Nombre de usuario o dirección de correo

Contraseña

Recuérdame

Science fiction is an increasingly problematic and imprecise term for the peculiar, mutant creature it seeks to name. Adolfo Bioy Casares—who cultivated the genre in works such as The Invention of Morel, Plan of Escape, and De un mundo a otro (no English translation)—preferred to call it “reasoned imagination”. We are talking about one of the expressions of the literature of the unusual, specifically the expression that offers us a strange reality. This reality can be presented either 25 minutes into the future (as Ballard favored in science fiction), or a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, or in an alternate (or possible) present just a couple of centimeters away from the one we currently inhabit.

Darko Suvin asserts that in so-called science fiction, the reader’s implicit agreement relies on a dual process of cognition and estrangement. In this process, the sudden appearance of the fantastic element within the fabric of reality is justified by means of a novum. That is, there is a mechanism, element, artifact, trigger, or reasoned excuse that gives rise to the speculative fiction we encounter. Thus, the science fiction reader is able to identify: “This is not reality, but it could (become) so”. In so-called hard Anglo-Saxon science fiction, the novum‘s presence is clear and often scientifically supported. The novum in Latin American science fiction, however, tends to be more hidden, subtle, and masked. It is as if on this side of the continent, the novum, instead of being a technological factor, tends to result from an alteration of the natural world. It is an element of the earth that has spiraled out of control—sometimes due to scarcity or even absence, other times due........

© Letras Libres