The original Spanish or Portuguese has been provided for all titles of works, for passages including key terms (particularly scientific or technical ones), whenever translation issues arise, and for a number of longer passages. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. The orthography in primary sources may vary from modern usage, as citations are taken from the earliest available edition of each work (editions used are indicated in the bibliography). Emphases in citations are present in the original unless otherwise indicated.
1. As Brian Stableford writes in the entry on “Proto Science Fiction” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “Hugo Gernsback clearly believed that he was merely attaching a name to a genre which already existed” (965). Gernsback’s “scientifiction” genre label had become “science fiction” by 1929. Like Stable-ford, I reserve the term “proto science fiction” for pre-nineteenth-century works. For texts written in the nineteenth century through 1926 I employ terms such as “early science fiction,” “science-fictional,” and “belonging to the science fiction tradition.”
2. Gernsback was not the first to recognize the existence of an sf tradition; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers and readers of science-fictional texts were well aware of the “loose bonds of kinship” of these texts to others. What Stableford has written of scientific romance in Britain holds true as well for science fiction written in other Northern countries and in Latin America prior to 1926:
What entitles us to think of scientific romances as a kind is not a set of classificatory characteristics which demarcate them as members of a set, but loose bonds of kinship which are only partly inherent in the imaginative exercises themselves and partly in the minds of authors and readers who recognise in them some degree of common cause. What binds together the authors and books to be discussed here is mainly that they were perceived by the contemporary audience as similar to one another and different from others. (Scientific Romance 4)
3. Geographical distinctions commonly used among Latin American(ist)s may require some explanation. The term “periphery” (as opposed to the “center”) is a virtual substitute for denominations such as “third-world” or “developing” regions; note, for example, the title of a recent anthology of sf from Mexico: Visions from the Periphery: Anthology of Mexican Science Fiction [Visiones periféricas: Antología de la ciencia ficción mexicana] (ed. Fernández-Delgado). Additionally, my capitalization of “North” and “Northern” throughout this book is a deliberate effort to designate the region that has historically exercised the greatest political, cultural, and sf genre influence on Latin America. Most often this region includes the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and perhaps Russia and excludes Spain, Portugal, and usually Italy.
4. I am referring to the local reader base. Little science fiction from Latin America has been translated or reaches an international audience. A notable exception to this rule is the 2003 anthology Cosmos Latinos, edited by Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán. Internet magazines and fanzines such as the Argentina-based Axxón also make Latin American sf available to national and international readers of Spanish or Portuguese.
5. Although the situation has improved in recent years, in his 2001 introduction to Visiones periféricas, the Mexican writer and critic Miguel Ángel Fernández-Delgado is still defending Mexican sf against the expectation of charges of “the malinchismo that could be assumed in the cultivators of a literary movement that came from outside” (14). Malinchismo is a phenomenon described most famously by Octavio Paz in his essay, “The Sons of La Malinche” [Los hijos de la Malinche]; one aspect of malinchismo is the use of the “contemptuous adjective malinchista . . . to denounce all those who have been corrupted by foreign influences” (86).
6. Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz dates the change of fortune in the reception and the writing of Mexican science fiction from the 1968 publication of Carlos Olvera’s Mexicans in Space [Mejicanos en el espacio], and he sees a similar trend in the rest of Latin America at around the same time:
[With Mexicans in Space] for the first time in this genre, the future is not a superior stage of human evolution, but rather an avalanche of prejudices and complexes shared by all with humor and without shame.
Since the 1970s, national [Mexican] science fiction, like Latin American sf, is taking new paths. Social criticism, a libertarian spirit, stylistic experimentation, and the search for less obvious themes are transforming the paradigms of the future visualized by the youngest creators. (Biografías 346)
The more recent phenomenon of retrolabeling the earliest works of Latin American sf is another sign of the increasing acceptance of the legitimacy of the genre there. For more on retrolabeling and on recent developments in the field, see my “Back to the Future.”
7. González Echevarría defines hegemonic discourse as “one backed by a discipline, or embodying a system, that offers the most commonly accepted description of humanity and accounts for the most widely held beliefs of the intelligentsia” (41).
8. Ginway has also described elsewhere the unique perspective that science fiction written in the periphery provides on the genre and the cultures of both the first and the third worlds:
The production of a genre like science fiction in the Third World narrates a ‘displacement,’ or a shuttling between center and periphery. Thus, instead of condemning Brazilian science fiction as a simulacrum or cultural borrowing, it could be seen as uncentered and contingent, a useful tool for deconstructing literary and historical narratives and re-shaping the boundaries between national and international literatures. (Brazilian 34–35)
9. My discussion of Ryman’s ideas is based on my own notes taken at his talk, “In Praise of Science Fiction.” The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts has since published a revised version of this speech, titled “The Science Fiction Dream.”
10. Fernández-Delgado states that this mis-characterization of science fiction as magic realism and magic realism as science fiction in Latin American texts by Gunn is part of a larger phenomenon, calling it a result of widely held “prejudices . . . rooted in the mindset of the societies of the developed countries, and from which a considerable portion of their researchers are not exempt” (“Discurso”).
11. Ortiz subsequently cites Verne, Flammarion, Poe, and Hoffmann as important influences on Holmberg’s work, though he identifies these writers only with the fantastic (“Transition” 84).
12. See my “First Wave.” In Latin American science fiction, as in Northern science fiction, it is common practice to talk of “waves,” “golden ages,” and “booms” when discussing the trajectory of the genre, although these terms are usually applied to time periods such as the late 1950s or the turn of the millennium. Considering Latin American science fiction as part of a larger phenomenon, we can locate our texts of early Latin American sf within the leading edge of what Suvin has termed the Euro-Mediterranean sf tradition’s “fin-de-siècle cluster (ca. 1870–1910)” (87).
1. While some of these texts were claimed for the genre earlier (Nic-Nac by Goligorsky in 1968, “Mexico 1970” by Staples in 1987), they have been consistently cited as foundational Latin American sf texts only in more recent years. The bibliography in the entry on “Latin America” by Mauricio-José Schwarz and Braulio Tavares in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lists Brazil 2000 and Nic-Nac. All three texts are included in the important chronology compiled by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán et al. in Chasqui in 2000 and in their revised and updated chronology published in English in Science Fiction Studies. See my “Back to the Future” for more on the vagaries of the textual histories of these and other works of early Latin American sf.
2. A number of other works that have been retrolabeled as early Latin American sf are utopian in nature and/or involve displacement in space or time. Syzygies and Lunar Quadratures [Sizigias y cuadraturas lunares] (New Spain/Mexico, 1775) by Manuel Antonio de Rivas (dates unknown) contains a fantastic voyage to the moon; this text has been discussed by González Casanova, Larson, Fernández-Delgado and Dziubinskyj. Another work that centers around displacement in space is Francisco Miralles’s (1837–date unknown) From Jupiter: The Curious Voyage of a Magnetized Man from Santiago [Desde Júpiter: Curioso viaje de un santiaguino magnetizado] (Chile, 1877), which has been studied by Andrea Bell. Juan Nepomuceno Adorno’s (1807–80) “The Distant Future” [El remoto porvenir] (Mexico, 1862/1882) describes a utopian future for humanity; excerpts translated into English are in the Cosmos Latinos anthology (ed. Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán). The anonymous text “Delirium” [Delirio] (Argentina, 1816), since attributed to Antonio José Valdés (Pestarini, “Delirio”), is the tale of his contemporary Buenos Aires magically modernized by the giant Tremebundo. Argirópolis (Argentina, 1850) is something of a long political pamphlet in which Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88) outlines his plan for creating a more utopian society in Argentina’s near future. Perhaps the best-known Latin American work that discusses displacement in space and foregrounds Latin America as a historically privileged setting for “first contact” with an alien species is Amado Nervo’s poem “The Great Journey” [El gran viaje] (Mexico, 1917), in which he asks:
Who, in a not too distant future, will be
the Christopher Columbus of another planet?
