Saturday, April 16, 2011

Chicanonautica: Science Fiction Across the Tortilla Curtain in the Global Village

Attention Latino Lit crowd! The latest issue of Flurb, A Webzine of Astonishing Tales, Issue #11, Spring-Summer, 2001, published by Rudy Rucker and guest-edited by Eileen Gunn, has three stories by Mexican writers: Alberto Chimal, Bef (AKA, Bernardo Fernández), and Pepe Rojo, in Español as well as Inglés! There are also stories that surf past the borders of sci-fi into stranger territory by writers from Canada, England, and of course the ever-popular United States of America.


It’s great to see globalism and bilingualism riding the wave of the new technology.


And it’s free -- just click and read!


Flurb is following the globalizing lead of Jetse de Vries in his Shine anthology, and DayBreak Magazine.


It’s a far cry from twenty years ago, when I was trying to tell the English-speaking science fiction community that the genre was alive and well in the Spanish-speaking world, and practically no one was interested.


I remember hearing things like: “Only Americans have the cultural background to write about changing technology.” And it wasn’t just a language barrier -- a lot of fanboys believed that the English couldn’t write proper sci-fi.


It’s nice to see some real progress happening.


Ernest Hogan’s stories have appeared in both Flurb and DayBreak Magazine.


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