Cosmos Latinos

Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain. "Translated, edited, & with an introduction & notes by Andrea L. Bell & Yolanda Molina-Gavilán. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

Includes an extensive but unannotated bibliography of "Selected Primary Sources" (pp. 339-44), "Selected Secondary Sources" (pp. 344-350), and "Selected Internet Sources" (p. 350), with "About the Contributors" for brief identification of the translator-contributors to the project. In the series, The Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction, Arthur B. Evans, general editor.

From the backcover publisher's blurb:

[...T]his anthology offers popular and influential stories from over ten countries, chronologically ranging from 1862 to the present. Latin American and Spanish science fiction shares many thematic and stylistic elements with anglophone science fiction, but there are important differences: many downplay scientific plausibility, and others show the influence of the region's celebrated literary fantastic["magical realism" — RDE]. In the 27 stories included in this anthology, a 16th-century conquistador is re-envisioned as a cosmonaut, Mexican factory workers receive pleasure-giving bio-implants, and warring bands of terrorists travel through time attempting to reverse the outcome of historical events.

The introduction examines the ways the genre has developed in Latin America and Spain since the 1700s and studies science fiction as a means of defamiliarizing, and then critiquing, regional culture, history and politics [...]. The volume also includes a brief introduction to each story and its author, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works.[1]

See for Reaching the Shore, Mechanopolis, and Gray Noise; also: "The Anacronópete," "The Distant Future," "Baby H.P.," "Acronia," "Exerion."

Reviewed by M. Elizabeth Ginway, SFRA Review #270 (Oct./Nov./Dec. 2004): 15-18. For other reviews, see the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of October 2023, here.[2]

RDE, finishing, 13/15Aug20f., 26Oct23