Please join us for a talk with Dr. Aníbal González (Yale University).

Horror and revulsion have been present as the predominant emotional tone in Latin American science fiction from its earliest modern forms during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries until today. Unlike the celebratory optimism of key periods of science fiction from industrialized nations in Europe and North America, Latin American science fiction is consistently skeptical of technology and its social effects. In the 1869 novel The Yocci Well by Juana Manuela Gorriti, indigenous pharmacopeia becomes a means to foretell a grim future, and the machines and inventions in Leopoldo Lugones' stories in Strange Forces (1905) frequently turn against their makers.

In today's Latin American science fiction, cybershamanism and sheer lack of understanding lead to grotesque biological outcomes such as in Luis Carlos Barragán's novel The Worm (2018). In Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes (2018), cybernetic entertainment brings out the worst in human nature, while in Mariana Enríquez's Our Share of Night (2019), British-descended members of Argentina's elite practice black magic and live in multidimensional ghost houses where locked doors lead to bleak alien landscapes.