Who, with mighty machine, will succeed in
exploring the ocean
of ether . . . (lines 1–5)
¿Quién será, en un futuro no lejano,
el Cristóbal Colón de algún planeta?
¿Quién logrará, con máquina potente,
sondar el oceano
del éter . . .
3. The capabilities of the science-fictional utopia for complex temporal negotiations between past, present, and future are elucidated by Moylan (25–26).
4. The identity of Fósforos-Cerillos has been variously posited as either Sebastián Camacho y Zulueta (Fernández-Delgado in the Chasqui and SFS chronologies) or José Joaquín Mora (Trujillo Muñoz, “El futuro en llamas” 12). Lacking definitive proof, I base my characterization of the writer on the content of “Mexico 1970” and on the fact that a number of other articles in the same issue of El Liceo Mexicano on sociocultural and scientific themes are signed “Fósforos,” “Fósforos-Cerillos,” or “F.C.” I take this to indicate a certain degree of involvement on the part of this writer in the journal and in the publication mission proclaimed in its introduction. “Mexico 1970” is signed “Fósforos” at the end of the article in El Liceo Mexicano, and its author is listed as “Fósforos-Cerillos” in the index to the issue.
5. I am indebted to Paul Alkon’s discussions of the interplay of metafictional, realistic, and fantastic elements in his Origins of Futuristic Fiction (124–25, 193–206).
6. Here Alkon is summarizing and building upon ideas from Bronislaw Baczko’s analysis of Mercier’s L’An 2440 [translated in the United States as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred] in Lumières de l’utopie (165n22).
7. There is some vacillation in the utopian portrayal of the estranged society in the case of Nic-Nac. My characterization of Holmberg’s representation of the relationship between Europe and Argentina is based on another of his texts in addition to Nic-Nac: the 1875 science-fictional work Two Factions Struggle for Life, discussed in chapter 2.
8. See Burns (History chapter 4, particularly 158–61 and 168–71, from which information for the overview in this paragraph is taken) for a more detailed description of the revolution in Brazilian transportation and communication in this period as well as for discussions of progress versus modernization and development versus growth in Brazil.
9. I am indebted to Braulio Tavares and to the staff of the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro for their help in acquiring copies of over a hundred pages of the manuscript.
10. This passage was chosen from a number of possibilities because it provides fairly clear evidence of the influence of Mercier on Felício dos Santos. A footnote in chapter 1 of Mercier’s Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred [L’An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante] reads: “The whole kingdom is in Paris. France resembles a ricketty child, whose juices seem only to encrease [sic] and nourish the head, while the body remains weak and emaciated” [Tout le royaume est dans Paris. Le royaume ressemble à un enfant rachitique. Tous les sucs montent à sa tête et la grossissent . . . mais le reste du corps est diaphane et exténué] (4; 82).
11. Pedro II was one of the few rulers in his time, and the only Brazilian, elected to one of the eight places reserved for foreigners in the Academy of Sciences of Paris. The French astronomer and geographer Emmanuel Liais (1826–1900), who carried out extensive research in Brazil and was director of the Astronomical Observatory of Rio de Janeiro in 1871, writes of the emperor’s “vast scientific knowledge,” and used data from astronomical observations carried out by Dom Pedro at São Cristóvão in order to complete his own work (Liais 142). Felício dos Santos portrays Liais as praising Pedro II’s scientific acumen in exchange for monetary support (Brazil 2000 Feb. 21, 1869).
12. Phase two of Brazil 2000 continues to employ the mediated history text brought back from the year 2000. The text now includes an account of Pedro II’s visit to the Brazil of the future, but is filtered, as usual, through the nineteenth-century editor and others.
13. I have changed this quotation from the plural to the singular. Originally it referred to both Joaquim Felício dos Santos and his Brazil 2000 and to another text by Justiniano José da Rocha that cannot at present be located.
14. The diversity of Holmberg’s publications and his work as a scientific generalist at a time when specialization was increasingly valued is explained by Luis Holmberg as a necessary sacrifice during that generation in a country of “little scientific culture” (140–41). His reasoning shares a number of similarities with Nancy Stepan’s arguments against attempts by modern Latin American nations to reproduce the structures of Northern scientific research systems in the final chapter of her Beginnings of Brazilian Science.
15. In Nic-Nac the inhabitants of Mars are referred to as “Marcialitas” [Martialites], a nod to the warlike tendencies of some of the inhabitants. As these inhabitants appear only in a few chapters of the tale, we will use the more standard “Martians” to avoid confusion.
16. The two authorities mentioned, Mr. Gould and Dr. Uriarte, were public figures in Argentina at the time. Benjamin Gould (1824–96) was an American astronomer and the first director of the National Observatory, established at Córdoba in 1871. Dr. José María Uriarte was the first director (1863–76) of San Buenaventura, a mental institution in Buenos Aires (subsequently renamed “José T. Borda National Hospital” [Hospital Nacional José T. Borda]; this asylum is featured in the award-winning Argentine sf film Man Facing Southeast [Hombre mirando al sudeste] [1986]).
17. Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) was a French scientist, popularizer of science, and sometime Spiritist. Lumen was a dramatization of ideas he had first expounded in several nonfictional books (Stableford, “Introduction” xiv). In the tale, Lumen is the spirit of a recently deceased Frenchman who describes the edifying interplanetary travels of his spirit to his former student, Quaerens. But while Flammarion uses Spiritism to give his title character greater authority, Holmberg uses it both to claim greater authority for Nic-Nac and simultaneously to call Nic-Nac’s authority into question. Lumen speaks to his student from a higher plane of existence, but Holmberg brings Nic-Nac back to Earth to tell his tale from our terrestrial, material plane, where Nic-Nac faces charges that his tale is the product of hallucination or of a deranged mind. While Flammarion’s belief in and defense of Spiritism eventually damaged his reputation in scientific circles, Holmberg continued his work as a respected scientist throughout his career. Pagés Larraya writes of Holmberg’s attitude toward Spiritism: “Although [Holmberg] may not have been a militant adept of these practices and even satirizes them . . . it is common knowledge that they interested him greatly” (42). Holmberg’s treatment of Spiritism is less satirical in other works of fiction, but he uses Spiritism as a literary device in Nic-Nac.
18. In 1878 in The Argentine Naturalist, Holmberg compared certain scientists unfavorably to Verne: “Those men of science, who keep themselves completely isolated from the world that surrounds them without reaching them, are certainly not those who pour the heat and the light of the truth onto the populace” (qtd. in Luis Holmberg 136). Luis Holmberg identifies both Burmeister and “the German professors Sarmiento brought to form the Academy of Sciences in Córdoba” as being guilty of sundry acts of inaccessibility in the eyes of his father (139).
