Science fiction from Latin America, featuring zombie dissidents and aliens in the Amazon

A spaceship lands near a small Amazon town, forcing the local government to manage an alien invasion. Dissidents who disappeared during a military dictatorship return years later as zombies. Bodies suddenly begin to fuse upon physical contact, forcing Colombians to navigate new dangerous salsa bars and FARC guerrillas fused with tropical birds.

Across Latin America, shelves labeled “ciencia ficción,” or science fiction, have long been stocked with translations from H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, and HG Wells. Now they may have to compete with a new wave of Latin American writers who are appropriating the genre and rerooting it in their homeland and history. Shaking off the rolling cornfields and New York skylines, they set their stories against the dense Amazon, rugged Andean mountainscapes, and unmistakably Latin American urban sprawl.

The avalanche of original science fiction is timely as many readers and writers in Latin America feel suffocated by the folksy tropes of magical realism and desensitized by realistic depictions of the region’s struggles with violence.

“Latin America has been a ‘today’ region,” Rodrigo Bastidas said in a telephone interview. He is a co-founder of Bogotá-based Vestigio, one of the few small, independent publishers of Latin American science fiction novels. “People don’t have time to think about the future because they were too busy surviving the present – ​​civil wars, revolution, dictatorship – so much of our literature was realistic. We needed a testimony.”

The current explosion of storytelling sheds a different light on the region, he said: It is emancipatory and proposes freedom from recycled stories and foreign heroes.

“We realize that the future is not something we should borrow or take from other people,” Bastidas said. “We can make it our own, supported by science fiction. We can create it ourselves.”

The writing, in Spanish and Portuguese, is radical and idiosyncratic, teeming with techno shamans and futuristic indigenous aesthetics, while also being influenced by the region’s European and African heritage. Troubled histories and the urgency of the present also inspire it with themes such as colonization, the climate crisis and migration.

“We have to reclaim our future and stop thinking that we are a small, forgotten place in history, somewhere even the aliens would never go,” Colombian author Luis Carlos Barragán, a polestar for this wave, said in a statement. interview by phone. His work is Douglas Adams meets Jonathan Swift, feet firmly on Colombian soil but heads held high in the cosmos.

The writing of Latin American science fiction stretches back more than a century, but has often been isolated, with fewer circulations than the English-language titans of the genre and no integrated regional tradition or market. Because of labyrinthine export requirements that used to make it almost impossible to sell books outside the land of printing, editors and writers brought their work across the border themselves, lugging suitcases filled with books.

Political and economic crises in Latin America in the 20th and early 21st centuries repeatedly devastated compensated writing and production. Few publishers would take a chance with a new or local author if Philip K. Dick was a sure salesman. High paper prices and devalued local currencies made publishing even more difficult.

But energetic fans supported the work, with zines distributed on floppy disks, photocopied, and then read online. Increasing digital access broadened the space for science fiction readers and writers, and then the pandemic accelerated the sharing and discovery of what had become a vast and passionate community.

“We saw that we are not the crazy ones at the party anymore,” said Bastidas. “Similar things happened everywhere.” Bigger publishers like Minotauro (an imprint of Planeta) are starting to release more original work, although small ones are still the lifeblood of the genre. Bets on little-known authors and original writing pay off: sales have increased.

As the galaxy of local sci-fi communities became more closely connected, they shared ideas and developed tactics: Publishers began seeking investment in book production through platforms such as Kickstarter and began publishing online or simultaneously with other imprints, aided by the expansion of book sales. by Amazon in the region.

After following their own path for years, Latin American science fiction writers are winning awards beyond their borders, including in Spain and the United States, and gaining academic interest, including in North America: Yale held its first conference on Latin American science fiction in March.

Writers also highlight a wide variety of tropes and influences often made anarchic, feminist, weird, or underworldly, including noir, fantasy, Lovecraftian New Weird, and punk styles made in Latin America – dingy steampunk, urban cyberpunk, slum virtual reality or pirates flying in zeppelins over the Andes.

There’s even nationwide “gauchopunk,” complete with gaucho androids dreaming of electric emus, conjured up by Argentine writer Michel Nieva in a tongue-in-cheek reference to Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

“We don’t leave anything ‘pure’,” said Cuban author Erick Mota. “We have things pre-eminently contaminated, and only by accepting intermingling do we become ourselves and our own. Not a single sci-fi concept that we haven’t taken and adapted to our context has become mestizo‌.

