Acceso usuarios
Aníbal González
This essay seeks to establish a broader conceptual framework for studying the historical development of Latin American science fiction and its recent turn—in a genre usually focused on other times and worlds—to references to the past and present of Latin American history and culture. Valuable current studies of Latin American science fiction have been devoted primarily to the history of the genre itself and to tropes that have recurred in certain periods of the development of Latin American science fiction, such as cyborgs, androids, and zombies. Few have been devoted to the issues and forces at play in the current rise not only of science fiction in Latin America but of a recognizably Latin American form of science fiction. Through readings focused on the role of history and time in representative Latin American science fictional narratives of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, from the Argentine Juana Manuela Gorriti and the Chilean Jorge Baradit to the Cuban Yoss, the pervasiveness of historicity, the view of indigenous knowledge as proto science (rather than superstition), and a penchant towards dystopias, horror, and the Gothic, are considered as possible defining traits of Latin American science fiction.