19. New discoveries and retrolabeling of works of utopian/dystopian science fiction from these “generations” in Latin America preclude detailed discussion of all of them here. Tales of utopias displaced in space are now much less common, but see particularly Emília Freitas’s The Queen of Incognito [A rainha do Ignoto] (Brazil, 1899) and Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg’s Olimpio Pitango of Monalia [Olimpio Pitango de Monalia] (Argentina, 1915).
20. Lamarckian hereditarian thought was not discredited for decades after our texts were written. As Stepan says, “The centrality of Mendelism to our modern genetics has made it easy to overlook the continued vitality of non-Mendelian ideas in medicine and science until well into the 1940s” (Hour 65).
21. A major flaw in such thinking (reflected in these early Latin American utopias, which depended heavily on eugenic solutions) was that it diverted attention from far more pressing problems. As Stepan says, in Latin America “the hereditary aspects of poverty and disease were minor in comparison with the economic and political ones” (Hour 101).
22. This saying was coined by the Argentine statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–84) in his influential work Bases and Points of Departure for the Political Organization of the Argentine Republic [Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina] (1852).
23. Darío mentions Ezcurra briefly in his autobiography (Rubén Darío, La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo [Alicante, Spain: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2000] XLIII), and a fragment of a letter from Ezcurra to Darío exists in the National Library of Chile. Lucio V. López (1848–94) is best known as the author of The Great Village [La gran aldea] (1884).
24. See Rock 157–61 for an overview of the Argentine situation in this period, including the statistics that follow. The cumulative effects of the financial crises were rising unemployment and falling wages in Buenos Aires; the impact this had on immigration to Argentina is staggering. A net gain of 220,000 immigrants in 1889 shrank to only 30,000 in 1890 and became a net loss of 30,000 in 1891.
25. Ezcurra was not alone in his literary reflections on the national situation, though he was the only writer to do so in science-fictional mode. The year 1891 also saw the publication of the first three works of the aptly named “Stock Exchange Series” [ciclo de La Bolsa] (Oviedo 160).
26. Such juxtapositions of the nineteenth and thirtieth centuries outside the literary project of Andros and Filos are constant throughout the text. This technique is somewhat reminiscent of Brazil 2000, though without the presence of a time traveler they are rather more forced. Other metafictional techniques employed in Brazil 2000 such as the footnote and the citation of invented authorities are also present in Century XXX (see 34, 106 for examples).
27. Stepan’s study of eugenics in Latin America centers around the years in which eugenics societies first appeared there (1918), but she also cites evidence of the circulation of eugenics-related ideas much earlier. Eugenics was discussed in Argentina as early as the 1880s (Stepan, Hour 35n2); the three science-fictional texts examined in this section support this assertion.
28. The population of Buenos Aires doubled during the 1880s to reach half a million inhabitants. The foreign-born made up 19.8 percent of the population of Buenos Aires province when the 1869 census was taken; this percentage had increased to 30.8 percent in the 1895 census (Rock 153, 141).
29. This is not to say that there was no racism in Argentina. The country has a long national history of privileging Anglo-Saxon immigrants and avoiding mixing with nonwhite races. Stepan calls Argentina (versus Brazil and Mexico) “the most conventionally racist in its eugenic ideology” (Hour 139), and she states that, unlike Mexicans, “Argentinians condemned racial and cultural intermixture as threats to the unity of an Argentine nationality” (106). The only reference to racial or ethnic difference in Century XXX is in the name of the women’s charitable association, “The Daughters of Mandinga” [Las Hijas de Mandinga]. Members of the association are characterized as the antithesis of Parelia, that paragon of womanhood, and a footnote pretends to give the etymology of the term Mandinga as “From man, man, and dinga, boat” [De man, hombre, y dinga, embarcación] (206n1). Thus we have literally “man just off the boat,” or newcomer/immigrant/upstart, but the evocation of West Africa is also clearly present.
30. Moylan traces the “sibling” relationship between the eutopia/positive utopia and the dystopia/negative utopia; both imagine a “coherent whole” and drive the reader either toward or away from the reality depicted (see especially xiii, 127, 129, 133).
It should also be noted that the use of the term “perfection” throughout this chapter reflects its use by the authors themselves. I am not defining a utopian society as one that “must be perfect and therefore unrealizable” (see Sargent, “Three Faces” 6).
31. As part of this discussion on education and work, Ezcurra calls the middle classes those who “best preserved the type of the species” [conservaban mejor el tipo de su especie], as long as they avoided the inappropriate temptation of “envy and imitation of the upper classes” (279).
32. Little information is available about Barnsley’s life. I am grateful to Godfrey Barnsley, his grandson, for virtually all biographical data, and I am indebted to M. Elizabeth Ginway for providing contact with Mr. Barnsley.
33. Alberto Santos Dumont (1873–1932) is widely cited by Brazilians as the first to solve the problem of heavier-than-air, unassisted flight, disputing the claim of the Wright brothers.
34. This description contains a clear reference to the ending of H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). At the end of Wells’s novel the Sleeper is engaged in an airplane battle and finds himself falling out of the sky, though the reader never learns when and where he lands.
35. Century XXX is not a true tale of the far distant future. Like the texts set in the year 2000, it can be viewed as containing the seeds of change, as Ezcurra used the wide gap between the years 3000 and 1891 as a satirical disconnect between two time periods that he was equating allegorically.
36. Dr. Oswaldo Cruz had had great success at eradicating yellow fever in the Rio de Janeiro area by 1906 (Burns, History 272). Unfortunately for Barnsley, who later contracted an ultimately fatal case of yellow fever while fishing in Mato Grosso, the disease was virtually unheard of in the cooler climate of São Paulo, and he was misdiagnosed (Godfrey Barnsley, message to the author).
37. For more on the treatment of Afro-Brazilians and Brazilian Indians in São Paulo 2000, see Haywood Ferreira, “Emergence” 269–70. At the crux of Barnsley’s differentiation between Brazilian and Northern views on race and racism was Brazil’s use of miscegenation rather than segregation to resolve its race issues. Racism and social flexibility among the races have always functioned differently in Brazil than in the North; Barnsley’s views on this topic were eminently Brazilian. Stepan’s discussion of these issues is useful for understanding these differences more clearly: “ ‘Constructive miscegenation,’ it could be said, was thus as much a product of racism as its reverse,” she writes (Hour 170).
38. As Stepan explains, in 1933–34 Italians and Latin Americans from multiple nations worked within the Latin International Federation of Eugenics Societies [Federación Internacional Latina de Sociedades de Eugenesia] to explore “commonalities” among the nations (Hour 189–92). “ ‘Latinity,’ ” writes Stepan, “was constructed as an oppositional identity to ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ ” (189).
39. Much of the republication of Urzaiz’s works has been carried out by the press of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY), including several editions of Eugenia (of the novel’s seven editions—1919, 1947, 1955, 1976, 1982, 2002, and 2006—at least three [1947, 1976, and 2002] were published by or in concert with the UADY).
40. Eugenic ideas and writings on eugenics were present in Mexico prior to World War I (Stepan, Hour 56, 58). However, Urzaiz was still breaking very new ground in his use of eugenic methodology in his novel. Historian Beatriz Urías Horcasitas has called Eugenia “one of the first manifestations of eugenics [in Mexico] during the twentieth century” (59). In contrast Amado Nervo, Urzaiz’s compatriot and fellow writer of early science fiction, wrote against eugenics during this same time period, see Nervo, “Eugenesia.”
