Latin American Science Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide (review)

270 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Diaspora studies. It is less valuable to a broad audience because of die author's approach and style of presenting complex theoretical contexts. The populations which it discusses will not understand much of it, thus they, again, become vague undefined subjects seeking voice and place in Western discourses. Geta LeSeur The University of Arizona Latin American Science Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide Greenwood Press, 2004 Edited by Darrell B. Lockhart Latin American Science Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Darrell B. Lockhart, primarily provides a comprehensive catalog of the genre, positioning its presence in Hispanic narrative and seeking to stimulate furrher research . Furthermore, the book is a source of review of borh canonical and more recent authors of science fiction in Latin America and it allows for the exploration of the particular identity of Spanish American science-fiction. Organized author-by-author, the volume contains entries on 70 writers, prepared by 20 contributors. Each entry includes a short biography , a presentation of the author's production, and bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. Lockharr proposes that, although considered in rhe past a lesser form of literature, in Spanish America die science fiction genre has long been practiced as a means of cultural expression in which inventive parodies and allegories of social upheaval, political unrest, and economic crisis are developed. However, although today this writing is not viewed as a unified, counter-hegemonic discourse—instead of forming a collective identity, writers share only a common interest in the genre—this type of literature offers a unique critical judgment of society. The editor remarks that one of the greatest accomplishments of science fiction is its ability to locate culture in different spaces, times, and planes of reality. This particular channel for allegorizing rhe present displaces reality, turning the genre into a discourse of social protest. Therefore, the book is a contribution to a once-considered minor literature that is now being reevaluated in the light of cultural studies. This should suggest to the reader of Latin American Science Fiction Writers a potential study of the fictional relationship between the production of either space or time and its relationship to reality in Hispanic literatures. If science fiction is able to modify space in the narration, it is also able to propose an innovative—or subversive—perspective of an institutionalized reality. While popularized during die recent past century, the earliest science fiction examples date from the late eighteenth century in Latin America. Soon after, initial works may be found in the Modernist literarure of the nineteenth century. From these early foundational texts, Spanish American science fiction has continued to produce narratives of speculation, Utopian and dystopian visions of society, stories of the borderlands, and cyberpunk. One of rhe most interesting issues covered in this book is the current state of science fiction production today. The genre is undoubtedly an urban phenomenon; therefore original examples of this popular literature, from the late 1700s to the present, may be easily found in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. However, in Mexico, this production trend is now shifting to the northern border-states of the country. Federico Schaffler, José-Mauricio Schwarz, and Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz have been leading in the creation of a body of literature that defines die realities of the U.S.-Mexico border region . A review of rhe works of these border novelisrs may compelÃ- further research of science fiction as metonymical example of marginality (literary, economical, political, and/or culrural). For instance, Lockhart notices that Trujillo's work permits a more comprehensive analysis of hybridity in the Mexico-U.S. region (201). Entries on rwo aurhors, Colombian René Rebetez or the Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky, curiously have not been included in the book Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 271 in spite of the fact they are given credit as being the creators of the first surrealist science fiction magazine Crononauta (in Mexico) in 1964. Perhaps rhey should be considered for subsecuent editions, especially since lately Jodorowsky has developed rhe science fiction genre into a poopular comic srrip. Although Lockhart does not include the aforementioned authors in rhis volume, he does rightly...