If Hugo Gernsback’s first act in the inaugural issue of Amazing Stories was to choose the term that would eventually become “science fiction” to designate the type of works that his magazine published, his second act was to use that term retroactively to label—or retrolabel—a body of existing texts that he felt belonged to the same tradition. “By ‘scientifiction,’” he states, “I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” (3).1 Although the genealogy of science fiction has been actively traced in its countries of origin since the moment Gernsback formally baptized the genre,2 in Latin America this process did not get underway until the late 1960s and continues today. Like all such bibliographical processes, the effort to retrolabel Latin American sf has in part been the result of a desire for the stature and legitimacy that identifiable ancestors bestow upon their descendants. While Latin Americans can point to Northern Hemisphere antecedents for their science fiction and claim that established pedigree as their own, their late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century search for a more direct national or continental sf family tree represents a desire for evidence that science fiction has been a global genre from its earliest days and that Latin America has participated in this genre using local appropriations and local adaptations. This participation is one way in which Latin America has demonstrated a continuing connection with literary, cultural, and scientific debates in the international arena. But the addition of pre-space-age works to the genealogical tree of Latin American sf does more than provide its writers and readers with local roots: it broadens our understanding of the genre in Latin America and in other areas of the periphery;3 it extends our perception of the role of science in Latin American literature and culture; and, together with later Latin American sf, it contributes new perspectives and new narrative possibilities to the genre as a whole.
FIGURE I.1. The Arts in This Century [Las bellas artes en el siglo presente] by Aurelio Giménez. Caras y Caretas 118 (5 January 1901), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
From the nineteenth century to the present day, science fiction has consistently proved to be an ideal vehicle for registering tensions related to the defining of national identity and the modernization process. These tensions have long been exacerbated in Latin America by the challenge of constructing and/or maintaining a national identity in the face of significant influence from the North and by the uneven assimilation of technology in Latin American countries, which has resulted in a situation that García Canclini has termed “multitemporal heterogeneity” (47). When characterizing Latin American science fiction, however, it is important to bear in mind the differences between the nineteenth century and the twentieth and twenty-first in terms of the production and readership of the genre, the perception of the relationship with the North, and the role of science in the national imaginations.
Association with the genre carried relatively little cost for nineteenth-century authors. Having their work carry the sf label has often been a double-edged sword for Latin American writers in more recent years. If the name recognition of science fiction brings them an easily identifiable genre home and a ready-made reader base, that reader base is still relatively small.4 Texts carrying the sf label are frequently assumed to be second- or third-string works of pulp fiction, and they often draw charges of being a party to cultural imperialism and of failing to reflect local realities.5 (It should be said that with the recent boom in the writing and criticism of Latin American sf, and with a shifting of genre tides away from the predominance of shiny, rocket-launched visions of the future, writers and promoters of the genre in Latin America are now better able to defend themselves against such charges.6) Prior to the heyday of the pulp era, however, sf was not so thoroughly perceived as an external genre that was unrelated to Latin American realities, nor had such strong links yet been forged between sf and popular culture.
FIGURE I.2. Housework in the New Century [El trabajo doméstico en la nueva centuria] by Urtubey. Caras y Caretas 118 (5 January 1901), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Contrary to their more recent association with mass culture, science-fictional texts in the nineteenth century were read almost exclusively by the literate upper classes in Latin America. While many writers in the young nations sought to establish and make contributions to their countries’ national literatures, it was more acceptable then to have works of Northern writers as literary influences. This was a time in Latin America when the political, economic, cultural, scientific, and even racial characteristics of northern European nations such as Britain, France, and Germany were often touted as models for bringing progress to, or “civilizing,” the “barbarous” Latin American nations. The United States was largely viewed as an example of a nation that had successfully incorporated these models. Thus an association with literary genres of Northern origin such as the utopia, the fantastic voyage, the scientific romance—genres that were fast coalescing into the sf tradition—was more likely to increase than to decrease the cachet of a text.
