Rodrigo Bastidas: Science fiction books also exist in Latin America

Ovidio Castro Medina

Bogotá, April 4 (EFE). Tackling science fiction from the point of view of Latin American authors is the proposal by Colombian writer Rodrigo Bastidas Pérez for the anthology “The Third World After the Sun” (Minoturo), which brings together stories from 14 authors in which realism and fiction are brought together.

Bastidas confirms in an interview with Evie that one of his claims is to show that “Latin American science fiction is diverse, and it is not only science fiction that deals with specific topics, but can take up electronic phone themes (machines of the future) and also talks about uchronias or refers to space travel) “.

Authors such as Cuban Eileen Villar Madruga, Miles Gonzalez, Argentine Teresa Mira de Echeverria and Laura Pons are in the book with their own power.

There is also Jorge Paradet (Chile), Luis Carlos Barragán (Colombia), Fabio Fernández (Brazil), Giovanna Rivero (Bolivia), Juan Manuel Robles (Peru), Solange Rodriguez (Ecuador), Ramiro Sanchez (Uruguay), Susana Susman (Venezuela), the Mexicans Alberto Mirago Chemal and Gabriele. .

In their stories, they talk about condors, jaguars, ayahuasca, indigenous people, shamanism, video games, artificial intelligence or cyberspace.

Bastidas (Pasto, Colombia, 1979) explains that one of the other purposes of the anthology is that science fiction writers from Latin America appear in it because there is a place “in a kind of boom.”

Although he confirms that all the authors of the book are good, Bastidas highlights Uruguay Sanchez because he considers himself one of the people who thinks science fiction more than others from a general construct but from the scale to which it approaches. : “I think it’s a great, good show.”

Rómulo Gallegos Prize nominee De Barragán highlights that he proposes “science fiction dealing with political, biological, religious and mystical themes” and “all of this is reflected in a novel Bogotá or Colombia.”

Bastidas, who is also the general editor of Vestigio, a Colombian publishing house focused on science fiction, also estimates that there are women writing in the genre and that there is a “seed that sprouts” and is bearing fruit.

“Right now, writing and women’s literature associated with genre literature, that is, horror, fantasy and science fiction literature, you have to look at it closely because this is where a kind of seed is exploding right now,” he says.

Abundance of authors

Bastidas, que actualmente está terminando una novela y un cuento, asegura que en Latinoamérica hay suficientes autores, de buena calidad, con los cuales, “fácilmente se podrían hacer otros dos tomos” sobre este género sinad perder la calido “sobre este género sin perder la calidad” Sun”.

“There are so many science fiction writers out there that even though they are the ones who wrote the anthology (…) you can make two more volumes with other writers without getting down on science fiction or getting interested in it at the very least,” he explains.

He considers that the anthology could also open spaces for other publishers to “dare to spread science fiction at the regional level” and adds that the book also reminds the rest of the world that “in Latin America we also write science fiction.”

Reality from fiction

Bastidas, who was a professor at several universities in Colombia and Mexico, asserts that science fiction is not a matter of travel and the machines of the future, but rather an element of reality.

In this regard, he asserts that many writers of this kind have expressed “a kind of political vision that science fiction possesses that allows, in another way, to see reality accurately through extrapolation of worlds.”

One such specimen is the graphic novel “El Eternauta” by Argentine Hector German Osterhild, published from 1957 to 1959, in which an alien invasion of Buenos Aires was shown and how people united to fight against that occupation.

“But what this book actually presents is the problem that existed in Latin America with dictatorships (…) and to address readers about what was happening in Latin America at that time,” says Bastidas, who remembers that Austerold had disappeared during the last military government. Argentine like his four daughters. EFE

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