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231 NOTES The original Spanish or Portuguese has been provided for all titles of works, for passages including key terms (particularly scientific or technical ones), whenever translation issues arise, and for a number of longer passages. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. The orthography in primary sources may vary from modern usage, as citations are taken from the earliest available edition of each work (editions used are indicated in the bibliography). Emphases in citations are present in the original unless otherwise indicated. introduction 1. As Brian Stableford writes in the entry on “Proto Science Fiction” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “Hugo Gernsback clearly believed that he was merely attaching a name to a genre which already existed” (965). Gernsback’s “scientifiction” genre label had become “science fiction” by 1929. Like Stableford , I reserve the term “proto science fiction” for pre-nineteenth-century works. For texts written in the nineteenth century through 1926 I employ terms such as “early science fiction,” “science-fictional,” and “belonging to the science fiction tradition.” 2. Gernsback was not the first to recognize the existence of an sf tradition; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers and readers of science-fictional texts were well aware of the “loose bonds of kinship” of these texts to others. What Stableford has written of scientific romance in Britain holds true as well for science fiction written in other Northern countries and in Latin America prior to 1926: What entitles us to think of scientific romances as a kind is not a set of classificatory characteristics which demarcate them as members of a set, but loose bonds of kinship which are only partly inherent in the imaginative exercises themselves and partly in the minds of authors and readers who recognise in them some degree of common cause. What binds together the authors and books to be discussed here is mainly that they were perceived by the contemporary audience as similar to one another and different from others. (Scientific Romance 4) 3. Geographical distinctions commonly used among Latin American(ist)s may require some explanation. The term “periphery” (as opposed to the “center”) is a virtual substitute for denominations such as “third-world” or N O T E S T O PAG E 3 232 “developing” regions; note, for example, the title of a recent anthology of sf from Mexico: Visions from the Periphery: Anthology of Mexican Science Fiction [Visiones periféricas: Antología de la ciencia ficción mexicana] (ed. FernándezDelgado ). Additionally, my capitalization of “North” and “Northern” throughout this book is a deliberate effort to designate the region that has historically exercised the greatest political, cultural, and sf genre influence on Latin America . Most often this region includes the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and perhaps Russia and excludes Spain, Portugal, and usually Italy. 4. I am referring to the local reader base. Little science fiction from Latin America has been translated or reaches an international audience. A notable exception to this rule is the 2003 anthology Cosmos Latinos, edited by Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán. Internet magazines and fanzines such as the Argentina-based Axxón also make Latin American sf available to national and international readers of Spanish or Portuguese. 5. Although the situation has improved in recent years, in his 2001 introduction to Visiones periféricas, the Mexican writer and critic Miguel Ángel Fernández -Delgado is still defending Mexican sf against the expectation of charges of “the malinchismo that could be assumed in the cultivators of a literary movement that came from outside” (14). Malinchismo is a phenomenon described most famously by Octavio Paz in his essay, “The Sons of La Malinche” [Los hijos de la Malinche]; one aspect of malinchismo is the use of the “contemptuous adjective malinchista . . . to denounce all those who have been corrupted by foreign influences” (86). 6. Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz dates the change of fortune in the reception and the writing of Mexican science fiction from the 1968 publication of Carlos Olvera ’s Mexicans in Space [Mejicanos en el espacio], and he sees a similar trend in the rest of Latin America at around the same time: [With Mexicans in Space] for the first time in this genre, the future is not a superior stage of human evolution, but rather an avalanche of prejudices and complexes shared by all with humor and without shame. Since the 1970s, national [Mexican] science fiction, like Latin American sf...

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