41. The usual word for “eugenics” in Spanish is “eugenesia.” Urzaiz’s use of the term “eugenética” [eugenetics] is clearly meant to emphasize the scientific, genetic foundation of the Bureau and of his utopia.
42. Terminology and regulations surrounding the Bureau of Eugenetics suggest that Urzaiz modeled his system of obligatory, government-run reproductive service after Bellamy’s system of required service in his industrial army.
43. Dziubinskyj tells us that Urzaiz was “an advocate of birth control and of access to post-secondary education for women at a time when these issues were taboo” (“Eduardo Urzaiz’s Eugenia” 463); Urzaiz’s advocacy of women’s rights and women’s education are also described in Urzaiz Jiménez (40), Souza de Fernández (12), and López Cortes (33–34). At the same time, Urzaiz’s equality of the sexes has its limits. Women in Villautopía were scholars and doctors, but they also tended to occupy the more traditional occupations of childcare worker and waitress (working “amid pinches and flirtatious remarks”; Urzaiz 34). While all men in Villautopía have long been able to easily discern and separate carnal from romantic love, “only some superior women have been capable of this” (106).
44. Urzaiz is also conscious of Malthusian population projections, and he posits that government control of reproduction will eventually be useful in cases of overpopulation (59, 62, 148).
45. A “sanitary dictatorship” had been declared in Mexico in 1918 to promote hygiene and fight disease by Dr. José María Rodríguez, director of the national Superior Council of Health [Consejo Superior de Salubridad] (Urías Horcasitas 60).
46. Mexico is the only country in Latin America where sterilization was ever legalized, though it was legal in only one state (Veracruz), and it is unlikely any ever took place. Stepan credits the legislation to the fact that Mexican eugenicists had closer connections to U.S. scientists than did their counterparts in other Latin American countries (Hour 131–32). There are also two Brazilian science-fictional texts from the 1920s that advocate eugenic sterilization: The Kingdom of Kiato [O Reino do Kiato] (1922) by Rodolfo Teófilo and The Clash of the Races; or, The Black President; An American Novel of the Year 2228 [O choque das raças; ou, O presidente negro; romance americano do anno de 2228] (1926) by José Bento Monteiro Lobato.
47. Later in the novel, the United States is criticized for enslaving and then segregating blacks rather than, it is to be supposed, seeking to mix them with other, superior races in the population (Urzaiz 124–25).
1. Not all of the concepts mentioned are purely Lamarckian, though they are often associated with him. Darwin and Lamarck did not diverge so widely in their ideas as is generally supposed, see Eiseley 199–204.
2. I would argue that there are geographic locations in Europe with strong temporal connotations, especially to the past, yet I agree that this is not so in the historically distinctive pattern of the United States.
3. Doctor Benignus is neither the first nor the last literary text to locate earlier stages of evolved animal and human life in the Brazilian interior. One Northern example that was well known in Latin America is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, The Lost World (1912). The expedition of Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger also finds the trappings of the “civilised world” on the Brazilian coast, at Pará in the north (196). But it is in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon—amid areas that are labeled on the crude, hand-drawn map included in the novel as “unexplored,” “morass,” and “many snakes and tarantulas”—that Challenger locates living evidence of the past: both dinosaurs and Darwin’s missing link, the ape-men (82). (This text was translated into Spanish by Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg.)
4. Although Zaluar favored the abolition of slavery, he includes virtually no mention of the influence of Africa on the formation of Brazil in this text. The location of blacks in Zaluar’s racial hierarchy is based on the following passage: “There is proof today that less difference exists between a chimpanzee and a negro from Lake Albert than between the latter and Newton or Kepler” (36). Whereas Indians were seen as a symbol of Brazilianness, of what differentiated Brazil from Europe and made it unique, and were thus to be integrated into Brazilian society, African slaves were considered foreigners. They were often left out of nineteenth-century Brazilian attempts at constructing a national history (Bertol Domingues and Romero Sá 84).
5. In his book Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror in Brazil 1875–1950 [Ficção científica, fantasia e horror no Brasil] Roberto de Sousa Causo describes Doctor Benignus as a tale in which science and technology are accessible only to the Brazilian elite, play only “passive” roles, and do not have a significant impact on Brazilian society (131–32, 142). Causo extends this characterization to the Brazilian sf of the nineteenth century through the 1920s and 30s, citing the absence of actual time travelers in early Brazilian science-fictional works as further evidence of this phenomenon (145). A more active role for science and technology than that posited by Causo is suggested in Zaluar’s work, both by the charge to Dr. Benignus from the more advanced Sun Being to spread scientific knowledge as a route to progress, and by the culmination of the novel in the foundation of a utopian colony, the success of which depends upon scientific and technological advances. The addition of Brazil 2000 and São Paulo 2000 to the corpus of early Brazilian sf reveals that the genre does indeed possess time travelers and that science and technology—with regard to transportation, communication, hygiene, and more—are represented multiple times as key components in the creation of Brazilian utopias.
6. Marún quotes Domingo F. Sarmiento’s diary entry of 12 August 1868 (originally quoted in Alberto Palcos, “Darwin, Sarmiento y Holmberg,” La Prensa 25 Feb. 1945).
7. Burmeister (1807–92) did not become a supporter of Darwin’s ideas on evolution until 1889, shortly before his death (Montserrat 23).
8. This narrative frame occurs on the page prior to 1, in a section titled “Dos Palabras” [Two Words].
9. Holmberg took part in his first scientific expedition at the age of twenty, under the aegis of the Argentine Scientific Society [Sociedad Científica Argentina]. At that time Río Negro (in Patagonia) was part of a relatively unknown area of the southern lands. The region was still Indian territory and would not be claimed for the Argentine state until seven years later, as a result of Roca’s Conquest of the Wilderness. Among Holmberg’s other expeditions, sponsored by the Argentine government and by various scientific societies, were journeys to the northern provinces (1877); the Curá-Malal mountains (1883); Paraná, Santa Fe, and Misiones (1884–86); Chaco (1885); and Uruguay (1890).
10. These debates are surely modeled after the 1860 debate between the Darwinist T. H. Huxley and the creationist Samuel Wilberforce.
11. Holmberg uses his characters’ names to typify the characters themselves and/or to allude to the contemporaries they represented in whole or in part (see Montserrat 27n18). Holmberg multiplies his own scientific authority and authorial voice via the creation of multiple semiautobiographical characters in a number of his literary texts. For a discussion of the Kaillitz-Griffritz example in Two Factions, see Dellepiane, “Ciencia” 474. For an expansion of this discussion to include the Holmberg-narrator, see Haywood Ferreira, “Emergence” 40–45, 58–59.
12. The political content of Two Factions attracted attention from Holmberg’s contemporaries. Just after its publication, the author and critic Miguel Cané (1851–1905) criticized Holmberg’s choice of temporal setting as too close for comfort to “the vivid memories of the violent upheaval which has agitated the republic” (Cané, “Dos partidos” 174). Note that the political context for Two Factions is the same as that for Nic-Nac.
13. The process of locating and confirming the status of the missing link in Two Factions involves a third geographical-temporal journey, that of an Argentine expedition to Africa, the place of humanity’s origins, and their return with an Akka to Buenos Aires.
