Radio play “Miami Punk – The complete DLC” – media

Juan S. Guse tells an adventurous, excitingly wild story in his 640-page novel miami punk of 2019: The Atlantic has inexplicably retreated well below the horizon. Since then, you can get from Florida to the Bahamas without getting your feet wet – as long as you evade the Coast Guard, which, due to the lack of a coast, has reinvented itself as an anti-inland security force.

Meanwhile, thousands of alligators are marauding through Miami, being taken down cattle by cattle by competing private forces – one of the few jobs that still exist for low-skilled workers in the city: the economy and society are in extreme imbalance. A supposedly grassroots-democratic but mysteriously infiltrated congress is deliberating on a new order without any result. At the end of the novel, the condominium housing this disparate assembly rises into the air and floats away.

Based on this scenario, Iris Drögekamp and Felix Lehmann now have the nine-part radio play Miami Punk – The complete DLC realized as a co-production of NDR and SWR. This production is not a simple radio adaptation of the novel. It’s kind of a sequel. Which is a promising approach, because the radio play genre is finally not dwarfing itself as a secondary or third-party user of literary material that has already been established. Rather, it cleverly continues this story, told from many perspectives, using the genre’s own resources.

Gamers play some levels of an adventure that is already part of the novel from other perspectives.

(Photo: Sebastian Stamm/NDR/SWR)

The radio play isn’t really a sequel to the novel either. DLC stands for downloadable content, i.e. additional downloadable content. For his novel, Guse transferred the logic of computer games to literature – miami punk is thus a succession of scenarios and levels, the story branches out in a large decision tree. By no means everything is told; Paths not taken by the characters remain unexplored.

The radio play Miami Punk – The complete DLC begins after the open end of the novel. Three gamers meet under the guidance of a master, spoken by Stefan Konarske, to play through three adventures. These are settings from the novel, without the concrete fight against the alligators, a mission in the desert and the descent into the mind-altering basement of the flying building complex called Rowdy Yates being part of the novel in this form.

The complete DLC presents variants of individual fragments of the novel’s plot, thus growing back into it; one encounters characters and narrative strands again in the radio play. As a result, some things become clearer, other things that seemed certain are suddenly only vaguely comprehensible. The good thing about the radio play is that this bonus material, if you will, is not B-stock. Rather, it adequately advances the literary game to a new level. Before you get involved, however, it is best to read the novel. Otherwise the pleasure is probably only half as great.

Miami Punk – The complete DLCNDR Kultur, Wednesdays, 8 p.m.

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