La ilusión persistente

Reviewed by: La ilusión persistente: Diálogos entre la ciencia ficción y el campo cultural by Silvia G. Kurlat Ares David William Foster Kurlat Ares, Silvia G. La ilusión persistente: Diálogos entre la ciencia ficción y el campo cultural. Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2018. Pp. 430. ISBN 978-1-93074-484-4. It is often sustained, if only by implication, that science fiction is an impossible genre in Latin American culture, that “Latin American science fiction” is a curious oxymoron. Certainly, there have been quaint Latin American works—every bit as quaint as American nineteenth-century fiction appears to be, with rocket ships done up in Victorian upholstery. Perhaps, also, this bibliography is fleshed out with works of speculative or futuristic fiction, although science in any specific sense of the word is not at issue except for some fantastic details of décor and quotidian life. Even in the case of countries like Argentina and Brazil, where there is a significant scientific commitment to experimental research (after all, Argentina can boast of Nobel Prizes in the sciences), writers do not evince the sort of stunningly sophisticated knowledge about experimental science that American or European counterparts do. Where, then, does there lie any niche for science fiction writing in Latin America? The great Argentine graphic novel El Eternauta (1957–59, by Héctor Oesterhold and Francisco Solano López, with multiple alternative revisions) is illustrative in this regard. Often read as a prescient allegory of the series of the impending military dictatorships between 1966 and 1983, El Eternauta describes an invasion of mysterious superpowers, one that a group of humble Argentine citizens is able to forestall, only for the text to query enigmatically, “[yet] might it be possible?” Although there is an impressive array of fanciful scientific-looking gadgets, there is no real engagement with them in terms of deep scientific questions, and the focus of the narrative is on questions of solidarity, much in the fashion of the sociopolitical commitments of the mid-century, and on the vulnerability of the populace to manipulation and yet the heroism of those who will assume the responsibility of principled resisance for family and nation. While some readers have focused on the presence in the text of scientific details (and Kurlat Ares, in La ilusión persistente: Diálogos entre la ciencia ficción y el campo cultural makes much of this, relating it to debates in Argentina of the day over the role of science), the display of the scientific is rather thin. One detail will suffice: those resisting the invasion invent something that looks like the Geiger counter. It is an ingenious, homemade harbinger of the more scientific instrument. Asmovian science fiction (if one might look in American literature for a standard of the presence of experimental science) would not be content to invent what the reader already knows about, but rather then to invent something the reader has never heard of. This is, in great measure, the frisson of cutting-edge science fiction: what we don’t already know about or perhaps cannot really even think about, until the scientific visionary, fictional or real, comes along and does it for us. Fortunately, however, Kurlat Ares is not actually interested in defending El Eternauta as cutting-edge science fiction of the sort I am describing, but rather a type of writing that involves string theory-like intersections of speculation, fantasy, the counterfactual, the unconscious, and really any element that refutes prescientific concepts of reality. That is, elements of science [End Page 623] (including pseudoscience) are seen as a way of deconstructing what one assumes to be humdrum reality (in this vein, are conspiracy-theory narratives, which abound in Argentina, science fiction?). Where this becomes fascinating, over and over again in the works that Kuralt Ares examines in superb critical detail, is how much Latin American science fiction (let us agree to call it as such, such taxonomy is of only passing interest when the ideological stakes are so high) is in reality a deconstructive exercise in sociohistorical analysis. Oesterheld’s disappearance by the military regime in 1976 may have been directly related to his cultural production

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