14. Holmberg’s use of the Akka as proof of Darwin’s theory of evolution should not be misinterpreted as evidence that the Argentine author and scientist espoused a teleology-driven evolutionism that rejected natural selection. Rather, this shows that Holmberg was not immune to repeating the errors of other overzealous Darwinists, who placed existing peoples “on the time scale of the fossil past” (Eiseley 277). Darwin himself used a “living taxonomic ladder” to a certain extent in formulating his hypotheses (Eiseley 288).
15. This epigraph is signed “Holmberg.” Thus the fictional Kaillitz (presented by a fictionalized Holmberg) is linked to Holmberg’s real-and-now-fictionalized translation.
16. The tradition extends from Holmberg and Lugones on to Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), and Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–99). Although all of these authors knew (or knew of) one another, not all science-fictional influences carried forward. Borges, clearly unaware of the contributions of Holmberg and others to the genre, called Lugones’s “Yzur” the first work of science fiction in Spanish (“Prólogo” to La estatua de sal 12).
17. Even classifying the stories according to the categories constructed for this book is not always a clear-cut process. “An Inexplicable Phenomenon” [Un fenómeno inexplicable], for example, is an evolutionary tale, involves strange forces, and includes a double (it is discussed in chapter 3).
18. For more on the relationship between literature and science in Lugones, see Cano 110–11.
19. Poe’s essay, “Eureka,” is commonly acknowledged to be the model for “Cosmogony.”
20. An earlier Argentine science-fictional work containing explanations of Biblical tales of origins is Carlos Monsalve’s “From One World to Another” [De un mundo á otro] (1881), in which Adam and Eve are discovered to be immigrants from an overpopulated planet.
21. These concepts do not originate with Lugones but are, in the words of Conil Paz, “mere recreation—with modern scientific additions—of principles enunciated by the beloved Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine, which appeared in 1888” (116).
22. Lugones specifies his divergence from the canonical sciences in “Cosmogony” (255).
23. All of the texts in Strange Forces have been translated by Alter-Gilbert, with the exception of “Cosmogony.” Alter-Gilbert’s translations tend to err on the side of the literal, and at times they are incorrect. I have used Woodruff’s superior translation of “Yzur,” but upon occasion he is overly figurative. Parenthetical citations in this book include the corresponding page number of the Spanish edition of Las fuerzas extrañas, even when the original Spanish has been omitted. Where two page numbers are given, separated by a semicolon, the first indicates the translation by Alter-Gilbert or Woodruff, respectively, and the second indicates the Spanish original. Where only one page number is given, it pertains to the Spanish edition; this indicates that I have provided my own translation. Where I have made very minor modifications to the translation, the page number of the translation is given followed by the word “modified.”
24. Sirena is the word for “siren” and also for “mermaid” in Spanish, as “siren” once was in English. The mermaid has symbolic meanings associated with mythology but also with the New World. In the accounts of his voyages Christopher Columbus famously described seeing mermaids in the waters off the coast of the Americas.
25. This is a further example of the symbiotic relationship between Lugones’s “Cosmogony” and his “Origin of the Flood.” Only in “Origin of the Flood” do we hear from such a creature, and only in “Cosmogony” is its provenance explained in detail: “The vehicle that those lunar spirits used to come to the Earth was the cone of shadow that the Earth projects on the moon, and which, during eclipses, brings us evil exhalations from that heavenly body; as the moon is a cadaver, it must not emanate life naturally” (278).
26. In his book on science fiction and the Hispanic American canon, Luis C. Cano provides an excellent discussion of the ape stories of both Lugones and Quiroga (111–25).
27. Lugones frequently employs a first-person narrator who addresses the reader directly. As Borges has written, Lugones never achieved the type of “close, intimate confidence” [confidencia íntima] with the reader of a Darío; indeed, “Lugones customarily disdained the conversion of the reader, preferring rather to intimidate him” (Leopoldo Lugones 20, 82). “Yzur” is an exception to this tendency toward intimidation.
28. Lugones took this concept of the ape as a devolved human directly from Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy (1889; Barcia 34).
29. As has been discussed earlier in this chapter with regard to Doctor Benignus, the African was commonly cited in the nineteenth century as an example of a less-evolved human, an unfortunate use of new scientific precepts to support older racist attitudes. In apparent acts of political correctness, both Alter-Gilbert’s and Woodruff’s English translations of “Yzur” omit this last comparison between Yzur and people of African descent, thus denying the reader a more complete picture of the prevalence and depth of racist attitudes at the time.
30. There are a number of commonalities between the narrators of “Yzur” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Each man’s grip on reality appears to loosen as his tale proceeds (this is admittedly more extreme in the case of Poe’s narrator), and both are very desirous of convincing the reader that this is not so. Compare the overdone protestations of Lugones’s narrator at the end of “Yzur” (discussed later in this section), to Poe’s opening lines: “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? . . . Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (92).
31. Scari identifies Lugones’s models of perversity in other works of Poe, such as “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat” (182–83n38).
32. Due to the double meaning of amo as either “master” or “I love,” more than one translation is possible for Yzur’s final utterance. If we discard the option of “I love water” for the first sentence, the alternate translation is: “Water, master. I love my master.” This would, perhaps, be the version preferred by the narrator, as it not only provides a successful scientific experiment, but also conveys Yzur’s respect and forgiveness.
33. The publication date of 1898 is taken from the Molina-Gavilán et al. “Chronology.” “The Last War” was first collected in the 1906 anthology Souls that Pass [Almas que pasan]. I have been unable to locate an earlier edition of the story. Nervo’s works in general are difficult to date precisely. The data on his works listed in this book’s chronology have been compiled from information given in his Complete Works [Obras completas] of 1962, as well as in Larson, the Molina-Gavilán et al. “Chronology,” the catalogs of various national libraries in Latin America, and WorldCat.
34. A publication date of 1856 has traditionally been listed for “The End of the World” because this date is given by Macedo himself in the anthology The Novels of the Weekly Paper [Os Romances da Semana] (1861). The date 1856 is repeated no fewer than four times on pages 47–49 (1873 edition) of Macedo’s introduction to the story, but the date 1857 is given twice on page 51, which lists the subtitle as “The End of the World in 1857.” Historical information in Yeomans confirms 1857 as the correct date. (My thanks to Kris Stacy-Bates, science and technology librarian at Iowa State University, for locating this information.)
35. The expression used is “encontrei todos os bancos rotos” (67), playing on a double meaning: “I found all of the banks had gone into bankruptcy” (“bancarrota” and “bancos rotos” both mean “bankruptcy”) and “I found all of the banks broken” (“rotos” also means “broken”). The discussion of banks in the story reflects the impact of the newly established banking sector, dominated for most of the 1850s by the Bank of Brazil, as well as the brief financial crisis of 1857.
36. The cooperation between the parties during the Period of Conciliation (1853–57) was so effective that Burns describes these years as “apolitical” (History 176). Macedo casts some aspersions on the spirit of this cooperation by having Martinho spy a newspaper bulletin stating, “The political parties reconciled definitively” [Conciliárão-se definitivamente os partidos politicos] at 11:00 A.M. on June 13, 1857—an hour before the comet struck (76; see also 73).
37. For more on the romantic and naturalist currents present in “Demons,” see Toledo (though I disagree with a number of her genre-related statements).
