Author Description

According to the back-cover blurb, this book is the "remarkable novel which was the basis of the world's greatest science-ficton movie". Hyperbole about the film aside, Fritz Lang's Metropolis is not one of the first ever adaptations of a science fiction novel. On the contrary, von Harbou's Metropolis is one of the genre's first novelistions - as it was actually based on the 1924 screenplay.The back-cover blurb further adds, "The language of the novel is sometimes as thesauric as Shiel, as kaleidoscopic as Merritt, as bone-spare as Ray Bradbury, as poetic as Poe, as macabre as Machen...." Certainly von Harbou's prose style is... florid. Wildly over-written, in fact. Not having read any 1920s German science fiction before, I don't know if it's representative of the time and place. But I have read DH Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, and neither were as over-the-top as von Harbou. For example, "Now she stood still, regarding the young men and women one after another, with the deadly severity of purity. She was quite maid and mistress, inviolability-and was, too, graciousness itself, her beautiful brow in the diadem of goodness; her voice, pity; every word a song" (p 13).This "quite maid and mistress", a phrase repeated a number of times throughout Metropolis, is Maria. She has broken into the "Club of the Sons" with a train of poor kids in tow in order to shame the playboy sons of the city's oligarchs into doing something about Metropolis's poverty. Freder, son of the Brain of Metropolis and heir of the city, immediately falls in love with her. In penance, he decides to swap places with a worker on the New Tower of Babel's Pater-Noster machinery. As a result, he stumbles across a meeting in the catacombs beneath the city and hears Maria preach to the assembled workers.