dedicates the novel, an oceanic, undifferentiated, latent
power of growth, gives rise to the diversity of phenomena from objects
and creatures to sensations and forces. It thus provides a model for
understanding why technology and nature become so difficult to
distinguish from each other, and why history takes on such cosmic
dimension. If the dystopian vision of the novel is built upon the
image of a thoroughly technologized nature, any suspicion of a static
hierarchy between the two is complicated to the extent that technology
is itself depicted as a force of nature.

http://academia.edu/1973590/Das_Tausendnamige_Natural_Technologies_Natural_Histories_in_Alfred_Doblins_Berge_Meere_und_Giganten