38. The imaginary reverse-evolution in “Demons” may well have been inspired by Axel’s dream in chapter 32 of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. My thanks to Arthur Evans for bringing the similarities to my attention.
39. If the original publication date of 1898 is correct, the Spanish American War (April–August 1898) may have had some influence on the composition of “The Last War.” For a discussion of the impact of the war on Spanish American modernists, see Durán 77–78.
40. “The Last War” is not the only text in which Nervo adopts a Danilevsky-type vision of cyclical history. In the 1898 text “Tales from Future Centuries: Wars and Armies” [Cuentos de los siglos futuros: Las guerras y los ejércitos], written under the pseudonym “Natalis,” Nervo states that the past (i.e., present) habit of marrying within one’s own “tribe” leads to a process in which “races formed thusly remained so for centuries, degenerating in the end and giving way to other new races” (481). In the short piece “The ‘Monkey-Man’” [El ‘mono-hombre’], Nervo extrapolates what might happen if such beings did exist: “Only that if one day one of those anthropoids happened to be a little more intelligent than the others, rebellion was certain. . . . We would return to the eternal story of revolutions. The underdogs would take the throne . . . and back to the beginning!” (718, second ellipsis in the original).
41. The title of this work in its original version, as published in Revista Universal, is “How the War Ended” [Cómo acabó la guerra]. All subsequent editions, including the edition published by Guzmán scholar Emmanuel Carballo in Guzmán’s lifetime, carry the title “How the War Ended in 1917” [Cómo acabó la guerra en 1917]. It is not known if this change was made by Guzmán himself, but I have retained it because of the aforementioned conditions and because the inclusion of the year serves as a useful (and likely intentional) contextualization for readers who encounter the work elsewhere than in the original periodical.
42. At the outset of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), the Little Tramp’s life also is controlled by a machine, leading to a mental breakdown.
1. See chapter 2 for a discussion of the complete text of Two Factions.
2. Clarke’s statement or “law” is quoted by numerous writers, including Nicholls and Shippey in their ESF entry on “Magic” (765).
3. Stepan explicitly notes the appeal of Lamarckian interpretations of evolution to those she terms “religiously inclined” (Hour 74).
4. I have found Paul Alkon’s discussion of the influence of “the non-occult wing of mesmerism” on Félix Bodin’s formulation of the first poetics of futuristic fiction (Le Roman de l’avenir, 1834) particularly helpful in developing the framework for this chapter (Origins 277–89; quotation on 288).
5. Some notable members of the SPR were Alfred Russell Wallace, Oliver Lodge, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; members or associate members of the ASPR included William James and Edward Pickering of Harvard, G. Stanley Hall of Johns Hopkins, and Theodore Roosevelt (Monroe 206–7; Moore 142–43).
6. As Monroe states, “Throughout the 1890s . . . many considered psychical research to be a legitimate branch of psychology” (209).
7. These assertions by Moore about North American Spiritualism are also generally applicable to European Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Spiritism and also to these alternative sciences in Latin America. American Spiritualism had a significant impact on the European movements, and the alternative sciences tended to arrive in Latin America via France (see Monroe 15–18 and 72–75, Machado 42–45).
8. The other three main principles of Spiritualism listed by Moore are: “a firm belief in the inviolability of natural law, a reliance on external facts rather than on an inward state of mind, and a faith in the progressive development of knowledge” (19).
9. It is notable that greater opposition to Spiritualism came from Christianity than from science (Moore 31). The liberties taken with orthodox beliefs by French Spiritists, for example, led to considerable conflict with the Catholic Church, including the placement of work by Kardec and other Spiritists on the church’s list of forbidden books (see Monroe 142–46).
10. The original source is D. Alverico Peron, A Fórmula do Espiritsmo, trans. from Spanish (Bahia: Tip. de Francisco Queirolo, 1874), 46.
11. Stableford subsequently links this phenomenon of literary hybridization with the emergence of alternative belief systems such as Theosophy and Spiritualism (Scientific Romance 35–43).
12. Several Brazilian works discussed elsewhere in the book would fit quite well into this chapter, for example, Brazil 2000 and Doctor Benignus. Two other texts included in the chronology that could conceivably be discussed in chapter 3 are: The Magic Spectacles [A luneta mágica] (1869) by Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, and “The Immortal” [O Imortal] (1882) by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908).
13. Some of the stories in Strange Forces appeared in magazines prior to being anthologized in 1906. The following information is taken from Arturo García Ramos’s introductory material to the Cátedra edition (page 85): El Diario published “La fuerza Omega” (January 1, 1906); “Un fenómeno inexplicable” originally appeared with the title “La Licantropía” in the theosophical magazine Philadelfia in 1898; and Caras y Caretas published “El Psychon” (January 1, 1898), “Viola acherontia” (January 1, 1899, under the title “Acherontia Antropos”), and “La metamúsica” (June 29, 1898).
14. See chapter 2, note 23, for citation format used for stories with published translations.
15. Lugones describes Paulin as a “Spiritualist” [espiritualista], but it is clear that he is not narrowly identifying the character with a specific strain of Anglo-American Spiritualism. Paulin also practices some form of Mesmerism with a somnambulist and is compared to the French occultist Déodat Roché (1877–1978) and the British Spiritualist scientist William Crookes (1832–1919) in the same line (118–19; 221–22).
16. This ending is reminiscent of Amado Nervo’s short story “The Frozen Ones” (discussed briefly in chapter 2). In that tale, a scientist experimenting in cryogenics invites the narrator to his laboratory to view the people he has frozen. Doubting the “slyly aggressive mystery” in the doctor’s smile and fearing for his own safety, the narrator does not keep the appointment (402).
17. Masiello links the causes of this fragmentation to Gorriti’s internationalism and the vagaries of exile (47).
18. Only three women are known to have written science-fictional works during the time period covered in this study (see the chronology in this book).
19. Sayers Peden’s translation deviates from the structure of the original at several points. It does not contain the dedication, the short introductory section is transposed and included in section I, and section I is given the subtitle “Confidence of a Confidence” (the original has no subtitle for section I, only for section II, for which the translation does match). See chapter 2, note 23, for citation format used for texts with published translations.
20. The translations of the first two phrases are mine, the third is by Sayers Peden (81). I give more literal translations of passages for the purpose of subsequent analysis of the Magnetism/Mesmerism practiced by the woman in the tale. Sayers Peden renders fascinados as “mesmerized” (81); this is an excellent translation, but I have used the cognate “fascinated” in order to support the argument that Gorriti does not employ the rhetoric of Mesmerism in the text (an argument also made by Cano 76, 85).
21. Soriano provides approximate dates for each of the subplots in “He Who Listens” (277–78). The amorous adventures of the grandfather took place in early nineteenth-century colonial Peru, the male narrator-conspirator’s tale in the 1850s or early 1860s, his subsequent political adventures between 1860 and 1862, and the female narrator’s recounting of his incomplete confession shortly afterwards.
22. With some original additions (particularly of terminology related to the alternative sciences), this sentence is a summary of Soriano’s discussion of the generational changes in “He Who Listens” (249–52, 272–73).
23. See Schneider (7–8, 18–22, 25) and Trujillo Muñoz (Biografías 50–53) for more on Castera’s dualism.
24. Fernández Delgado makes the connection to Saint Augustine’s words in his entry on Castera in Latin American Science Fiction Writers (52), though our interpretations of the reference differ somewhat. It is also possible that the intended spelling was indeed “Querens,” meaning “The Lamenter,” which would be in keeping with the end of the apothecary’s tale. The Flammarion reference would still stand by association. My thanks to my colleague Madeleine Henry, professor of classical studies, for consultation on this title.
