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eBook details
- Title: Discovering and Re-Discovering Brazilian Science Fiction: An Overview (Report)
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 220 KB
Description
This paper is an overview of representative works of Brazilian science fiction (sf) and their periodization. As the article "A Chronology of Latin-American Science Fiction" by Molina-Gavilan et al. demonstrates, we have reached a point in the study of Latin American sf at which it is possible to trace its genealogy, proving that the genre has a long-standing historical presence and social relevance in a region associated with neo-colonial societies and developing economies. In fact, in the Latin American sf of the nineteenth century, as Rachel Haywood Ferreira has pointed out in "The First Wave: Latin American Science Fiction Discovers Its Roots," science and technology play a key role in intellectual life, since technology is viewed as a possible solution to overcoming the historical lag in economic development with the hope of creating a better, more utopian society (Ferreira 434). In order to offer an overview of Brazilian sf, we take our cue from a pioneering work, the Fantastic, Fantasy, and Science Fiction Catalog (1991) by Braulio Tavares and Roberto de Sousa Causo, a work that offers a list and summary of works as well as the publisher contact information of publishers for English-speaking researchers and translators. As its title indicates, this compendium identifies three subgenres of speculative fiction: the fantastic, fantasy and sf. The fact that these are grouped together reflects that, in the Brazilian tradition, all three remain closely related to this day, gaining strength in numbers in a country where high art and the realist tradition predominate in literary circles and publishers. Additionally, it is common in Brazil for critical works, anthologies and fanzines to include multiple genres from this group, a phenomenon that has the added effect of facilitating generic cross-fertilization. As we shall see, many of Brazil's contemporary authors, among them Braulio Tavares, Gerson Lodi Ribeiro, Roberto Causo, Carlos Orsi, Octavio Aragao and newcomer Cristina Lasaitis all write works in these genres, or a mix of them. Furthermore, the New Weird, itself a blend of horror, fantasy and sf devices has also gained strength in Brazil. In fact, Fabio Fernandes and Jacques Barcia, among others, have started a website in English "Post-Weird Thoughts." All these authors consider themselves to be part of the sf community in Brazil, and for this reason, our approach here is necessarily inclusive, rather than exclusive in scope. It is also important that, since this study has a partially thematic approach, there is an unavoidable measure of chronological overlap between subsections.