A Company Wants to Conquer the World with Psychoforming
The archive of the Herbert W. Franke Foundation contains an unfinished late novel by Herbert W. Franke. The book is due to be published at the end of 2025 as the last book in the work edition for the time being – in print and as an eBook. Conceived in 2014, it is a topic that may seem more realistic today than at the time of its creation. The foundation is looking for graphic designers who would like to work on the project.
Herbert W. Franke was unable to complete the novel Nanox. However, Franke read the beginning of the novel with a self-contained story at an event in Zurich’s Collegium Helveticum, an interdisciplinary research center run by the University of Zurich and the ETH in Zurich. It is housed in the historic building of the famous Semper Observatory. The interdisciplinary event in November 2014 focused on the topic of nanotechnology and how it is used in science fiction. In addition to the reading, there was a talk by Franke with literary scholar Hans Esselborn from the University of Cologne, co-editor of the work edition, physicist Klaus Ensslin from ETH Zurich and German scholar Philipp Theison from the German Department at the University of Zurich.) They discussed the topic of nanotechnology and how it is dealt with in science fiction.
Franke explained in an interview with the blog Die Zukunft: “The focus is on nanotechnology, the possibility of using technology even in the smallest dimensions. This applies not only to new building materials, synthetic foods, medicines and switching systems, but also to interventions in the nervous system of animals and humans and ultimately also in the brain. It is possible to import data into the brain and delete other data, thereby changing – and falsifying – the past. This is exactly what my new book with the provisional title Nanox is about.”
An excerpt of the Nanox exposé by Herbert W. Franke
“At the center of the action is the Nanox Group, a company that has expanded worldwide in just a few decades. This is due to the technical method that has been adopted and further developed, nanotechnology, which opens up completely new possibilities in the most diverse areas of life. It encompasses computer technology as well as medicine, weapons technology as well as the entertainment industry, psychotechnology as well as surveillance practices, genetic engineering as well as narcotics and drugs.
The plot: The founder of Nanox, Maximilian Crantz, is dying, and a war of succession has broken out between his relatives and closest employees, using all legal and illegal means. The problem: the direct heir, the only son of the founder of Nanox, is under the influence of green esotericism and would not continue to run the company in his father’s spirit. His rivals on the management board find a way out: with the help of the latest methods of personality transformation based on nanotechnology – psychoforming – they want to turn him into an unwilling tool for their own purposes.”
Storyboards as graphical element of he novel
From the very beginning of the project, Franke had the idea of interspersing the scripts with the adventure stories for psychoforming in the novel. However, these scripts were not to be embedded in the plot text as text, but as graphic storyboards – similar to comics and with speech bubbles. Franke has already worked out one of the stories as a template for graphic designers.
Search for graphic designers
The foundation is now looking for young graphic designers who might be interested in realizing the storyboard for the first, already developed episode. It will then be printed in the book.