The nineteenth century was also the time in Latin America in which scientific discourse was the supreme guarantor of truth. In Myth and Archive, his landmark study of Latin American narrative, Roberto González Echevarría describes what he has termed the “hegemonic discourse of science” as “the authoritative language of knowledge, self-knowledge, and legitimation” in Latin America (103).7 This legitimating power of scientific discourse would imbue texts written in the nascent science-fictional genre with an additional authority originating outside the texts themselves. As in the twenty-first century, nineteenth-century Latin American nations were rarely producers of original scientific research, so the source of this authority would necessarily carry some association with the North. While Northern influence in science as well as literature is sometimes seen as doubly damning in Latin American sf today, this was much less the case a century ago. In addition, we must be mindful that what is sometimes conceived of as the external component of hybrid/mestizo/post-colonial Latin American cultures is not really so alien to Latin American reality. As González Echevarría states:
It does not escape me that the hegemonic discourse described here comes from “outside” Latin America; therefore Latin America appears to be constantly explaining itself in “foreign” terms, to be the helpless victim of a colonialist’s language and image-making. There is a level at which this is true and deplorable. However, in Latin America, in every realm, from the economic to the intellectual, the outside is also always inside. . . . Latin America is part of the Western world, not a colonized other, except in founding fictions and constitutive idealizations. (41–42)
This is to say, political independence from European colonial powers did not completely divorce Latin Americans, especially Latin American elites, from their European roots.
Latin American scientific, economic, and cultural dependence was also expected to be short-lived. The mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of nation building in Latin America, in terms of institutions and infrastructure, and also of great real and/or perceived national potential. A number of Latin American nations prospered economically from booms in the markets for their natural resources. The dawn of the twentieth century also saw the birth of Spanish American modernism, the first of the Latin American literary movements to resonate beyond Latin American shores. In the sciences, as Nancy Stepan has said, “Latin Americans were still small contributors to science by world standards” (Hour 40), but she describes Latin American scientists as “attuned” to European scientific advances, and cites the history of eugenics in Latin America as an example of the region’s “generalized endorsement of science, as a sign of cultural modernity, and as a means by which the various countries of Latin America could emerge as powerful actors on the world stage” (Hour 36, 40). Texts written in the sf tradition in nineteenth-century Latin America, then, would not have been perceived as pale imitations of imperialistic literary models portraying extrapolated societies based on unattainable technologies, but as works that described the present with the authority of scientific discourse and reached for the brighter future that seemed destined to come.
A better understanding of Latin American science fiction, both early and later, can provide insights into an oft-neglected aspect of Latin American reality, and can also serve to broaden our understanding of sf in general. In the North, especially in the United States, we suffer from a certain myopia in our perception of the world and its literatures. The preeminent Argentine sf critic Pablo Capanna has described this phenomenon as “the incapacity, characteristic of all imperial centers in history, to understand what occurs far from the center of power, or how those who live in the periphery think” (“Entrevista” 165). Latin American sf can provide some much-needed correction to our vision; as M. Elizabeth Ginway notes in her article, “A Working Model for Analyzing Third World Science Fiction,” “The subaltern or outsider position provides new and varied perspectives on hegemonic cultural production” (488).8 In his keynote address at the 2007 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Geoff Ryman speaks of science fiction as a “collective activity,” a “continuity,” a “mass dream”; he characterizes the science fiction of the center (my term) as suffering from an ethnocentric view of the world, from gender bias, and from a limited view of the role of the “other” (we either shoot it or assimilate it).9 Ryman then speaks of the potential for science fiction written in the periphery to help the genre break away from its stereotypes and contribute to the construction of a new mass dream. The retrolabeling of early Latin American science fiction is part of a process by which we are recognizing what the work of Latin American writers contributes both to the genre and to that dream.
FIGURE I.3. Locomotion in the 20th Century [La locomoción en el siglo XX] by Francisco Fortuny. Caras y Caretas 118 (5 January 1901), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
While the labeling and retrolabeling of texts as science fiction have been proceeding apace in Latin America, there is simultaneously an inverse phenomenon of mislabeling and even unlabeling. Magic realism and the fantastic are the most common alternative genre labels for Latin American science fiction. Such categorizations sometimes occur for theoretical reasons, which vary in nature from misunderstanding to valid uncertainty regarding the degree of a text’s affinity to multiple genres, or for sociocultural reasons, related in diverse ways to the stigma or prestige of a genre label.
