Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

The Future In Fragments: Three Critical Dystopian Works By Fernando Contreras Castro, Matthew Richey

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

In the prologue to the 2014 edition of Cantos de las Guerras Preventivas, Costa Rican author Fernando Contreras Castro states that the novel, originally published in 2006, originated as a response to the ambiguously-defined military campaigns that dominated the global geopolitical landscape during the first decade of the 21st century. Contreras Castro further explains that the novel is an attempt at imagining near-future worlds from a distinctly Latin American perspective, while avoiding the currents of cyberpunk and paranoid fiction that dominated late 20th century science fiction writing in the United States. The novel also marks a significant departure from …

Political Wishful Thinking Versus The Shape Of Things To Come: Manuel De Pedrolo’S "Mecanoscrit" And “Los Últimos Días” By Àlex And David Pastor, Pere Gallardo Torrano

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Despite almost forty years separating Manuel de Pedrolo’s novel Mecanoscrit del segon orígen (1974, trad. Typescript of the Second Origin) and the brothers Àlex and David Pastor’s film “Los últimos días” (2013, US tit. “The Last Days”), it is not difficult to find several socio-political areas of intersection which converge on a biological issue at the end of both works: the pregnancy of one of the characters at the end of each story.

Yet, such an interpretation would be rather limited as it ignores the socio-political landscape from which each work originated. Published in the aftermath of the first …

Eugenia En Su Contexto: Utopía Y Proyecto Alterno De Nación, Miguel García

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

En fechas recientes la novela Eugenia: esbozo novelesco de costumbres futuras (Mérida, 1919), escrita por el doctor, funcionario público y pedagogo Eduardo Urzaiz, se ha vuelto una pieza clave para entender la ciencia ficción mexicana y latinoamericana, al ser uno de los ejemplos tempranos de especulaciones futuristas y por integrar en su discurso a la eugenesia, una ciencia alrededor de la cual se desarrolló un movimiento global cuyos alcances se siguen mapeando hoy en día. Sin embargo, dos problemas principales han impedido el entendimiento cabal de la novela: 1) una insuficiente comprensión de la relevancia de las ideas eugenésicas …

Buenos Aires Dreaming: Chronopolitics, Memory And Dystopia In La Sonámbula, Mariano Paz

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

The Argentine film La Sonámbula (dir. Fernando Spiner, 1998) is one of the most renowned examples of local science fiction cinema. The film portrays a post-apocalyptic, totalitarian Argentina in the year 2010 (the near future at the time of the film’s release). Since this dystopian scenario never materialized, it might be assumed the concerns and anxieties about Argentine politics that the film conveys might have been exaggerated or unfounded. Drawing on the concept of chronopolitcs, as defined by Paul Virilio, and on the theoretical framework proposed by Paul Ricoeur related to the study of memory and forgetting, this paper discusses …