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Hobby Forum Index » Arts - Books - Reviews » Book Review - Cosmos Latinos
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| Danny Yee |
 Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 2:49 am |
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Cosmos Latinos
- An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain
edited Andrea L. Bell + Yolanda Molina-Gavilán
translated from Spanish
Wesleyan University Press 2003
352 pages
A book review by Danny Yee
http://dannyreviews.com/h/Cosmos_Latinos.html
_Cosmos Latinos_ contains twenty-seven science fiction stories, mostly
from Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil; there are five
stories from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, but most
come from the boom of the 60s and 70s and the last fifteen years.
The collection can be read simply for enjoyment: most of the stories are
brief, tasty morsels and the longer ones are fast-paced and gripping,
making for a volume that I found really easy to read. Some of the
authors have also published "mainstream" works, but all the pieces (with
the possible exception of the earliest few) are unequivocally science
fiction -- there is no attempt to claim the big names of South American
magical realism for the genre. _Cosmos Latinos_ offers us dystopian
futures, spaceships landing on alien planets, aliens and alien artifacts
on Earth, body enhancements, and much more that any reader of the genre
will find familiar.
If the motifs and themes are familiar, however, they are given different
twists. Take the time travel stories: in Ricard de la Casa and Pedro
Jorge Romero's "The Day We Went Through the Transition", the favorite
target of time terrorists is Spain's transition to democracy in the
mid-1970s, while in "Gu Ta Gutarrak" Magdalena Mouján Otaño takes a
hoary time travel plot and mixes it up with some light-hearted Basque
nationalism. While malign or authoritarian governments are a genre
tradition, for many of the authors in _Cosmos Latinos_ that is informed
by first-hand experience of prisons, censorship, and disappearances,
rather than by the more theoretical libertarianism of much North American
science fiction. Factories and working conditions appear as themes in
several stories; religion -- and specifically Catholicism -- in others.
For those interested in the background, Bell and Molina-Gavilán offer
a twenty-page general introduction to the history and themes of Latin
American and Spanish science fiction. This surveys some of the landmark
works and authors as well as the broad trends both within countries and
across the region.
"The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a veritable explosion in Spanish
and Latin American SF, in terms of the number and quality of
works being produced by authors who dedicated all their creative
efforts to SF and of the increased opportunities they had for
disseminating the genre. Many diverse factors made this an era
of unprecedented achievement ... the increased availability of
translated U.S. and European works; the broadening of the genre
to embrace more of the thematic concerns of the social sciences
and humanities ... foreign and domestic SF magazines that were
willing to publish local writers ... small presses specializing
in SF ... the vision and energy of dedicated editors ... and a
much greater level of communication and organization among fans"
There's also a twelve page select bibliography, covering secondary sources
as well as key works. A brief author biography precedes each story and
endnotes explain references that may be unfamiliar to English-speaking
readers. The biographies are a nice supplement to the introduction,
offering some personal, localised stories to flesh out the more abstract
and general introduction.
Two possible problems with _Cosmos Latinos_ strike me. One is that
it inspires an interest in authors whose other works have not (in most
cases) been translated into English. The other is that the price may
deter casual science fiction readers used to cheap paperbacks. On the
plus side, it's a seriously handsome volume, with a cover that almost
makes me reconsider the "no images" policy on my review web site.
--
%T Cosmos Latinos
%S An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain
%E Bell, Andrea L.
%E Molina-Gavilán, Yolanda
%M Spanish
%I Wesleyan University Press
%C Middletown
%D 2003
%O paperback, bibliography
%G ISBN 0-8195-6634-9
%P xi,352pp
%K science fiction, short fiction, world literature
30 July 2003
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Copyright (c) 2003 Danny Yee http://danny.oz.au/
Danny Yee's Book Reviews http://dannyreviews.com/
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