Science fiction is a genre with notoriously nebulous borders, and Latin American science fiction has a particularly strong propensity to form hybrids with neighboring genres. The latter is due in part to influences from national literatures, including a number of strong traditions of the fantastic. Hybridity is also fostered by the nature of local reception for science-fictional works. As Molina-Gavilán et al. explain, “Historically, in the absence of sustained attention from the literary establishment, Latin American writers have been free to disregard the more stringent genre boundaries that shaped early sf production in the U.S.” (“Chronology” 369). In light of these considerations, some latitude—up to and including dual categorization—clearly must be allowed when discussing genre and Latin American science fiction.
Those who would assert with James Gunn that “Latin America’s greatest contribution to science fiction and fantasy (and literature itself) has been ‘magic realism,’” however, go beyond acceptable limits of genre flexibility (480).10 Most Latin Americans and Latin Americanists with an interest in science fiction do not discuss magic realism as a part of the genre or even as a particularly close relative. But more than the theoretical issues of genre delimitation, it is the underlying sociocultural implications of mislabeling science fiction as magic realism and magic realism as science fiction that concern us here.
When Northerners label science-fictional texts as works of magic realism, it is often due to the status of magic realism as the prime export genre from Latin America to the North. This phenomenon can lead to what David William Foster has described as “the often quite seriously distorting image of Latin American literature provided by what gets translated into English (i.e., what satisfies the English-reading public’s tastes) and what gets studied by foreign scholars” (v). From a Latin American perspective, Capanna writes of a desire to escape these limiting stereotypes, to show, as it were, the other side of the coin: “The alternative (to magic realism) is what many of us want: . . . to adopt an attitude of critical reflection that permits a less passionate analysis of a reality that, ‘magical’ as it may be, has its own rationality and its own profound strengths” (in “Coloquio a Distancia” 16). Science fiction is not written as a counterbalance to magic realism—it has far too long a history in Latin America for such a theory to hold any water—but it does provide an alternative angle on Latin American literature and culture. To have an understanding of Latin American science fiction, then, is to have a more complex and complete picture of Latin American reality.
There is also a more deliberate way in which Northerners and Latin Americans alike mislabel science fiction, and this may take the form of denying a text’s kinship with the genre. This mislabeling and unlabeling reflect a desire to disassociate a text from the mass or pop culture stigma that can be attached to science fiction. As Ursula Le Guin has put it, “At the moment, most literary critics carefully use terms such as ‘magical realism’ for fantasies they approve of, and take no notice whatever of the popular and commercial forms of fantasy” (29).
Magic realism is not the only alternative label here. In the United States, writers and publishers of science-fictional texts may seek to locate their works in the “Fiction/Literature” section in the bookstore rather than on the “Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror” shelves out of a desire to be taken more seriously in certain intellectual circles and to reach a potentially broader cross section of the reading public. This instinct is all the stronger in Latin America, in light of the lesser degree of academic acceptance of science fiction and of the reduced possibilities for genre texts to achieve mainstream crossover. Even in Brazil, where magic realism—and the fantastic—holds far less sway than in Spanish America (Ginway, Brazilian 29), both publishers and authors of sf have been attracted to magic realism as a genre label because of the marketing power it has attained since the 1970s and because “‘science fiction’ had strong North American connotations, whereas ‘magical realism’ suggested the possibility of a literature more closely identified with Latin American cultural roots” (Tavares, Fantastic 6).
The more firmly established tradition of the fantastic as a genre in many Latin American countries, as well as its more canonical literary pedigree, has made it a particularly attractive alternative option to science fiction. We must first clarify that, when used in reference to Hispanic American literature, the term “literatura fantástica” usually indicates a narrower corpus of works than by the Northern use of “fantastic” as a blanket term for sf, fantasy, and “all forms of human expression that are not realistic” (Westfahl 335). Works of the Spanish American fantastic tend to be in the vein of the Todorovian fantastic and its adjacent genres, though the origins of the tradition in Latin America are found much earlier in the gothic and in the powerful influence exerted by Poe and others on Latin American fiction. The fantastic generally flows well within or quite near to mainstream fiction in Latin America, and it is with this in mind that Sergio Gaut vel Hartman asks his fellow Latin American writers of science fiction: “Why don’t we huddle under the generous wing of ‘the fantastic,’ obtaining the favor of the ‘general public’ and avoiding being catalogued as suspects of lese-literature?” (11). Greater prestige and wider acceptance may also be sought by emphasizing links with the work of more canonical authors. Although Borges is often the author of first recourse in these cases in Latin America, it should not be forgotten that Borges did not despise genre fiction or hesitate to champion “the pleasure of adventures” to be found in “works of reasoned imagination” [obras de imaginación razonada] such as Bioy Casares’s classic work of Argentine science fiction, The Invention of Morel [La invención de Morel] (Borges, “Prólogo” to Invención 9, 12).
