The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction by Haywood Ferreira, Rachel (review)

In this book we witness Rachel Haywood Ferreira’s strongest abilities as a scholar: her ample knowledge of diverse national literary traditions and texts, as she analyzes more than twenty-five novels and short stories from Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, as well as classics of American, English and German science fiction. She pays attention to the difficult paths of science fiction historiography, from the end of the 19^th to the beginning of the 20^th centuries. We also appreciate her serious discussions on the role of science in national development and its influence on literary history, the impact of Darwin’s theories on literary production and the cultural imagination, and the tension between technophilia and technophobia, among other matters. Haywood Ferreira’s engagement with these issues makes her study an important contribution, not only to Latin American science fiction studies, but also to Latin American cultural studies and to world science fiction.

Working with what she calls the “pre-space” age, Haywood Ferreira makes a case for considering science fiction a “global genre” and emphasizes the need to insert Latin American science fiction production in it. On the other hand, she is keenly aware of the local circumstances that give the genre its Latin American “flavor”: in the case of science fiction, many of the works analyzed show a particular inclination to get involved with political issues through a satirical bend. Drawing on some previously published material, she divides her book into four chapters. The first one, “Displacement in Space and Time: The Latin American Utopia and Dystopia,” studies six 19^th-century texts from countries with strong science fiction traditions – Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina –, asserting that readers will gain insight not only about the narrative motifs and themes (utopias, time travel, and the like) present in them, but also about the complex social and political forces that provided the cultural context that made it possible for these works to be published and read. As the author says: “The length of this chapter reflects the relative importance of the utopia in early Latin American science fiction as well as the length of the works discussed” (13).

The second chapter, “The Impact of Darwinism: Civilization and Barbarism Meet Evolution and Devolution,” engages first with a recognized Argentine writer of the times, Leopoldo Lugones, and then with a group of authors dealing with apocalyptic narratives and narratives of evolution as related to time. In these texts, “issues of national identities, influence, and politics were woven more subtly into geographies of setting, into characters’ nationality or social class, and into choices to pursue non-canonical alternatives to traditional sources of authority” (81). In these first two chapters, in which she could have devoted more time to the development of topics such as Darwinism or Modernism, we find the most original contributions of the book: for the first time these texts are read together under the umbrella of science fiction, stating their particularities but also drawing on their similarities.

The third chapter, “Strange Forces: Exploring the Limits of Science,” rightly tackles the issue of differentiating between science fiction, the fantastic, and magical realism, given that more often than not, there are no clear boundaries and this results in confusion. Haywood Ferreira approaches the subject carefully by not drawing limits that might prove too stringent; she understands that, when discussing texts by Argentine writers Eduardo Holmberg, Lugones, Miguel Cané, and Juana Manuela Gorriti, and those by Mexican writers Pedro Castera and Amado Nervo, or topics such as magnetism and the occult, the discourse of science fiction and the fantastic (often intermingled in Latin American literature) tend to blur their lines. Moreover, this platform gives Haywood Ferreira a starting point to discuss the exploration of alternative ways of knowing that was so characteristic of the period.

In the fourth chapter, “The Double: From Science to Technology,” based on some of the tenets from Beatriz Sarlo’s seminal The Technical Imagination, we see a turn towards modernity and 20^th...