Just hold on and keep your eyes fixed on the horizon – otherwise, reading this book might make you a little dizzy. Wild wie die Wellen des Meeres (‘As wild as the waves of the sea’) swings constantly back and forth, back and forth.

The protagonist Ava Garcia is centre-stage here. She’s a mysterious young woman who likes birds more than people. Her story moves forward along one narrative thread; Ava is on the run from her life and from Paul, living on a remote research station in Scotland. She settles down well in her new life in this barren environment. She does her research, goes walking, has an affair. In the in-between chapters, her life is told in reverse, back to a traumatic childhood experience that even put her eyes out of balance. One has remained ‘duck-green’, while the other has turned grey.

This is already the fourth book by Anna Bischofberger, alias Anna Stern – a 29-year-old author and natural scientist. She takes several risks, spinning the reader round both in her chronology and in her language. Her rhythm and style constantly shift direction. Whole passages relate daily routines almost as if she were writing a report – one sober clause follows another, repetitively. But then she squeezes several tropes into a single sentence, as when windows become “empty spaces, holes in the night”, or when stars “dot the heavens like the footprints of a sandpiper”. And she adds photos, handwritten notes and phrases from English songs to her text.

This novel actually has too much of everything – secondary characters, details, pages. Nevertheless, its sheer originality means it exerts a strange pull of its own. Like the sea. sp

In a world entirely covered with ice, what is the genesis of an imaginary submarine capable not only of descending to the ocean’s depths, but also of drilling into the earth’s crust and from there into inner-space? In the first instance, in 2010, it took place in the mind of the visual artist François Burland, who was creating another Nautilus in Bordeaux, a one-tonne, 18-metre-long submarine with a silver tinplate hull.

Eight years later, André Ourednik’s Atomik Submarine gave a literary form to the submersible. It is both literary and absolutely outlandish, in terms not only of its wild adventures but also of its bizarre language with anarchic-futuristic connotations. Illustrating the text in a very beautiful large format edition are further echoes of these characteristics found in Burland’s surreal collages of rockets, zeppelins, underwater divers, and an amputee Eiffel Tower.

This ‘Ark of Utopia’ narrates its own Odyssey through the voices and frozen words (think Rabelais) of the ‘mužiks’ passengers, who have been pulled straight from the primordial chaos by three Promethean lunatics. The thick intertextuality portrays a host of other figures including Gilgamesh, Jonas, Tinguely, Moby Dick, Nietzsche, and not to mention the Soviet superhero Oktobriana.

Could this modern Noah’s Ark succeed in bringing about a radically different reality? It has the means, bearing all the technical, poetic and literary virtuality imaginable, and that’s not to mention its absurdity. The answer is actually obvious: the subversive submarine is just a metaphor for the larger work, a virtual machine from which we can dig, perforate and atomise all our conventional representations. With its eminent experimentalism, this is a book for any wise scientist. jfd

Here, the reviewer ought almost to resort to poetry herself. But let’s first sum up who the poet is: Thilo Krause, an engineer and economist, worked as a researcher at ETH Zurich until 2015. He writes as if you were dreaming. One scene after another flits past, floats by, and disappears over the horizon. Feelings surge up, ripple on the surface and then swim away. Krause grew up in Dresden on the Elbe and lives today in Zurich. Water flows incessantly through his mental images. If there were no rain, rivers or sea, his book ‘What we talk about in a thunderstorm’ would not have a soul. Water surrounds the city and the land here, the adult mind and the playing child. Whoever likes modern poetry will find Krause’s third volume a boat in which to glide calmly away on board, away from reality into the clarity of magical moments. jh

The geneticist Daniel Fox makes a resounding discovery. There’s a DNA sequence that distinguishes the human race from all other living things. The discovery wins him a Nobel Prize but arouses the interest of big pharma, which seeks to modify the sequence to reap profits. Fox calls for a moratorium on genetic manipulation applied to humans, and is immediately hounded by a shadowy organisation.

The author of ‘The Sequence’, Stefan Catsicas, was a professor of cellular engineering at EPFL and a manager at Nestlé. His first novel, a thriller combining science, mythology and spirituality, addresses major questions, including the origin of humanity, the role of the innate and the acquired, the transition from polytheism to monotheism. He proposes a thesis: our genes influence both behaviour and religious questions. The book moves between hard science and science fiction, freely adapting the proven scientific theories on which it is based. It remains essentially a thrilling adventure novel, but avoids the genre’s usual style completely. zs

Did he or didn’t he? Did the son of illiterates really write 37 plays that are the most significant in the English language? Or did an aristocrat publish them under ‘Shakespeare’ as a pseudonym? Ashley Curtis, a Swiss author with American roots, has woven this scholarly debate into the 431 pages of his new thriller. Scholars meet in Stratford-upon-Avon for a conference to discuss Shakespeare’s authorship. During a performance of Macbeth, the 70-year-old Professor Thompson dies of a heart attack. At the same time, a manuscript is stolen from his hotel room. Thompson had intended to bring new findings to the debate. “Academics don’t kill each other on account of their petty disputes”, claims Detective Stokes, who is investigating the case. But a corpse is found floating in the River Avon, and a woman professor is almost strangled to death. The puzzle could be solved by a book published in 1605. But who can decode ‘Witches’ Magic’?

