El tercer mundo después del sol, edited by Rodrigo Bastidas Pérez, is an anthology of Latin American science fiction, featuring writers from Mexico to Argentina, though skewed towards South American writers. I picked it up on spec — as it were — in large part because the cover art — featuring a woman in colorful Bolivian clothes and a bowler hat, wearing mechanical bracers on each arm that allow her to control the gigantic red-pink mecha rising from the mist behind her — absolutely governs. unfortunately, most of the stories themselves don’t live up to the promise of the cover art.
some of this is simply because the stories did not catch my interest specifically — Laura Ponce’s “A través del avatar”, for example, is a perfectly serviceable cyberpunk story about artificial intelligence and media piracy; it just didn’t particularly move me personally. Fábio Fernandes’s “Amor: una arqueología” (translated from Portuguese by Diego Cepeda) is a conceptually interesting story about parallel universes, but it didn’t land for me emotionally the way it was clearly meant to.
for a disappointingly large number of the stories, however, the reason they didn’t land for me is that a bunch of them are very weird about Indigenous people and colonialism. Bastidas Pérez flags the importance of Indigenous cultures in his prologue to the collection, which begins with an account of Cofán activists working to get the US patent office to cancel Loren Miller’s patent on Banisteriopsis caapi (aka Ayahuasca). he takes this as emblematic of a tension in “Latin American” relationships with Western science and so by extension science fiction — and yet there is, as far as I can tell, not a single Indigenous author included in the anthology. in this respect, the collection is emblematic of the tendency of postcolonial states in Latin America to adopt (sanitized versions of) Indigenous cultures as “national” symbols while continuing to systemically marginalize and dispossess living Indigenous peoples. (this tendency exists across settler colonies, and we can see it, too, I think, in the ways the Scottish and “postcolonial” Irish states relate to Gaelic-speaking communities.)
this tendency manifests in a variety of ways through the collection. Jorge Baradit’s “La conquista mágica de América” presents the Spanish conquest teleologically as an inevitability even in a world where magic is widespread. in Baradit’s postscript/author’s note to the story, he adds:
Latinoamérica es temporalmente circular. Sus indígenas siguen acá, sus conquistadores, sistemas feudales, modelos económicos de vanguardia, socialismos reales, guerrillas narcosatánicas, carteles que consumen ayahuasca o brujería asesorando ministerios completos. América es una acumulación rizomática caótica de gran belleza estética. Nada se ha ido, todo sigue acá, revolcándose como serpientes en celo, dando forma a un futuropasado permanente, un agujero luminoso y alucinado del que no puede salir, la gran olla donde se cocina el mestizo andrógino que algún día parirá el territorio.
[Latin America is temporally circular. Its indigenous people are stll here, its conquistadors, feudal systems, avant-garde economic systems, real socialisms, narco-satanic guerrillas, cartels that consume ayahuasca or witchcraft [brujería] while advising entire ministries. America is a chaotic, rhizomatic accumulation of great aesthetic beauty. Nothing has gone; everything is still here, rolling around like snakes in heat, giving form to a permanent futurepast, a luminous hole, hallucinated by one who cannot leave, the great pot where the androgynous mestizo to whom the territory will one day give birth is being prepared.]
this is, frankly, just classic raza cósmica mestizx supremacy bullshit, and it’s as racist and colonial here as always. other stories in the anthology lay claim to Indigenous cultures in a variety of ways: Garbiela Damián Miravete’s “La sincronía del tacto” uses hallucinogens to meditate on the relationship between science and tradition, but in a way where white and mestizx people become the inheritors of Indigenous ritual; T. P. Mira de Echeverría’s “Les Pi’Yemnautas” combines a Last of the Mohicans-style story of vanishing Indigenous people with some weird almost-transmisogyny (extra disappointing because Mira de Echeverría is themself nonbinary). Ramiro Sanchiz’s “Fractura” is a New Weird-style story set in a version of Peru where the romanticized Incas departed into space (freeing up the land for colonialism, again a classic colonial narrative).
sorry, I know I’m just some gringo guy and a literal Yankee, but this is all still colonialism, actually! I appreciate the desire to engage seriously with Indigenous science and scientific knowledge, but I don’t think the specific execution in these stories is the way to do it.
unfortunately there was some other more general weirdness about race, too — Giovanna Rivero’s “Other Voices”, for example, features some classic techno-Orientalism, with an emotionless East Asian ambiguously-villain who is ostensibly Japanese but has the (pseudo-)Chinese name “Chieh-lin”. diversity win?
in spite of this, there are some definite standouts here. the highlight for me was probably Luis Carlos Barragán’s “Éxodo X”, a deeply unsettling story where beings across the planet have begun to transform physically and mentally into other (specific) beings. the story follows a man from a conservative, white family in Texas who begins to transform into an Afro-Colombian university student from Chocó, is essentially kicked out of his racist family, but retains some of his white, USAmerican cultural values when he arrives in Colombia, like immediately calling the police to report the person he’s “supposed” to be replacing, who has been in hiding after taking an illegal drug to stop his own transformation. it also features a particularly harrowing scene about a woman who used to be a Muslim from Chicago who has become a racist white woman, who experiences her new being’s racism as effectively horrible intrusive thoughts. there’s a lot going on here — I think it would be a rewarding story to teach.
I was also very struck by Juan Manuel Robles’s “Constelación nostalgia”, which reminded me strongly of Edmundo Paz Soldán’s absolutely exquisite novel Iris. both texts are explorations of imperial violence: like Paz Soldán, Robles examines soldiers who have done (and continue to do) horrible things and asks, how do war crimes and brutal violence become not only possible but normal? what social, political, and technoscientific structures enable imperialist war? and, more generally, what kinds of consequences should there be? this is the longest story in the collection, and I think for me probably the best.
there are some formal experiments here, as well. the most successful, I think, was probably Alberto Chimal’s “El Gran Experimento”, which is presented as a numbered list of 100 sentences-propositions narrating a climate-dystopian future. I also appreciated the mix of voices and persons (including second person!) in Elaine Vilar Madruga’s “Khatakali”, although the story as a whole didn’t quite come together for me. Fernandes’s “Amor: una arqueología” also has a cool structure for dealing with the parallel universe element.
altogether, while it wasn’t a bad reading experience (I’ve given it 3.25/5 on Storygraph), I was a bit disappointed/frustrated overall. still, I’m mostly glad I picked it up. (also, seriously, go look at the cover art. can’t overstate how cool it is.)
(back: main page · reviews by author · reviews by country)