The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (review)

The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction examines early science fiction writing in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Encompassing the time period from approximately 1850 through 1920, this text is an innovative and thoroughly enjoyable exploration of a genre not often associated with Latin American literature. As Haywood Ferreira affirms, early science fiction writing has generally been studied within the context of US and northern European literary production; however, her monograph clearly and cogently demonstrates that original and engaging narratives published in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Latin America can also be appreciated through the lens of science fiction.

Haywood Ferreira's study is comprised of four chapters that chronologically and thematically trace the progression of science-fictional texts in the three countries. The works of well-known, canonical writers, such as Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga, Amado Nervo, Martín Luis Guzmán, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, are critically analyzed, as are pieces by less prolific authors. In total, eighteen authors and more than thirty novels and short stories are a part of this extensive investigation of literature informed by both science and what the author refers to as the "pseudosciences." The final listing of science fictional texts published in Latin America between 1775 and 1920 will be extremely helpful to those readers who wish to explore the topic further.

Chapter 1, "Displacement in Space and Time: The Latin American Utopia and Dystopia," focuses on futuristic texts that employ the trope of spatial and temporal travel. The literary strategy allows each author to call attention to the social and political issues of his day and to put forth his individual vision of how to promote progress and stability for Latin America. While signaling the influence of writers such as Camille Flammarion, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe on the texts under study, Haywood Ferreira also develops a persuasive argument in which she details the importance of local ideas and circumstances on the works. She is equally successful in challenging the widely held assumption that early Latin American science fiction tends to avoid scientific detail and technological description.

The noticeable influence on Latin America's science fiction of Darwin's theory of evolution, Spencer's Social Darwinism and Lamarckian concepts of heredity is the theme of chapter 2. Although these evolutionary theories were frequently questioned in the literary texts, Haywood Ferreira explains the overall role scientific discourse played in the region's literature at the dawn of the twentieth century. For instance, these scientific theories were often modified and incorporated into novels and short stories as a way to further explore the contemporary political debates centered on the dichotomy of civilization/barbarism. Authors such as Augusto Emilio Zaluar and Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg are examined in this chapter.

Concepts from the alternative sciences of Magnetism, Spiritism, and Theosophy are explained and placed within the context of early Latin American science fiction in chapter 3. Asserting that the genre's first wave, particularly in Latin America, often obscured the distinctions between the canonical sciences and more occult practices, Haywood Ferreira's analysis of several stories is a fascinating study of the syncretic nature of many early science fictional narratives. Her study includes, among other texts, "Un fenómeno inexplicable" by Lugones, "Quien escucha, su mal oye" by Gorriti, and "Un viaje celestial" by Pedro Castera. Basing her arguments on the evidence that alternative scientific approaches enjoyed some degree of credibility at the time, as well as the fact that the field's practitioners used ostensibly scientific methods, the author establishes that the texts do fit within the category of science fiction.

Chapter 4 examines texts by Holmberg, Alejandro Cuevas, and Horacio Quiroga, in which an artificially created human double is the central theme. The stories reflect the technological advances of the time period and offer a literary assessment of society's acceptance or rejection of the developments. As the author ably demonstrates, these doubles, in the form of automatons and laboratory experiments...