In the preface to his excellent book on the early science fiction of England, France, and the United States, Science Fiction before 1900, Paul Alkon observes that “science fiction has from its outset been an international phenomenon transcending political boundaries while nevertheless taking on distinctive features that reflect different national preoccupations” (xiii).1 Let us then consider the features that have distinguished Latin American science fiction from the outset. A recurring theme of science fiction in Latin America and in other areas of the periphery is the definition of national identity, along with its corollary, the relationship between the post-colonial self and the Northern other. This sf also has a strong tendency toward political content; the nationality, race, and social class of characters are given more weight than in Northern sf. Further, works that may be discussed as sf are more likely to be hybrids, also claimed by other genres.2 The following examination of the characteristics of Latin American sf encompasses the full time span of the genre there, but focuses on the defining elements of nineteenth-century works.
From the beginning, Latin Americans themselves have been the most persistent questioners as to whether there can be a Latin American science fiction and, if so, what makes it Latin American. “We will only admit the necessity for and the validity of a Latin American sf to the degree that we recognize in it something that could not have been written in other latitudes,” declares critic Pablo Capanna (in “Coloquio a Distancia” 20). The debate as to the acceptable degrees of imitation, borrowing, or influence of Northern sf versus the desired percentages and characteristics of local, national, or Latin American contributions is ongoing in the Latin American sf community.
In recent decades, this debate has perhaps been clearest in the Brazilian arena, due to the competing volleys of manifestos. In his “Cannibalistic Manifesto of Brazilian Science Fiction—Supernova Movement” [Manifesto Antropofágico da Ficção Científica Brasileira—Movimento Supernova] (1988), inspired by Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” [Manifesto antropófago] (1928), Ivan Carlos Regina protests against the Brazilian tendency to produce derivative sf: “Copying the foreign model creates . . . mental poverty among intellectuals who seek, in grotesque imitation, to recreate the modus vivendi of technologically developed countries.”3 While as recently as 2004, the “Anti-Brazilitis Manifesto” [Manifesto Antibrasilitite] attacked—with particular emphasis on sf and other genre media—“the necessity of a mask or veneer of Brazilianness for a work of fiction written/produced by a Brazilian to be taken seriously by critics and by potential financial backers” (Reis).4
Prior to 1920, there were no genre-based literary circles or fandoms in which this debate could take place. Nevertheless, tensions between originality and influence (or nationally produced versus imported, or independent versus colonial identity) formed part of the cultural fabric in the relatively young Latin American nations. The frontispiece of Luis Holmberg’s biography of his father, Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, includes a quotation dated 1876, in his father’s own handwriting, reflecting upon precisely this issue: “I am Argentine, and I love my country, my country which is so beautiful and so prosperous but which has until now gone begging to Europe when she had in her bosom models of her own, sufficient for all the world.” Although, as we have argued, the perils of imitating the North were more often perceived in the nineteenth century as mitigated by the benefits of gaining Northern scientific knowledge and by the historical influence of Northern culture, the issue of influence was of supreme importance to writers of science fictional texts at that time. Along with their literary roles, many of these writers participated in the construction of their nations’ identities in political, legal, educational, or scientific capacities. When writing science-fictional works, they were highly cognizant of actively importing literary tools and tropes from Northern science fictional texts, even as they adapted them for their own purposes.
Considering González Echevarría’s pertinent reminder that, in Latin America, “the outside is also always inside” (41), it is clear that there is room for more than two positions in this self/other debate. Braulio Tavares, a contemporary Brazilian writer-critic, takes a more universalist view:
It does not seem to me that there exists a “Brazilian,” “European,” or “American” science . . . : there exists a science which, viewed as a system of ideas, belongs to humanity as a whole. . . .
