Chicanonautica: A Mad Scientist’s Mexican Daughter

by Ernest Hogan

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has expressed frustration with the science/speculative fiction genre, even announcing that she has left it, proving that she was capable of writing just about anything in the process. But lately she’s returned to it with a vengeance.  

Mexican Gothic not only expanded into the gothic romance genre but gave us world class horrors. And in her latest, she takes a classic novel—H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau--and does her own daring take on it. Look out world, brace yourself for The Daughter of Doctor Moreau.

No, it’s not an Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein-type franchise sequel, or prequel, but a bold new take on Wells’ original, that has been done and redone to the point of becoming a horror movie cliché, rethinking the entire concept from a modern viewpoint. Pretty gutsy.

Primarily, the traditional mad scientist (that she wrote about in an interesting article) and daughter are completely reconstructed. 

Instead of the beautiful but sheltered maiden who exists so a dashing hero can rescue her, we have a complex central character who becomes the core of a story richer than Wells’ original. Carlota Moreau is a breakthrough creation that readers will not forget, a mestiza of a different kind.

Moreno-Garcia sets the story in the jungles of the Yucatán peninsula rather than an island. This opens up a new world that readers of pop fiction are unfamiliar with. Mayan rebels show up, history that hasn’t yet been integrated into pop culture. My visit there decades ago rearranged my mind, streets and towns had Mayan names, naked children played with broken toys on dark dirt that the women somehow kept off their dazzling white huipils, all before the bizarre 21st century developments. Writers, gente, you really need to research tropical Mexico, you’ll be glad you looked beyond the deserts of Aztlán. 

This is a new take on the antiquated term “scientific romance” and brings it up to date for the modern reader, decolonialism and feminism with a damn good story. An excellent read that will satisfy the modern audience, and would make an excellent movie, if there’s any visionary filmmakers out there up to the job.

It’s also firmly in the Wellsian tradition of social commentary, Wells being a Victorian Social Justice Warrior—he wrote War of the Worlds to show the British what it would be like if someone else did to them what they were doing to the rest of the world. Here we see humanity’s relationship to nature and fellow humans–and question the very definition of what is human–through alien eyes, and a mind you fall in love with. Those in the Latinoid continuum will find things to identify with. 

Once again, I can promise that anything by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

is worth your time and money.

Ernest Hogan is judging Somos en escrito’s Extra Fiction Contest 2022.  The contest submission is free and is open for any Native or Latina/o/x person from or residing in the USA (of American Indian, Chicano/Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, Central American, or South American origin). The deadline is October 31, 2022. Can you blow the mind of the Father of Chicano Sci-Fi?