German sci-fi short stories for learners

What kind of sci-fi is in these German stories?

One impossible thing in an ordinary German place. A clock in a Munich café runs eleven minutes fast, and notes left under it come back answered. A time capsule dug up at a school reunion holds a letter that predicts the coming weeks. And at the end of a bus line, an old weather kiosk starts printing more than the weather:

Everyday German usually talks about the future in the present tense. "Morgen kommt Regen", says the radio in Die Stimme vom Bergsee: tomorrow it will rain. So when the werden future does appear, it tends to sound like a prediction or a promise, which suits a story about a machine that knows what happens next.

Why is there so much English in German sci-fi?

Because German technology talk borrows freely from English, and the stories reflect real usage: die App, das Backup, die Cloud, das Display. The nouns take a German gender and a capital letter, and borrowed verbs take German endings. One very common word looks English but isn't: das Handy is German for a mobile phone.

Loanwords make the sci-fi a little easier than its plots suggest. The hard words tend to be German compounds that describe the strange thing itself, such as Wetterhäuschen (weather kiosk) or Zeitkapsel (time capsule), and those split neatly into words you already know.

Which German sci-fi story should I read first?

• A1: Das Licht im Hof, in which a lamp across the courtyard flashes Maya's name at night, or Der hilfsbereite Roboter.
• A2: Die Stimme vom Bergsee, an old radio that reads out tomorrow's local news, or Herzensglitch.
• B1: Die Uhr im Café Morgenstern, Der Brief in der Zeitkapsel, or Die falsche Woche, in which a shy librarian starts remembering a stranger's week after a routine memory backup.
• B2: Die Echos von Berlin, set at a start-up that builds digital copies of the dead, or Der Gemüsegarten spricht, about arrows and letters that appear overnight in an allotment's vegetable beds.

New to German? The A1 German stories are the easiest way in. Sci-fi here often comes with a puzzle, so the German mystery stories are a natural next stop, or see every German series.