The dual labeling of works as both science fiction and fantastic is perfectly valid and not infrequently necessary. One must, however, be cautious and not overhasty in the unlabeling of works as science fiction in favor of these other genres. Eduardo Ortiz is not wrong, for example, to discuss Holmberg’s The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-Nac to the Planet Mars (1875–76) as a fantastic text. Ortiz’s arguments to deny that the text is also an early work of science fiction, however, depend on a narrowly defined characterization of sf that does not take into account the permeable boundaries of the genre, especially during a time before it had been more rigidly codified by publishers, writers, critics, and tradition (“Transition” 63).11 When science fiction is excluded from the genealogy of such Latin American texts, valuable tools for understanding and analysis are lost. Examining works through a lens of science fiction underscores the authoritative role of scientific discourse in nineteenth-century Latin America. Without such a perspective, direct literary influences from the sf tradition may be removed from the picture, and the writer’s knowledge and intentional deployment or adaptation of the emerging themes, icons, and conventions of science fiction may be missed or misinterpreted. Further, reading a Latin American text within the framework of the genre can shed light on the ongoing exploration of issues of influence, imitation, and originality in Latin American literature and culture. With these thoughts in mind, broad selection criteria were employed for the “Chronology of Latin American Science Fiction through 1920” at the end of this book. The objective is not to parse genre delimitations but to build upon the valuable bibliographical work and retrolabeling processes begun by others and to serve as a reference for those wishing to explore the field further.
This book examines the early science fiction of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico from c. 1850 to 1920. The dangers of working as a generalist and a comparativist on this broad topic are outweighed by the dangers of not doing so. Scholars and others interested in early science fiction will find a discussion of new primary sources from this time period. Students of Northern science fiction will find new approaches to the genre and new perspectives on the “first” world and its cultural production. Those with an interest in Latin America will find both a discussion of little-known Latin American texts and a new approach to canonical Latin American texts and authors examined through the lens of science fiction. In deference to the diverse backgrounds of potential readers, I provide explanations of a number of terms, concepts, and events—from “fanzines” to the unique character of the Brazilian monarchy—that may fall more within the realm of expertise of one readership than another.
The geographical and chronological parameters of this monograph have been established to represent patterns of theme and variation in what I have called Latin America’s “first wave” of science fiction.12 Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico are home to three of the strongest sf traditions in Latin America. They hold several elements in common, such as Iberian colonial pasts, heterogeneous populations, unequal modernities, and the challenges of consolidating national identity and unity in the face of direct and indirect Northern influence. All are located on the periphery of political influence and scientific research, yet all have potential for advancement in both arenas. Despite these commonalities, the three nations also illustrate the geographical, linguistic, political, racial, economic, and sociocultural diversity of the region.
The term “nineteenth century” is understood here as an extended period that ends with World War I. The time span under discussion in this monograph—1850 to 1920—falls before the formal recognition of science fiction as a genre in the 1920s and ’30s. It encompasses the emergence of early Latin American science-fictional texts in the industrial era, and also the previously mentioned era of the hegemony of scientific discourse—a hegemony that changes in the 1920s (González Echevarría 12). This period can be thought of as including approximately the first hundred years after the abolition of colonial rule in each nation, as well as the first century following the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1819).
