ditors Bell and Molina-Gavilán have assembled a bountiful anthology devoted solely to SF from Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, and it's an eye-opening winner.
First up is a long, informative introduction by the editors in which they offer a timeline of Latino SF and critical assessments of its prime practitioners and the strengths and weaknesses of the genre. They divide the span of Latino SF into four periods, an organizational scheme that the selections (all of them handily labeled as to country of origin and date of publication) then reflect.
First comes "In The Beginning: The Visionaries," which covers the relatively scant offerings prior to the 20th century. Here we find two entries. Juan Nepomuceno Adorno's "The Distant Future" is an essay-style depiction of the utopia that would result if the world followed Adorno's philosophy of "Providentiality." Paired with this is Nilo María Fabra's "On the Planet Mars," another utopian screed without much in the way of narrative.
But in the next section, "Speculating on a New Genre: SF from 1900 Through the 1950s," true storytelling takes over. Of the three stories here, the standout is "The Death Star," by Ernesto Silva Román. Appearing in 1929, this piece about a rogue planet that causes giantism in all life on Earth has all the characteristic naive zest of a typical Gernsbackian adventure.
We enter Latino SF's golden age in "The First Wave: The 1960s to the Mid-1980s." During this period, Latino SF truly achieved critical mass in response to the success of English-language examples. But the transplanted results were not mere imitations, but strange metamorphoses. Of the 14 stories in this division, the most memorable include "The Crystal Goblet," by Jerônimo Monteiro, where a strange glass tied up with the narrator's abuse-stricken childhood offers uncanny visions of a deadly future; "Acronia," by Pablo Capanna, which depicts a totalitarian artificial world where time has been abolished; "Post-Boomboom," by Alberto Vanasco, a deadpan apocalyptic satire; and "The Violet's Embryos," by Angélica Gorodischer, the narrative of a group of space castaways who stumble onto godlike powers.
Closing out the volume is "Riding the Crest: The Late 1980s into the New Millennium." Here in the form of eight stories we encounter the youngest generation of Latino SF writers, those born in the mid-1950s or later. Braulio Tavares writes about those rare humans who can stand mind-to-mind contact with a race of enigmatic aliens in "Stuntmind." Guillermo Lavín examines how a poverty-stricken young child's dream of a new bike ends up luring the kid into danger in "Reaching the Shore." Elia Barceló's "The First Time" chronicles a gruesome rite of passage for a future teenager. Pepe Rojo's "Gray Noise" charts the disintegration of a hardwired reporter. And "The Day We Went through the Transition," by Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero, is an action-packed saga of a war across time.
A foreign angle on a familiar field
The wonderful thing about this anthology, besides the simple and/or complex pleasures that all these stories give on their own merits, is seeing the possibilities and conventions of English-language SF reflected as in a funhouse mirror. These Latino and Latina writers are Westerners like us, true, so these stories are not as alien as, say, some Chinese SF is. Yet the cultures and traditions and tools of these writers are skewed just enough from our arbitrary Anglo-American baseline to insure that a welcome sense of cognitive estrangement is present even before the ostensible subject matter of each story is encountered. Such alternate takes on Anglo-American SF enlarge our perspectives as to what the medium can actually accomplish.
Weird echoes of famous SF writers are everywhere here. Angel Arango's "The Cosmonaut," with its giddy aliens helpfully and murderously dissecting a poor human visitor, reads like Stanislaw Lem—himself an off-kilter analogue of Anglo-American authors. Alvaro Menén Desleal's "A Cord Made of Nylon and Gold," about the freakouts of an astronaut, recalls the prime work of Barry Malzberg. Capanna's "Acronia" hews to a Ballardian vision, while Gorodischer's "The Violet's Embryos" is like a first-generation Star Trek episode as if penned by James Tiptree. The voice of R.A. Lafferty, himself fond of using Basque characters, whispers in Magdelena Mouján Otaño's "Gu Ta Gutarrak," a wry fable about the founding of the Basque race. Finally, de la Casa and Romero's "time patrol" tale might have been an outtake from Fritz Leiber's "Changewar" series.
As for the newest generation of writers, they're mostly influenced by cyberpunk, turning out credible examples of lowlifes meeting high-tech that examine corporate misdeeds and international struggles. "Like the Roses Had to Die," by Michel Encinosa, features a deadly female named Wolf who might be Molly Million's cousin, and a welter of ideas like a Charles Stross story. "Stuntmind," however, seems to hark back further, to Damon Knight's "Stranger Station."
These resonances do not prove that Latino SF is mainly derivative in nature, any more than comparisons of new stories in, say, a current issue of Asimov's to classic works would mean that the newer stories were mere imitations. Far from it. These authors, working often in isolation from the main currents of SF, used our models as springboards to unique visions. And in such realms as fusing religion with SF and in dealing with the harsh realities of authoritarian cultures, our Latino cousins outpaced us. This book opens up a wonderful new realm too little known north of the border. Heading deeper into the treacherous 21st century, we need all the additional speculative perspectives we can summon up if we are to survive.
