Spanish SciFi and Its Ghosts
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In 1975, Franco graced Spain with his departure, and his death
coincides with an explosion of science fiction literature.6 Once again, we can
safely relate the reasons for the rebirth of the genre in Spain to the country’s
political context: Spain was no longer isolated politically from Europe, and,
more importantly when it comes to our purpose, it opened up culturally to the
rest of the world—that is, it acknowledged, assimilated and attempted to
reproduce the cultural trends that had been developing in the rest of the
Occidental world while the country was in cultural lock up. Spain had literally to
catch up a forty-year delay with the rest of Europe and the United States and
radically modify its frame of reference as well as its collective consciousness if
it wanted to exist in this brave new world. The opening of the cultural borders in
Spain, which coincided with the death of the dictator, implied the reception all at
once of about a half a century of literary tradition and the discovery of many
foreign science fiction authors and works, mainly but not always from the
United States, who had been totally ignored until then—as far as the Spanish
public was concerned. Philip K. Dick was writing The Man in the High Castle
again for the first time about twenty years after its publication.7
When we consider the abundance of science fiction narrations produced
in the United States and in Europe during the second decade of the twentieth
century, the situation of Spain becomes even more uncanny, if not slightly
surrealistic, for it implies absorbing an almost unlimited corpus in order to
participate actively to its elaboration. Naturally, some Spanish science fiction
authors were more aware than some others of the state of the genre in other
countries, however, Spain’s recent cultural isolation and the mistrust of Franco’s
regime vis-a-vis anything foreign—especially languages—had made translations
rare and generally inaccurate; we must not forget that virtually all of Spain’s
cultural production and consumption during the four decades of Franco’s rule
were grinded by the regime’s ruthless censorship.
Contemporary Spanish science fiction authors must therefore both
assimilate an overwhelming amount of material and attempt to contribute in an
original way to the genre; that is, they are forced to imitate a pre-existing
narrative mode that has been articulated according to irremediably foreign
linguistic and cultural parameters but must nonetheless express a Spanish
identity in doing so in order to produce valid, convincing, original works.
Naturally, Spain’s peculiar historical circumstances have a direct influence upon
the manner in which many authors attempt to resolve this paradox and as we
proceed to a more textually oriented analysis, we can distinguish five elements,
either thematic or paradigmatic, which set Spanish science fiction apart from its
more informed international neighbors and that are either directly or indirectly
related to its political and cultural situation: (1) humor, (2) self-consciousness,
(3) subversion, (4) cultural tradition and—no surprise here—(5) Catholicism.
(1)
Humor: Contemporary Spanish science fiction tends to be
humorous, which is not a typical feature of the genre. If we indeed find humor in
some American authors, such as Brown or Harrison, we do not find it in the