Simulacra is, according to Mario Perniola, “the image of something that does not exist”. Simulation in fact, amongst all the terms that indicate the doubling of an object (representation, imitation, copying, etc.) is the one that conveys the absence of an original if one simulates something, an emotion, a fact, a process, a situation, it is because this something is not there, it is not present and needs to be faked. Nonetheless, the absence of a consistent reality is after all implied in the original title of the book: Simulacron III. With the exception made for few but significant details (temporary re-contextualisation being the foremost), Fassbinder’s adaptation follows quite closely Galouye’s novel, but insists on the ambiguity of perceived reality whilst the book overtly marks the distinction between the authentic and the unauthentic (without ever visually inscribing this difference in the semantics of the narrative). (4) ‘Busybodies’, ‘Pollsters’, ‘Reaction Monitors Code’, ‘Certified Reaction Monitors’, ‘Empathy-Surveillance Circuits’, ‘Contact Units’ and ‘Empathy Couplings’ populated Galouye’s futuristic novel set in the year 2034 Fassbinder captures the pervasive apparatus of control already wiring western society, avoiding any exotic aftertime he dramatises the contemporaneity of techno-totalitarianism. Translated into German, Italian and Spanish, Galouye’s book is the literary source of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht ( World on a Wire, 1973), the first of two cinematic adaptations of the aforementioned text.

Galouye (3) who had four years earlier published a novel entitled Simulacron III (published in England as The Counterfeit World). In June 1968 the science-fiction magazine Galaxy published two lists of sci-fi writers who respectively opposed and supported the US military intervention in Viet-Nam, amongst the supporters was Daniel F.

CCCP frontman Giovanni Lindo Ferretti (2) “This human race that worship clocks and does not meet time”

“There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I’d already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already”

Giovanni boccaccio decameron