Series “Droneland” | Control from the air

Sibel Kekilli (r.) in the exoskeleton. It has to look like the future. Photo: dpa/Felix Abraham As soon as Europol investigator Aart Westerfeld (Oliver Masucci) looks up, he sees a sky full of drones. In the near-future dystopia series “Droneland,” drones are an omnipresent phenomenon. The public space is comprehensively monitored and mapped, everything is saved and can later be accessed using an AI-supported database. The police examine crime scenes in virtual 3D rooms in which the events can be fast-forwarded and rewound.

Aart Westerfeld and his colleague Nina Bittmann (Sophie Mousel) have to investigate a murder case in which an EU politician was killed. The perpetrators were probably a group of international terrorists called the “Sons of the Night,” who had also just attempted an attack on the EU presidential candidate. The further the two officers investigate, the more resistance they encounter. Did the murdered politician have secret service contacts? Is someone trying to hide something here? Are the EU authorities possibly involved? At some point, their superior, played by Sibel Kekilli, who walks through the agency in an exoskeleton suit, explains to the two investigators that they should keep their hands off some data sets.

The six-part series “Droneland,” co-produced by Magenta TV and ZDF, is based on Tom Hillenbrand’s novel “Droneland,” for which he received the renowned Kurd Laßwitz Prize in 2015. Hillenbrand, a former “Spiegel” editor, has been writing science fiction and crime novels on an assembly line for several years. Although they are not major literary highlights, they explore the possibilities and dangers of technological developments very well and in a fictionalized form.

The pressing topics of AI and drones play a major role in Hillenbrand's books. Ten years ago, when the novel was published, drones were nowhere near as topical as they are today. “Droneland” is primarily about the almost perfected surveillance state, very similar to what was recently staged in the series remake “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” where drones fly through the air everywhere and an authoritarian state uses them to discipline its citizens.

Drones are likely to play an increasingly important role in the science fiction genre in the near future.

“Droneland” also offers complex world building. The terrorist threat in this story, set in 2040, is the result of colonial “solar wars” that the EU waged with North African countries. This is also a recurring theme in science fiction, as it also appears in Luise Meier's novel "Hyphen" (2024), where modern Europe and Germany establish new colonial regimes in the wake of ecological technologies. Given the current debates about a European defense policy, this is more relevant than it seemed imaginable years ago.

“Droneland” tells it all as a futuristic dystopia that is aesthetically reminiscent of “Blade Runner” or “Children of Men.” There are police checkpoints where riot cops beat up people at random, as well as large militant demos, run-down neighborhoods, a resistance movement and a seemingly untouchable tech mogul who lives in a science fiction-like villa complex in the middle of the Baltic Sea. There are also flashbacks to Westerfeld's past as a soldier, where he took part in an unintentional massacre of the civilian population in a North African country.

At times, “Droneland” seems like a very ordinary “crime scene” in which two detectives obediently pursue their case. The international production may not be able to compete with Hollywood films, but it is a far cry from European low-budget arthouse sci-fi. This is a little reminiscent of the French science fiction film “Zone 3” (2025), in which all armed drones whiz through the air. “Droneland” is told from the perspective of critical police officers, while the film from France gives the figures of the resistance a little more space.

Drones are likely to play an increasingly important role in the science fiction genre in the near future. Not everything that happens in literature makes it into mass-compatible film. William Gibson's groundbreaking novel "Periphery" was made into a series by Amazon, but canceled after one season. In January, Apple TV will be presenting an adaptation of Gibson's magnum opus "Neuromancer", which is primarily about virtual space (the author was the first to use the term cyberspace in the book over 40 years ago), but drones will also be seen everywhere. The same applies to "Blade Runner 2099", a series that starts in November and continues the SF classic - very contemporary with a female main character.

So drones are more present than ever. Although in cinematic fiction they are almost always just a tool for authoritarian surveillance and militarized police work to combat insurgency. It remains to be seen whether there are utopian possibilities for humanitarian action or for resistance against authoritarian tutelage.

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