Spanish SciFi and Its Ghosts
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distinction between science fiction, space opera and modem epic, and is hence able to
accommodate a great variety o f disparate works, such as Conan o f Cimmeria or Avatar .
3 This unfortunate fusion between Catholicism and nationalism, which appears quite
anachronistic in twentieth-century European politics, represents in Spain a return to the
mentality o f the so-called “Golden A ge” (1492-1659), when the Spanish empire, a
theocracy by any other name, dominated most o f the Occidental world and Spaniards
believed that they had been chosen by the hand o f the All Mighty to spread the good
word, i.e., Catholicism.
4 From a purely linguistic point o f view, National Catholicism ( nacional catolicismo) is a
direct emulation o f German National Socialism, for it subverts Spanish grammar by
placing the adjective before the noun.
5 Whereas dystopian science fiction is grounded on a prospective vision o f our reality (see
Moreno) and hence refers us to our own environment, space opera, on the contrary,
revolves around the representation o f exotic and distant worlds.
6 The explosion o f the science fiction genre in Spain following the death o f Franco is
amply documented, in particular by Diez in his essay “Ciencia fiction espanola: una
analisis en perspectiva.”
7 Although Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle was translated into Spanish and
published in Argentina in 1974— twelve years after its original release in English— under
the name El hombre en el Castillo ( The Man in the Castle) and hence theoretically
available in Spain, its reception remained highly limited; Philip K. Dick, along with most
U.S. science fiction authors o f his time, was literally re-bom for the Spanish public in the
eighties.
8 In the spirit o f full disclosure, it should be mentioned that Spain’s recent reevaluation o f
science fiction as a legitimate corpus for scholarly research is very heavily influenced by
the trends in cultural and popular culture studies that are shaping today’s syllabi
throughout most American universities.
9 From Philip K. Dick’s Valis to the Wachosky brothers’ Matrix, the metaphysical
dimension has been a recurrent narrative paradigm in the genre o f science fiction;
however, Spanish authors’ conception o f this particular notion often merges the physical
and metaphysical realms in order to represent a repressive order on both levels,
reproducing the theocratic peculiarities o f Franco’s regime.
10 It must be underlined that both novels, 1984 and Brave New World, are considered
classical works o f literature in spite o f belonging to the genre o f dystopian science
fiction, and their very presence at the heart o f the canon demonstrates the arbitrariness o f
the distinction between what is perceived as Literature and what is downplayed as
“popular literature:” it could indeed be argued that Philip K. Dick is a direct heir to both
Orwell and Huxley and that his novels deserve the same type o f scholarly attention.
11Any religious reading o f Orwell’s 1984 or o f Huxley’s Brave New World requires a
metaphysical interpretive frame that precedes the text itself, for the types o f
totalitarianism both works introduce, if quite different from each other, are both based
upon and structured according to the physical world.
Works Cited
A vatar . Dir: James Cameron. 20h Century Fox, 2009.
Dick, P.K. The Man in the High Castle. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962. Print.
— . Valis. N ew York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.
— . The Three Stigmata o f Palmer Eldritch. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.