Angélica Gorodischer (1928– ) is an influential Argentine writer of fiction and nonfiction who won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2011. Although an avid reader, she came late to fiction writing and won her first literary prize in 1964, for a detective story. In 1965, Gorodischer won another award for her first collection, Cuentos con soldados (Short Stories with Soldiers). She was born in Buenos Aires but is closely associated with the city of Rosario, home to her well-known character Trafalgar Medrano, an interplanetary businessman, introduced in her novel Trafalgar (1979; English translation 2013).
Although Gorodischer, after a certain point in her career, chose to focus on writing mainstream feminist literature and criticism, her speculative fiction continues to find a growing readership. The science fiction—more than twenty novels and collections of stories, most of it untranslated—shares structural and thematic similarities with the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. She is less of a magic realist than Gabriel García Márquez or Mario Vargas Llosa.
In addition to Trafalgar, the following books have been translated into English: Kalpa Imperial (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2003), which collects all the stories of the Kalpa sequence, initially published in two volumes (La casa del poder and El imperio más vasto, 1983), and the novel Prodigies (Prodigios, 1994; English translation 2015), set in the former home of the poet Novalis after it was turned into a boardinghouse. Among stand-alone short stories, “The Violet’s Embryos,” published in the highly recommended Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain (2003), is a good example of this author’s default style and approach. The story speculates about the nature of desire and search for happiness while confronting traditional military notions of masculinity.
The story reprinted here, “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets,” was first published in the magazine Minotauro in 1985 and then in Gorodischer’s collection of dystopian stories Las repúblicas in 1991. It has been translated into English for the first time for this anthology. “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” is a masterpiece of science fiction and of feminist fiction, written in a smoldering, bold, direct manner that is in some ways different in tone from many of her other translated works.