The chapters in this book are organized by subgenre and theme: displacement in space and time, evolution and devolution, the non-canonical sciences and the fantastic, and the figure of the double. There is also a chronological progression, both within each chapter and in the book as a whole. Over the many decades that comprise this extended nineteenth-century cluster of Latin American sf texts, there is a gradual transition from a climate of optimism to one of pessimism: science may not be the guarantor of truth it had long been thought to be, the impact of technology on individuals and society may not be positive, political stability and national potential may be difficult to achieve. Science fiction in Latin America during these years also passes from an elite tradition to a more popular one. Other issues persist throughout the era: the importance of defining and consolidating national identity; tensions between science and religion, city and countryside, and the canonical and the pseudosciences; and finally the production of literary hybrids formed by an endless variety of combinations of science-fictional and fantastic elements from national as well as Northern sf literary traditions.
Chapter 1 examines three generations of texts which employ strategies of cognitive estrangement in order to comment upon modernization, national identity, and political and sociocultural issues of the day. Building on the theoretical groundwork on displacement, the fantastic journey, futuristic fiction, and utopia/dystopia established by critics of Northern science fiction, these works are examined both in the context of national literary traditions and as part of a more global science-fictional continuum. The chapter begins with a discussion of three foundational works written by authors who were nation builders; these men viewed their texts as agents of change in times when Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico appeared to have the potential to join the nations of the first world. This hopefulness contrasts with the greater pessimism that emerges in the novels from subsequent generations. Eugenic-type discourse surfaced as writers sought new routes toward their visions of national progress and unity. The length of this chapter reflects the relative importance of the utopia in early Latin American science fiction as well as the length of the works discussed.
Chapter 2 explores the frequent attempts to amend, challenge, or reverse the tenets of Darwin’s theory of evolution by proponents of Lamarckian evolution and Spencerian Social Darwinism. The tensions between these competing conceptualizations of the world were particularly acute in Latin America, where discussions on evolution were often displaced reenactments of the eternal debate on civilization versus barbarism. The first section of the chapter examines two widely differing interpretations of evolutionary theory from 1875, in which each writer seeks to establish the location of the world’s modern/progressive/evolved future in his own nation. Portrayals of evolution give way to portrayals of devolution in the works of the modernist, Leopoldo Lugones. Poe’s Eureka and a belief in Theosophy were the motivating forces behind Lugones’s “Essay on a Cosmogony in Ten Lessons” and its literary companion piece “The Origin of the Flood.” Lugones’s famous ape tale “Yzur” is discussed as his most nuanced exploration of evolutionary and devolutionary themes. The chapter concludes with an examination of four Latin American visions of the end of the world—or at least of society as we know it—of what will become of us and of what we will become.
Chapter 3 examines the limits of the science fiction genre in Latin America through a study of those early texts in which the border between the science fictional and the fantastic is most blurred. The fingerprints of Shelley, Poe, and particularly Flammarion are discernible throughout these works. Their writers question the ability of the canonical sciences either to provide an adequate substitute for religious beliefs or to bring modernization to Latin America. Their disillusionment with the empirical sciences leads them to suggest practices such as Magnetism, Spiritism, Theosophy, and the use of sundry “strange forces” as viable alternatives for attaining and extending knowledge. The relative credibility enjoyed by the less canonical sciences in the nineteenth century, and the degree to which their proponents employed and promoted the scientific method, draw these texts closer to the realm of science fiction and, at the same time, expand the genre’s borders in Latin America.
Chapter 4 traces the passage of science fiction in Latin America from an elite to a more popular genre. This process is exemplified by a series of texts that deal with the creation of a double. The critical framework for this chapter is Beatriz Sarlo’s discussion of Argentina’s transition from a university-based science accessible to few to a technology that finds its way into the home workshops of the masses. In this progression, the more erudite and theoretical science of a Holmberg or a Lugones becomes the more popularized and practical technology of a Quiroga. Holmberg’s 1879 “Horacio Kalibang” is a Hoffmann-influenced tale in which a mechanically constructed secret army of automata gradually overtake the world, replacing both stranger and friend. By 1910 Horacio Quiroga is writing of a biologically constructed double in The Artificial Man, his modernization and Latin Americanization of Shelley’s Frankenstein. But the success of Quiroga’s builders of men soon turns to ashes, as does that of Cuevas’s Dr. Tolimán, in a Mexican tale of an apparatus that can bring the dead back to life. In a coda to the chapter, two other tales of the double by Quiroga reflect trends and traditions in technology and in Latin American science fiction at the close of the extended nineteenth century.