25. The majority of the scientists listed are also mentioned in Olaguíbel’s article, discussed above. All of the many scientific, philosophical, and literary authorities cited throughout Querens are European, with the exception of the odd reference to India as the source of the origins of Magnetism. Mexico is associated with India via climactic comparisons. As in Doctor Benignus, the New World is touted for its untouched natural wonders and its vigor, though this is a less central theme for Castera than for Zaluar.
26. The First International Congress of Psychology had just been held in Paris in 1889. For more on the relationship and eventual separation of psychology from psychical research, see Monroe 199–219.
27. Arthur Evans has noted similarities between this description of Castera’s “indigenous Eve” and Hadaly in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Tomorrow’s Eve [L’Ève future] (1886). Villiers’s meditation on Cartesian dualism also may well have exercised some degree of influence on texts such as Nervo’s The Soul-Giver (discussed in this chapter) and Quiroga’s The Artificial Man and “The Vampire” (discussed in chapter 4). Magnetism is a central element of many of these works, as is the location of the animating spark for a woman in her male lover (the electrification of Adam’s rib). Edison tells Ewald that Hadaly will be given life by “a single one of those still-divine sparks, drawn from your own soul” (67), and Ewald, not Edison, is called “her creator” in the end (204). In several of the Latin American texts a man’s love is the activating influence.
28. The Soul-Giver has been translated into English by Michael Capobianco and Gloria Schaffer Meléndez, making it one of a very few prose works by Nervo available in translation. Capobianco and Schaffer Meléndez’s edition is bilingual, but there is some variation between the Spanish original they work from and the edition I am using. I cite in Spanish from the 1962 Obras completas, and the translations given are faithful to that version. When Capobianco and Schaffer Meléndez’s original (and thus translation) diverge from the Obras completas or, occasionally, from my preferred wording, I modify their translation accordingly. Where only very minor modifications have been made, the page number of the translation is given followed by the word “modified.” See chapter 2, note 23, for citation format used for texts with published translations.
29. I have preferred the broader term “divinatory” to describe the gift-soul’s abilities rather than the translators’ “prophetic” (33). No ability to know the future is mentioned in the text, while the ability to diagnose illness is both practiced and described by the gift-soul, Alda, who tells the doctor: “With me at your side, there will be no illness you cannot diagnose correctly” (35; 205).
30. A further example of male-female duality given in the nouvelle is Alda’s propensity for fantastic literature versus Rafael’s preference for scientific treatises. Jensen also discusses the Rafael-Andrés duality (396).
31. I agree with the great majority of Jensen’s arguments, including his assertion that Nervo’s belief system was—with the exception of the element of metempsychosis—essentially Christian in nature (393). I do not concur entirely with his argument that the ultimate goal of the nouvelle is Rafael’s “Christian conversion” (398). While Rafael is converted from his former materialistic beliefs, he is not explicitly or necessarily converted to Christianity, as can be seen in my discussion of the changes in Rafael’s definition of the soul.
1. While no Brazilian texts are discussed in chapter 4, it cannot be categorically confirmed that there are no Brazilian science-fictional texts involving the creation of a double or artificial being. Because there has been so much recent retrolabeling of early Latin American science-fictional works (and because this process is ongoing), we do not yet have a firm idea of the extent of the corpus or the types of subgenres, themes, and narrative tendencies represented in it.
2. See my “Más Allá” for more on the expansion of the science fiction readership in Latin America in the 1950s.
3. See Stableford’s Scientific Romance for a comparison of the development of the North American and British speculative fiction traditions.
4. Sarlo’s translator, Xavier Callahan, points out the difficulties of translating apparent Spanish-English cognates such as sector, popular, and técnico/a (see “Translator’s Note” xi–xiii). Callahan translates the adjective técnico/a as “both ‘technical’ and ‘technological,’ according to the specific context” (xiii). The noun técnica also has multiple translations, “‘technology’ or ‘technique’ when those nouns serve both meaning and voice, and otherwise as ‘the technical’ and ‘the technological’ or, occasionally, as ‘engineering’—the very field to which so many puttering dreamers in Buenos Aires once aspired” (xiii).
5. Upon the publication of “Horacio Kalibang,” Holmberg was criticized in a magazine by someone writing under the pseudonym Anastasio for “this eagerness to distance himself from his country and constantly present foreign characters in remote lands” (El Álbum del Hogar 16 Feb. 1879). Pagés Larraya rebuts this accusation with an argument, almost science-fictional in nature, regarding the uses of displacement: “But, for those who know how to get to the meat of the story, the allusions to the people and customs of his own country are quite clear. In that way he could dissect them with greater impiety” (79).
6. Allusions are drawn by the company between the name Horacio Kalibang and that of a character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, clearly Caliban. Although another member of the party quickly dismisses this reference, saying “That is going off on a tangent,” Holmberg certainly intended to imply connections between the two figures (151). Both Caliban and Kalibang are slaves of powerful masters; they are subhuman figures (Horacio Kalibang was the most imperfect of all of his master’s creations). Perhaps Holmberg was interested in including the indirect connection with the New World in Shakespeare’s work; perhaps he was influenced by Ernest Renan’s Caliban, suite de “La tempête” (1878; see Frederick 60n4).
7. The complete record of Oscar Baum’s actions here indicates that Horacio Kalibang is a mechanical golem. See my “Emergence” 318n70.
8. The “national pride” to which Baum refers can be read as Argentine as well as German. Holmberg’s reference to Thomas Edison (1847–1931) uses the figure of the American inventor in a somewhat similar way as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam seven years later in Tomorrow’s Eve. In the “Advice to the Reader” with which he prefaced his novel, Villiers stated that the character of Thomas Edison in his work was not a representation of the real man but of “a LEGEND [that] has thus sprung up in the popular mind regarding this great citizen of the United States” (3).
9. The “scientific inventor” is Sarlo’s term, which she connects with the laboratory rather than with the doctor’s office or surgeon’s operating room, which would have been more familiar to readers of the day. The scientific inventor is, Sarlo writes, a more “exotic” and “intensified” version of the “technological innovator,” though without “the social and economic goals that motivated the technologically oriented, pragmatic inventor” (Technical Imagination 36).
10. Another work of early Latin American science fiction that deals with the transmission of criminal tendencies through inheritance, specifically through the blood, is “Doctor Orts’s Daring Operation” [La atrevida operación del doctor Orts] (Argentina, 1901) by Otto Miguel Cione (1875–1945). Orts is a physician who tries to combat the degeneracy, insanity, and criminality that occur in his family in every other generation. While he is normal, even brilliant, his son demonstrates physiognomical, phrenological, and behavioral characteristics of “a born criminal” (Caras y Caretas has no pagination). Orts performs a daring surgery, transplanting lobes from a healthy brain to replace the diseased portions in his son’s brain (Ludmer calls Orts “an Argentine Frankenstein” [Corpus 228]). The son changes both physically and mentally for the better, but within a year shows signs of reverting to his former self. “It was the blood that contained the germ of crime,” Dr. Orts realizes. His son’s own blood has changed the new cerebral lobes “molecule by molecule” until they become identical to the originals. The doctor extends this medical revelation to all of society: “The blood was what had to be changed, purified, fortified, so that the boy, what am I saying, so that all of humanity would not be so degenerate, so insane, so criminal” [La sangre era la que había que transformar, purificar, fortalecer, para que el niño, qué digo, toda la humanidad, no fuera tan degenerada, tan loca, tan criminal]. Orts dies of rage at his own impotence in the face of such a “terrible/inevitable law of inheritance” [fatal ley de herencia].
