“The man could feel his eyes filling with tears. Before him stood a spaceship, a gigantic metallic disk that seemed to be made of two immense plates joined at the edges.” These first words of Argentine Eduardo Goligorsky’s “The Last Refuge” could open any American or European science fiction story. However, the rest of the story largely deviates from Western models of sci-fi in its overt treatment of political themes, as “The Last Refuge” quite openly critiques authoritarianism. The story’s protagonist, Guillermo Maidana, must escape an authoritarian society that proclaims itself as the “the last refuge of Western civilization,” directly referencing Argentine dictator Juan Carlos Onganía’s paternalistic crusade against communism. Maidana’s crime? Possessing a photo album of historic technological and scientific achievements.
“The Last Refuge” perfectly encapsulates a broad trend in Latin American sci-fi: a divergence from European and American sci-fi’s emphasis on science’s power to change the world for the better. As Federico Schaffler, the former president of the Mexican Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy, told the HPR, Latin American sci-fi tends to tackle social and political themes in familiar settings rather than saying, “Let’s create this type of hyperdrive to travel to the stars and then fight in this intergalactic war,” likely because Latin American countries mostly import technology from abroad instead of producing their own.
Unfortunately, Latin American sci-fi like “The Last Refuge” has flown under the radar of critics and popular presses alike. It should not be so obscure: Latin American sci-fi is a powerful tool to explore the cultures that produce it, especially the three bastions of Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba. More broadly, its usage of socio-political conditions expands the influence of an increasingly global genre by providing a means to critique the real-life power structures behind these fictional conditions.
The Battle Against “Cosmic Evil”
Long a bastion of literature in Latin America, Argentina has produced some of the region’s most iconic sci-fi. Much of that sci-fi has touched on political themes. In an interview with the HPR, Pablo Capanna, a prominent Argentine sci-fi critic, pointed out one major theme in Argentine sci-fi throughout its “Golden Age” in the 1950s and ’60s: the dangers of militarism and authoritarianism. Gologorsky’s “The Last Refuge” is a prime example. Those critiques have only intensified since Argentina’s Dirty War, a period in which its military junta secretly tortured and killed tens of thousands of dissidents, who became known as the desaparecidos, and created a period of immense terror in ordinary people. “The dictatorship has been at the center of every dystopia” since then, Capanna continued. “Only recently has it started to recede.”
This theme is hard to miss in the opening words of Angelica Gorodischer’s landmark “Kalpa Imperial.” Its mentions of “days of anxiety and nights of terror,” the “denunciations, persecutions, secret executions, and whim and madness” that have left the empire, all clearly refer to the repression of the Dirty War. Since the story’s empire only reached its glory days after abandoning repression and authoritarianism, Gorodischer implies that society cannot reach its true peak under the iron fist of dictatorship; it can only do so once dictatorship has departed.
Capanna also pointed to the comic “The Eternaut” as the “best expression of that Argentine paranoia that makes us feel alone in the world.” The story allows readers to immerse themselves in a political fantasy where they are the “victims of a conspiracy of potentates.” Indeed, “The Eternaut” is perhaps the best example of Argentine sci-fi that changed along with its political context. The first iteration of “The Eternaut,” published between 1957 and 1959, tells the story of an epic battle against the forces of “cosmic evil.”
In addition to dealing with socio-political themes through this lens, the comic explicitly rejected sci-fi norms from the Global North. Instead of an individual, infallible superhero triumphing against the forces of communism, the protagonists of “The Eternaut” represent an alliance between three facets of Argentine society — intellectuals, workers, and the military. As one of the first sci-fi works to obviously take place in Latin America, it also places importance on the strengths of actors and places previously considered peripheral on the global stage.
When the comic’s author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, revisited the characters in the comic’s second iteration, its political context had changed as the military junta had taken power. Oesterheld, a member of a guerrilla group known as the Montoneros, inserted himself into the comic and turned the Eternaut himself into a hero against oppression. As the Dirty War continued, the first “Eternaut” became more broadly associated with a fight against imperialism and authoritarianism with the image of the Eternaut in his isolation suit used to show solidarity with the desaparecidos. In sum, these sci-fi works explore how Argentina has grappled with looking back and forward on the complex legacies of its Dirty War.
“So Far from God and So Close to the United States”
While Argentine sci-fi grapples with the impact of dictatorship and militarism, Mexican sci-fi has primarily focused on its political relationship with the United States. Approaches include pointed critiques of U.S. interventionism, broader criticisms of the ravages of capitalism, and reflections on the unique challenges of border life. Mexico is “so far from God and so close to the United States,” Schaffler joked, referencing a popular aphorism to explain Mexican sci-fi’s focus on themes relating to its northern neighbor. “A lot of it has to do with inequality, with this imbalance of power or culture.”
Adhering to the theme of inequality, Mauricio-José Schwarz’s “Glimmerings on Blue Glass” depicts a capitalist system where only those with mental disabilities have the right to work. The system is the result of people who failed to question authority or bring up “original concepts like justice, equality, and solidarity.” Yet there remains a glimmer of hope in fictional detective Jackknife Springs, who fights for the interests of the workers and “blind justice” rather than the exploitative capitalist system. Several stories collected in the anthology “Border of Broken Mirrors,” published in the political context surrounding the formation of the original North American Free Trade Agreement, also tackled these issues head-on. As the introduction notes, “We have decided to utilize our skills as speculative writers to search for that [new] mirror” to reflect on “a border more inscrutable than any other” through the lens of sci-fi.
