The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction

3. STRANGE FORCES: EXPLORING THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE

130 STRANGE FORCES EXPLORING THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE between science fiction and the fantastic Holmberg’s primary aims in Two Factions Struggle for Life [Dos partidos en lucha] were to spread the Darwinist message and contribute to the popularization of science in Argentina.1 Still, it would not do to forget that Holmberg also authored a fair number of works in which a supernatural explanation prevails. Although the novel has strong ties to the emerging science fiction continuum, its author judiciously employs notes of the fantastic, not only to add moments of drama and suspense to his at times didactic treatise, but also to bolster his scientific arguments when Todorovian hesitation is resolved via proof of natural causation. “I have never believed in witches, nor in demons, nor in kobolds, nor in anything of the sort,” so Ladislao Kaillitz begins his description of his first visit to Griffritz ’s private museum of natural history (Two Factions 28). The suggestion of witchcraft, the occult, and the magical is soon forgotten amid the descriptions of the copious exhibits of flora and fauna and the detailed scienti fic discussions between Kaillitz and Griffritz that follow, until a scene in which Griffritz revives a dried sensitiva plant [Mimosa pudica] harks back to the more fantastic tone of Kaillitz’s initial words. The pedigreed plant in Griffritz’s possession had been cut and dried by the French botanist Aimé Bonpland and sent to Alexander von Humboldt over fifty years earlier. Throughout the revivification process, Griffritz provides the young Kaillitz with extensive scientific explanations involving the relation between the diameter of the plant’s vessels and the ambient temperature at the time it had been S T R A N G E F O R C E S 131 cut, and Holmberg’s narrator supplies a supporting footnote in which he reviews and confirms the science involved. On a less empirically verifiable note, however, Kaillitz recounts that Griffritz places the plant in water to which he adds “some drops of a liquid that was not known to me,” and a short time later the sensitiva returns to life (39). Kaillitz, now referring to Griffritz’s liquid as “magical,” compares Griffritz both to Christ raising a “vegetable Lazarus” from the dead and to a “necromancer ” (45). The as yet untutored Kaillitz admits, “My science was not developed to the point that I could explain the causes that had brought about that strange phenomenon” (45). Despite Holmberg’s obvious delight in giving the initial impression that Griffritz is putting mysterious or supernatural forces to work in his museum laboratory, the ultimate lesson of the sensitiva episode is to provide Kaillitz (and the reading public) with ammunition against irrational interpretations of events and to encourage Kaillitz to pursue further scientific training and become a full-fledged Darwinist. As Griffritz explains: For those who believe in miracles easily, the resuscitation of a sensitiva plant—or even of a man—is nothing special; but, for those who only seek in natural phenomena the natural cause which produces them, seeing a thing which departs completely from the regular order is something which quickly incites their intelligence to investigate that cause. For the former group, everything is explained by the power or the will of God; for the latter by the simultaneous action of several physical forces. (44–45) Para los que créen facilmente en milagros, nada tiene de particular que se resucite una sensitiva, ni aún que se resucite un hombre; pero, para los que solo buscan en los fenómenos naturales la causa natural que los produce, ver una cosa que se aparta completamente del órden regular, es algo que incita vivamente su inteligencia á la investigacion de esa causa. Para aquellos, todo se explica por el poder ó la voluntad de Dios; para estos por la accion simultanea de varias fuerzas físicas. In Griffritz’s declaration, then, we find yet another precursor to Arthur C.Clarke’sfamousstatementthat“anysufficientlyadvancedtechnology is indistinguishable from magic.”2 Griffritz, the positivist par excellence, T H E E M E R G E N C E O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N S C I E N C E F I C T I O N 132 worships not at the altar of any orthodox or occult religion but at that of science—“I serve a scientific...