The characters in Curtis’s novel all inhabit an ivory tower of literary scholarship. But he has a fine feel for British humour, excitement is guaranteed, and there are enough protagonists to go round. What’s more, Curtis depicts professors as erotic and capricious – as befits a novel entitled Hexeneinmaleins – the ‘witch’s magic formula’. fs

Increasingly, we see the Geneva cartoonist Zep emancipating himself from the childish character Titeuf. After ‘Une histoire d’hommes’ and ‘Un bruit étrange et beau’, he is back with the ecological thriller ‘The End’. The basics of the plot may seem surprising, but they are based on scientific observations, in particular the ability of plants to modify their chemical composition in order to ensure their survival in the face of dangers, such as fire or the proliferation of mammals, in the same way acacia trees produce toxins to deter antelopes from eating their leaves.

This ‘plant intelligence’ may sometimes be contested (e.g., by the biologist Francis Hallé, whom Zep uses as a model), but it allows him to develop a highly symbolic story, featuring botanists confronted with an apocalypse orchestrated by trees. It’s a graphic warning set to the tune of the eponymous song by The Doors. bs

The celebrated neuroscientist Frank Stern has been attacked and is lying in a coma. Was it radical animal activists who attacked him because of his experiments on apes? Or was it the highly intelligent but hot-tempered Tina Benz, a doctoral candidate from his own institute? She and the professor are also in a relationship together. During the investigation, she concocts a plan with Frank, whose locked-in syndrome means he can only communicate by blinking.
In ‘Twice dead’, Beat Glogger weaves together people, radical animal protectionists and gruesome science fiction to create a gripping story. The only flaw in his book is that Glogger – a science journalist – keeps trying to put facts across. That seems unnatural, especially in Tina’s soliloquies. Such as when she asks whether Frank can think, despite being paralysed in his arms and legs. “Even after an amputation, patients feel pain in the limb they no longer have. They call it phantom pain”. ff

Science fiction has always sought to reveal the dark side of our utopias. In this collection of stories, it explores the vertigo of digital technology, and in particular the mirage of immortality that is the uploading of consciousness to computer media. The call for the first edition of the Prix de l’Ailleurs was: “What if humanity were to become digital?”. About a hundred authors took up the challenge. Ten short stories were selected for this volume, including the four winning texts. The published book is now ready for purchase in the bookstores. The result is a kaleidoscopic vision, sometimes sharp, sometimes ironic and melancholic.
It is definitely fiction in that it thinks the unthinkable, nurtures our abused humanity and shines a light back on the irrational. jb

The plot is here set in motion before a backdrop of colourful market stalls, refugee children and veiled women. A teacher of religion from the Engadine is in Istanbul, researching into a mediaeval philosopher who had a well-meaning interest in Islam. He is already engaged back home, but unexpectedly falls in love with a Turkish waiter who grew up in Germany. Before the two land in a hotel bed together, they talk in humanist fashion about religion, literature and the eventful history of this multi-cultural city. In ‘A winter in Istanbul’, Angelika Overath tells a well-researched, poetic story. No raki can wash away its aftertaste: this novel is itself a backdrop for discussing the burning political topics of today. uh

“Ghosts and melancholy go hand in hand”, writes Daniel Sangsue. This literature professor’s diary is filled with subtle reflections on modernity that combine jubilation and nostalgia. He delights in the many coincidences that have left their mark on his own path. He supports the argument that “ghosts are part of augmented reality” by citing Pokémon Go. And he tells us that UNESCO’s intangible heritage could have included a ghost hitchhiker haunting the Belchen tunnel between Basel and Solothurn.

The author expresses his concern about a society in which “the supernatural is no longer taken seriously”, in which the booksellers dear to his heart give way to ‘ghostly’ virtual bookshops and in which the “slow science” essential to his work has imposed upon it the implacable dictates of modern research: planning, collaboration and productivity measures. Noting the modern manifestations of spiritualism in the 21st century, Daniel Sangsue refuses to let go of a world that, above and beyond tolerating the fantastic, the unexplained, beliefs and intuition, actually cultivates them. ds