Emblematic of the anthology, Guillermo Lavín’s “Reaching the Shore” criticizes the exploitative capitalism inherent in the maquiladoras along the United States-Mexico border. The protagonist, José Paul, dreams of escaping Reynosa, the border city ruled by “dozens of whistle blasts,” while his father struggles with an addiction to a pleasure chip implanted at the base of his neck. The chip literally represents U.S. control over José Paul’s father’s destiny while figuratively representing consumerism driven by the United States. Since Mexico has suffered a long and tumultuous relationship with the United States, it makes sense that Mexican culture — and thus, Mexican sci-fi — fixates on this relationship.
A Planet (or Country) for Rent
Like Mexican sci-fi, Cuban sci-fi has also dealt with its complicated relationship with the United States, although in a different way. Cuban sci-fi seems more combative — precisely because it discusses the particularly jarring moment surrounding the fall of the Soviet Union, where Cuba’s relationship with the world seemed in flux as the country lost its prime benefactor.
Strangely, though, Cuban sci-fi is on the rise in the United States, partially because it has found a champion here. Restless Books, a nonprofit publisher with a mission to expand the audience for international literature, has published English translations of several major Cuban sci-fi stories by the genre’s pioneer Agustín de Rojas and Yoss, likely the most prolific and internationally-known Cuban sci-fi writer. As his translator David Frye told the HPR, Yoss’s work often makes Earth “a metaphor for Cuba or for Latin America.” He further identified one novel as the most overtly political of Yoss’s work: “A Planet for Rent.”
“A Planet for Rent” takes place on Earth after aliens have taken over and transformed the planet into a tourist paradise. Right from the introduction, Yoss establishes a comparison between post-contact Earth and Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. Cuba “learned to play the economics game according to one set of rules but discovered once it started playing that the rules had changed,” he writes on the transition from communism to capitalism. That transition mirrored the alien arrival in “A Planet for Rent” when humans suddenly became second-class citizens on their own planet, beholden economically to their new alien overlords. In the real world, foreign capitalists and American tourists won out at the expense of the Cuban people, while the aliens won out at the expense of humanity in Yoss’ imagined world.
In describing “A Planet for Rent,” Frye referenced the Aesopian novels of the Soviet Union, which used oblique references to Soviet culture to evade the period’s censorship. Even though Yoss wrote the novel in this style, its meaning is “pretty transparent if you know Cuba of the era,” Frye argued. “Every situation in the novel has a correlate in Cuba of the time.” These parallels play out in the book’s various vignettes. Like Cubans boarded rickety boats in droves to escape to the United States, humans in “A Planet for Rent” attempt to flee Earth on ramshackle, homemade spaceships. Similarly, itinerant artist Moy sends remissions to his family on Earth, mirroring the experience of Cuban artists and musicians abroad.
Some parallels are a little less obvious. The imported xenoid game voxl has grown in popularity on Earth, mimicking baseball’s popularity in Cuba. After a human team plays valiantly but ends up losing to a middling league team in an exhibition, the human team’s captain defects to fulfill his dream of a better life. This plotline has striking parallels to the 1999 exhibition baseball game between the United States and Cuba and the eventual defection of Cuban players to MLB teams. But Yoss reserved his most significant criticism for Cuba’s tourism industry that consistently prioritized foreign tourists over Cuban citizens, just as xenoid tourists used humans with reckless abandon in his novel.
Discovering a Hidden Genre
Despite its clear relevance to political themes across the region, Latin American sci-fi does not receive the credit it is due inside or outside Latin America. Historically, the literary establishment across Latin American has not taken sci-fi seriously. In Mexico, literary contests and publications “did not think it was sufficiently literary, so it was frowned upon,” said Schaffler. Likewise, the Argentine cultural establishment looked down on Argentine scientists in general. “Scientists’ opinion has as much weight as that of rock stars or sports idols,” Capanna explained. Even when sci-fi did enter the mainstream, popular audiences often believed that imported sci-fi was somehow “purer.”
In the United States, Latin American sci-fi has not gained much traction for two main reasons. First, Americans like the hyperdrive-and-galactic-war aspects of sci-fi largely absent from Latin American sci-fi because it allows them to escape the world they live in; they don’t necessarily want to reflect on that same world. Secondly, sci-fi mostly falls outside the established translation pipeline that brings in authors from other languages.
But this may be changing. Restless Books publisher Ilan Stavans believes international literature is having a resurgence in the United States. The Internet, meanwhile, allows writers and readers to bypass the literary establishment, so writers of popular sci-fi can avoid the disdain of traditional publishing houses. Likewise, writers from comparably underrepresented countries like those in Central America or the Caribbean can publish their work online, without conventional publishers. Finally, American readers — at least those who speak Spanish — can access sci-fi from all across the region, while publishers like Restless have started to publish a wider range of translations.
As a kid, I always enjoyed reading sci-fi. While I was never a fan of set-piece battles set on different planets each week, I always enjoyed reading about other cultures, new places, and the technological innovations that made getting to these worlds possible. When I started studying Latin America, though, I started wondering what critic Brian Slattery once wondered: “Where’s the Latin American science fiction?” As it turns out, the answer is simple: hiding in plain sight, waiting to be discovered.
Image Credit: Flickr / David Avalos
