Alicia Yánez Cossío (1929– ) is a journalist, fiction writer, poet, and professor of literature who is widely considered to be one of Ecuador’s most notable twentieth-century literary figures. Her poetry and fiction are highly regarded in her home country and, despite the difficulty Ecuadorian writers have had in reaching international audiences in the past, increasingly highly regarded internationally. She was the first Ecuadorian to win the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (1996). In 2008, Cossío received Ecuador’s highest prize in literature, the Premio Eugenio Espejo, for her lifetime of work. She has written three novels, Bruna, soroche y los tíos (1970), Yo vendo unos ojos negros (1979), and La cofradia del mullo del vestido de la virgen Pipona (1985).
Themes in Cossío’s work include corruption, social injustice, the role of women, the excesses of consumer-driven societies, and the dangers of technology. Many of her stories also focus on life in Ecuador’s central range of the Andes, where her characters are conflicted by the push and pull between their colonial past histories and the dehumanization of modern society’s materialistic tendencies.
In general, Cossío is deeply interested in telling stories about characters who are trying to figure out their place in modern society and how much of their past taboos and traditions they should keep or let go of in order to create a better life for themselves and others. Throughout her career, Cossío also has cultivated an interest in parody and satire.
She has not written much science fiction, but her interest in the dangers of technology is closely aligned with the concerns of many science fiction writers. The story reprinted here, “The IWM 1000,” is a clever and prescient take on information technology, presaging the rise of Google. It is also an excellent example of the Latin American tradition of the science fiction tale, sharing similarities to the work of Silvina Ocampo and Juan José Arreola included in this volume. This story first appeared in her 1975 collection, El beso y otras fricciones.