11. Note that verdugo can also be translated as “executioner.” I have preferred “tormentor” here to maintain the parallel with Tolimán’s previously cited use of the term (Cuevas 185). “Executioner” is not an appropriate rendering in the earlier instance, which means that the foreshadowing provided by the use of the word “verdugo” on page 185 will be lost somewhat in translation.
12. Despite the generational and individual contrasts between Quiroga and Lugones discussed in the introduction to this chapter, Lugones’s influence on Quiroga should not be underestimated. Lugones introduced him both to modernism and to Misiones. When Lugones traveled to Misiones in 1903 to study the Jesuit ruins—as research for his The Jesuit Empire [El imperio jesuítico] (1904)—Quiroga went as the expedition’s photographer. As Jitrik summarizes the relationship between the two, “[Quiroga] has in Lugones a protector, a friend, a mentor, and a guide” (12).
13. Sarlo elaborates on the authority of science versus technology: “Science is remote; technology, proximate. For this very reason, science has an authority to which technology must finally defer” (Technical Imagination 28).
14. The date given is June 11, 1909 (see page 114), but the text also indicates that this date fell ten months after the completion of the rat on August 23, 1909 (115, 109). Numbers and dates are specified throughout El hombre artificial, but on more than one occasion they are inconsistent (for example, five years of study in Europe are described for Donissoff, yet somehow this time period begins in 1903 and ends with his move to Buenos Aires in 1905 [100–101]). Pages given here are from the 1967 edition for ease of reference; the inconsistencies originate with the 1910 serialized version of the text in Caras y Caretas.
15. As in evolutionary tales such as “Yzur,” power dynamics can be traced through language. In The Artificial Man the languages of the North, of science and technology, and of wealth and power are used to subjugate a lower-class, monolingual speaker of Spanish. For more on the role of language and social class in the representation of power dynamics in the text, see Ludmer (Corpus 67–69).
16. Although the structure of Quiroga’s shorter nouvelle is less complex than that of Shelley’s text with its multiple narrators and multiple frames, the narrator’s sympathy for Donissoff and for the greatness of his endeavor is reminiscent of Walton’s attitude toward Victor Frankenstein and his work. Alkon has called Walton “the first misreader of Frankenstein’s story,” and the same can be said of Quiroga’s narrator (Science Fiction before 1900 31). The charisma of electricity as a fantastic yet scientific force spans the century between the two works.
17. Ortiz is frequently a step behind Donissoff and Sivel. “If you were not so intelligent,” Donissoff tells him at one point, “you would seem like a child sometimes” (110).
18. “The Vampire” [El vampiro] of 1927 should not be confused with the short story with the same title published by Quiroga in 1911.
19. Rodríguez Barilari notes the repetition in “Vampire” of some characters and a scientific principle that had originally appeared in “Portrait” (7).
20. The successful use of optography, the process of “tak[ing] a picture with the living eye”—enabling others to view the last image seen by a person who has died—was thought to be imminent at this time, both in scientific circles and in popular belief (Evans, “Optograms and Fiction” 342). While “Portrait” locates the production of the image using the mind/eye of the beholder rather than that of the dead person, Quiroga, a photographer, was almost certainly aware of optography and of literary treatments of it by writers such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Verne, and Kipling (see article by Evans, quoted above). Note in particular that the Kelvin character’s given name is Rudyard. The contemporary scientific credentials of optography, in addition to the extrapolations in the story on the work of Le Bon, support a more scientific—in the broader sense of science, discussed in chapter 3—interpretation of the text.
21. The index of Le Bon’s The Evolution of Matter (the source cited in “Portrait”) contains only three subheadings under “Rays,” these are cathode, Röntgen, and X (435). Quiroga’s N1 rays are almost certainly extrapolated from the “N rays” the French physicist René-Prosper Blondlot (1849–1930) claimed to have discovered in 1903. Le Bon, as well as several other scientists and at least one Spiritualist, also claimed to have discovered these rays (Klotz 169–70).
22. It is clear that this new evocation of the actress is not a vampire in the traditional sense. No identifying factors for vampires (lack of image in mirrors, pronounced canine teeth, avoidance of sunlight) or methods of combating them (garlic, crosses, wooden stakes) are mentioned in the text.
23. Sarlo discusses “Portrait” and “Vampire” in Technical Imagination (18–22), describing Quiroga’s literary and technical innovations in “Vampire” at the same time as she points out how he connects the “sinister aspect of technological extrapolation” to older literary forms and to more fantastic images, the “archaic phantasms of hysteria and vampirism” and the “archaic laws of guilt and vengeance” (21).
1. I use the term “global” rather than “international” in order to underline the inclusive scope of the genre. Alkon also calls science fiction “the genre best suited to speak for and attract the marginalized” (37–38), referring to the feminist subtext of Shelley’s Frankenstein, but his statement is equally as applicable to the Latin American as to the female “other.”
2. See, for example, Morosetti’s work on science fiction in West Africa for a discussion of similar tendencies toward genre hybridity elsewhere in the periphery.
3. Regina’s call to arms is answered by Roberto de Sousa Causo, who criticizes the values expressed in Anglo-Saxon sf as “alien” to Brazilians, in particular the representation of “the future populated only by citizens of the first world, the techno-scientific idyll, an ideology of the bipolarization of conflicts” (“Introdução” 8). Although Causo himself declared Regina’s manifesto defunct in the mid-1990s, because it “never found market support or a solid discourse, and it was easily dismissed” (“Brazilian Science Fiction” 125), the debate continued.
4. For more on this debate in Brazil, see Ginway, Brazilian 139–43, and Ginway in Molina-Gavilán et al., “Chronology” 384.
1. As kindly pointed out by Omar Vega, the database includes scans of several works of early Chilean sf (database information given in bibliography of secondary sources under “Literatura de ciencia ficción en Chile”).
2. Bibliographical information for the original manuscript varies in scholarship on the work. Because I have not consulted the original manuscript, I refer the reader to the following sources: González Casanova 104–18; Larson 55 and bibliography; Morales 556–57; Fernández-Delgado’s 2001 edition of the text.
3. See entries under both titles in the bibliography of primary texts; note that the “Narración interplanetaria” in the Guía de Forasteros edition is missing the frame story. My thanks to Miguel Ángel Fernández-Delgado for providing copies of the text and bibliographical information as this book was going to press.
4. This short story by Gerónimo del Castillo Lenard (1804–1866) was retrolabeled as science fiction by Fernández-Delgado after reading about the text in Ruz Menéndez (Molina-Gavilán, Fernández-Delgado et al., “Chronology” 407; message to the author, 5 Aug. 2008).
5. The connection between Natalis and Amado Nervo was made by Fernández-Delgado.
6. My thanks to Miguel Ángel Fernández-Delgado for providing bibliographical information as this book was going to press and to Pepe Rojo for bringing this text to my attention with the Minibúks series.