Helwig Brunner imagines what life on this planet could look like in the 25th century.
What remains of life as we know it today? What of our values? And what will the retrospective view from the future of our current age look like? Shimmer proves to be a bundle of questions that fall back on us, our here and now, from a distant future.
It is the 25th century. Climate crisis, species extinction and nuclear disasters have turned the earth into an inhospitable planet that is difficult to live on. Heat and drought are shimmering on and above the world, glaciers are melting, the water is evaporating. Leonard, a researcher into the past, lives in a human area and works on behalf of a powerful authority to describe former sources of hope and devastating failures in human history. He looks at the dark heart of the 20th and 21st centuries and at the same time remembers the love of his life, Lea.
With his extensive expertise as an ecologist specializing in energy, Helwig Brunner has created a stirring novel. Shimmering is an attempt to rethink the obvious threats to human, civilizational and ecological well-being in unembellished and uncompromisingly precise language.
»A compelling and highly literary approach to a topic that concerns us all.« (Bernd Melichar, Kleine Zeitung)
»In his novel, Brunner engages with ambivalent contemporary debates and comments on them in a convincing way thanks to exaggeration or distortion. Shimmer tells of the downfall in powerful images. The clever conception allows a view from the future onto a past that is our present and shows its powerful ghosts, illusions and omissions with regard to their all too possible consequences.« (Ursula Ebel, Die Presse)
»Helwig Brunner’s novel is not only an impressive and unembellished depiction of our possible (or rather: probable) future, but also a wake-up call to become aware of human fragility.« (Christoph Hartner, Kronen Zeitung)