As for the importation of themes and images of foreign sf, this seems an interesting question, but secondary. . . . Certain literary conventions, by being used outside their place of origin so frequently, end up becoming universal. (O que é 81–82)
The positions of the majority of Latin Americans—including many whose statements in this debate we have just noted—consist of some mixture of acknowledging the inevitability of a degree of Northern influence in the genre, while at the same time seeking to find their own voices. They reject not so much the influence of Northern sf, but its idealization by Latin American writers who thereby reveal themselves to be incapable of imagination. Sergio Gaut vel Hartman states that, for Latin Americans who write science fiction, “Lost purity (or forced hybridization [mestización]) has dictated the norms of our way of writing without deliberation or reflection” (11). What Gaut vel Hartman seems to object to most is the blind imitation of Anglo-Saxon sf. The mestización he accepts as part of the apprenticeship of the sf writer, stating: “Those of us who grew up reading Anglo-Saxon science fiction had already lost our purity the day we sat down to write science fiction for the first time” (11). His use of the term mestización indicates, however, that he is also aware that Latin American writers do not come to science fiction empty-handed, a fact he makes more explicit with examples: “Borges plus Sturgeon, Macedonio [Fernández] by way of Bester produce explosive, unpredictable results” (11).
In his Biographies of the Future: Mexican Science Fiction and Its Authors [Biografías del futuro: La ciencia ficción mexicana y sus autores], Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz reflects on how far science fiction has come as a genre in Latin America: “Now we have a historical consciousness of belonging to a global movement and, at the same time, we respond to this world science fiction movement with our own characteristics, with notable antecedents and with distinctive, complementary aspirations” (355). With the exception of Trujillo Muñoz’s nod to recent progress in retrolabeling, this assertion is not so far from what might have been said of Latin American sf in the nineteenth century, for science fiction has been a truly global genre from the earliest times of genre formation. As we have seen, there is both direct and indirect evidence that nineteenth-century Latin American writers were reading Verne, Wells, Poe, Shelley, and other Northern writers and were seeking to write science-fictional texts that described their own realities. The difference, perhaps, is that these writers might have thought of themselves as joining a global movement rather than belonging to one as a fully integrated participant. I. F. Clarke has described authors of early Northern sf as writing “for the nation and for the world” and as having “an international audience for their stories” (xiii). Their nineteenth-century Latin American counterparts, however, did not feel described by such narratives, and so they produced their own. A closer look at the early texts being retrolabeled in Latin American science fiction genealogies reveals the “notable antecedents” in a tradition of works engaged in dialogue with global literature and making original contributions to that dialogue.
Latin American science fiction is frequently characterized as more political than that written in the North. This is a particularly apt distinction in the nineteenth century, when Latin American sf tends to reflect a more concrete and detailed political agenda than science fiction written in nations with longer histories of political independence and stability. Writers of early Latin American sf were often intimately involved in the process of deciding the future course of their nations, and they used the nascent genre not just to circulate their ideas in the public arena, but to show their countrymen and women their view of the present reality and their vision of a better, more modern one to come. This is not to say that the science fiction of Northern writers such as Bellamy or Wells did not promote specific political agendas, but that their agendas were not as dependent, for example, on a ceasefire this month so that the new president could take office, or a vote for the right candidate in the next elections to prevent the worst sort of military rule, or the expansion of transportation and communication networks so that the nation could function as a unified whole.
Even in subgenres with less overt political content than the relatively popular utopias and dystopias, Latin Americans gave greater emphasis in their texts to reflections on politically charged issues of national identity and national composition. This is most consistently demonstrated in representations of nationality, race, and social class or profession in Latin American works. Many character types that have since become stock players in the global science fiction megatext—such as the scientist, the scientist’s assistant, or the cicerone to an alien environment—first appeared in nineteenth-century sf. In early Latin American science fiction, however, a prominent role also is played by the anti-scientific character, inevitably a figure inimical to the social, scientific, or political progress of the nation, who must be opposed or educated by the hero of the piece. Foreign characters have long been used to represent the other, the exotic, the strange, but in Latin American sf the figure of the foreigner is accompanied by more political baggage, as characters’ nationalities reflect an author’s views on international power dynamics and on the ideal makeup of the national population. In the nineteenth century, the European (though rarely an Iberian) or North American character is often employed to represent authority, either the authority who can recognize and legitimize the position of Latin American nations in the world or the authority from whom power must be wrested. Characters from the United States tend to represent the applied sciences, whereas Northern Europeans typically represent the theoretical sciences or the pinnacle of culture and the arts. Finally, there are “less desirable” foreign or minority characters that represent countries and races perceived to be less developed or less “evolved” than the nineteenth-century Latin American ideal. The national origins of this lower-tier component—usually recent immigrants—vary depending on the Latin American nation and the time period. As in Northern nations, the genetic and cultural contributions of those of African or indigenous descent were, with notable exceptions, rarely valued in nineteenth-century Latin America or in its science fiction, but the question of what to do about these groups was more pressing in relatively unpopulated Latin American nations whose national composition was considered “uneugenic” by Northerners. These character dynamics have changed markedly in more recent Latin American sf, though distinctions between those from central nations and those from the periphery usually still hold.