In the high Andes of Peru and Ecuador, work inspired by neo-Indigenousness proliferates, propelling cosmologies and aesthetics forward in time to flourish as aerospace, robotics or virtual reality.

Writers in Argentina and Colombia have created a wave of body horror-influenced sci-fi known as splatter punk, few more gag-inducing than Hank T. Cohen of Colombia or Agustina Bazterrica of Argentina, whose “Cadaver Exquisito” (“Tender Is the Flesh” ) was a phenomenon on TikTok, it has been translated into multiple languages ​​and a television adaptation is in production.

In Brazil, Afrofuturism has taken off, with an explosion of science fiction inspired by African heritage and culture. The works are closely linked to an emerging movement against structural racism in the country, including from writers such as Ale Santos, published by HarperCollins Brazil.

In Mexico, writers like Gabriela Damián Miravete use science fiction to confront their country’s epidemic of violence against women. In “They Will Dream in the Garden”, which was translated into English and won the Anders Award, Damián gives victims a second life by building a world where the minds of murdered women are digitally captured in holograms that “live” together in a garden.

Latin American experiences of differentness and progress pervade the new writing, especially the label of “developing country,” rendered meaningless in distant futures or by alien invasions. Bastidas’ wryly titled anti-colonial anthology “El Tercer Mundo Después del Sol,” or “The Third World from the Sun,” was published all over the Spanish-speaking world, including Spain, where Latin American science fiction rarely gained popularity.

In Barragán’s telescopic satire “Tierra Contrafuturo” or “Earth Against the Future,” the United States threatens to invade Colombia to arrange an alien arrival, claiming that Colombia is not up to the job. Intergalactic councils demand that Earth apply for membership. The planet does not meet the criteria to be considered civilized, and their application is rejected.

Mota finds virgin territory by not only reimagining the future, but also rewriting the past. “Habana Undergüater” envisions that the Soviet Union won the Cold War and that Americans took refuge in Cuba, arriving by boat to try and build a new life in run-down or flooded neighborhoods. Farther back, Mota’s most recent novel, “El Foso de Mabuya,” or “Mabuya’s Tomb,” envisions leviathans destroying Christopher Columbus’s expedition before it arrives in the Americas and paints the continents as united among indigenous peoples.

“We live in a time when the United States and Europe are rethinking their history of slavery and colonization,” he said. “With this writing, we can overcome some old traumas.”

Instant crises have fueled subgenres such as Latin American climate fiction or cli-fi – speculative works about the environment – including the work of Uruguay’s Ramiro Sanchiz, Bolivia’s Edmundo Paz Soldán, and Dominican Republic’s Rita Indiana, whose books are available in English. They weave climate apocalypse, time travel and virtual reality with Yoruba mythology, Amazonian deforestation and ayahuasca-inspired psychedelic plants.

Also on the rise is virus fiction being born during the coronavirus pandemic; call it vi-fi. A new novel by Nieva, a winner of the O. Henry Prize, is “La Infancia del Mundo” (“The childhood of the world”), a Kafkaesque dengue fable. And Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trías rose to international acclaim with “Mugre Rosa” (“Pink Slime”), a prescient combination of climate and pandemic fiction translated into seven languages, in which a plague arrives on a red poisonous wind and a food source. crisis leaves humanity with nothing to eat but pink goo.

Short stories that play with science fiction are turning heads in the hands of writers like Bolivia’s Liliana Colanzi and Argentina’s Samanta Schweblin, now widely translated and whose “Seven Empty Houses” won last year’s National Book Award for Literature in Translation .

Even Mars is being rewritten: Colanzi’s publishing house has, as she puts it, “one foot in the jungle, the other on Mars,” and she entered the planet in her latest collection, “Ustedes Brillan en lo Oscuro,” or “You Glow in the dark.”

“Mars was already very much colonized by English-language science fiction,” Colanzi said. What she wanted, she said, was “to have the freedom to really create my own Martian colony.”

Whether it’s rewriting old worlds or inventing new ones, the region is seeing “an explosion of imagination,” Barragán said.

“The shadow of English-language science fiction has hung over us for a long time,” he said. “But we’re rethinking what it is to be Hispanic.”