The most common characterizations of Latin American science fiction have long been that it is “soft” rather than “hard,” and that it is more dependent than Northern sf on strategies of the fantastic and magic realism. While strong cases can be made for these generalizations, it is important to qualify them with a comparison to trends in Northern sf, with insights from contemporary critics, and in light of the extended perspective afforded by a consideration of nineteenth-century texts. The thorny issue of genre delimitations has been discussed in the introduction to this volume. The “softness” of Latin American sf is perhaps best described as “less true than might be assumed” (Bell and Molina-Gavilán 14). There have been periods in U.S. and European science fiction in which content/plot or the social sciences were emphasized over the traditional hard science approach, most notably during the Campbell years in the 1940s and the New Wave movement in the mid-1960s. An examination of the complete panorama of the genre in Latin America reveals that, like Northern sf, Latin American sf also varies according to local and global literary trends, scientific and technological developments, and the national and international mood of the time. Much of the science fiction produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century falls distinctly toward the hard end of the spectrum. Most of the writers in question had either a professional scientific background or a strong working knowledge of the sciences. Scientific didacticism is if anything more prominent in nineteenth-century Latin American sf than in Northern sf, because Latin American writers felt it was their duty to educate and inform their compatriots, in order to encourage the sort of scientific mindset that would spur sluggish national progress. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the personal computer and the Internet are somewhat diminishing the “multitemporal heterogeneity” of Latin America by providing increased access to cutting-edge science (García Canclini 47). This has undoubtedly contributed to the inclusion of “harder” elements in the works of some contemporary Latin American writers.
With the possible exceptions of Argentina and the River Plate region, the texts from the time period discussed in this book were not foundation stones for national sf traditions in their respective countries. Eighteenth, nineteenth, and even early twentieth-century works of Latin American sf had little if any influence on Latin American sf writers of subsequent generations because the earlier works had virtually disappeared. This occurred for various reasons: the condemnation of such works by the Inquisition, their limited distribution in periodicals or monographs, and the extremely local nature of some texts. Lately, however, these retrolabeled early works of Latin American sf seem to be coming into their own. They are now becoming valued as reflections of Latin American attitudes toward science, literature, national identity, and other sociocultural issues of their times. And they are, at long last, becoming appreciated as evidence of the roots of Latin American participation in the sf genre.
At last count there are over ninety works of Latin American science fiction, from eleven different countries, published before 1920. I do not claim that this clustering of texts constitutes a wave of Latin American science fiction in and of itself, but suggest that these works are evidence of Latin American participation in the global wave of early science fiction. Bell and Molina-Gavilán are right to characterize our authors as having “no particular commitment to the genre,” and they are equally correct in saying that there is “no cohesive science fiction tradition” in Latin America in these years (“Introduction” 4). Most of these authors wrote in many genres, literary and otherwise, and did not identify themselves primarily as writers in the science-fictional vein. They were all at least cognizant of the sf tradition, however, and some were actively engaged with the works and mores of the sf tradition. These writers may not have been aware of each other’s works, or of the fact that together they were establishing a pattern of Latin American participation in the genre, but they were most certainly aware of the “bonds of kinship” between their texts and those of writers in the North (Stableford, Scientific Romance 4). Taking these early authors and texts into account, it becomes clear that science fiction is more firmly anchored in Latin American literary and cultural history than has previously been recognized. The genre should be seen not as just a space-age or computer-age phenomenon in Latin America, but as literature that has evolved over time, literature that has been adapted by Latin Americans to reflect their perspectives, to say what “could not, perhaps, have been expressed in any other way” (Holmberg, Nic-Nac 186).