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language: Spanish
country: Bolivia
year: 2021
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 21.12.24-5.1.25
truly nobody is doing it (science fiction) like him (Edmundo Paz Soldán). La vía del futuro is an exhilarating collection of short sci-fi stories set in a relatively near future. unlike his previous collection, Las visiones, the stories are not linked by characters or plot, but there are occasional references to shared world-building elements — principally, a “deep web” cult of scientists dedicated to a possibly-mythical “artificial intelligence” called “the Deep One” (“el Profundo”).
the stories are often harrowing and always deeply unsettling. the title story offers a series of vignettes or interview extracts surrounding a megalomaniacal tech bro who may or may not genuinely believe in the artificial god at the heart of his money-laundering cult. there are lesbians, which was a nice surprise, although they do break up, badly.
the second story, “El Señor de La Palma” is also about a kind of cult, this time a plantation / packing plant in central Bolivia whose employees — in fact essentially indentured laborers — are “paid” in corporate cryptocurrency that seems to grow in value magically.
“Mi querido resplandor” is about a young woman who brings her friends to visit her mother, an amateur ufologist who runs a museum in her hometown. her friends hope to see a UFO while they’re there.
“La muñeca japonesa” is about an importer who slowly ruins his life with robots — it reminded me of Chung Bora’s “Goodbye, My Love” from Cursed Bunny: a similar kind of unhealthy, destructive obsession. nonetheless, it was maybe the weakest story in the collection, I think.
“El astronauta Michael Garcia” is about a replacement astronaut on the ISS whose sense of reality begins to blur and change. it’s probably the least science-fictional story in the collection, and it wasn’t my favorite, but there’s something oddly fascinating about it.
“Las calaveras” is about unsettling cave-diving. almost horror — or not-quite-horror — as a man’s scuba diving expedition with his wife takes a turn for the weird.
“En la hora de nuestra muerte” is probably my favorite story in the collection, a fragmentary, dark vision of the opiate crisis through the eyes of the workers who operate an urban surveillance system somewhere in the US (implicitly I think New York City) designed to catch drug overdoses as they happen and dispatch assistance. the entanglements of class, race, addiction, state power and violence, immigration, and surveillance. there are lesbians again.
finally, “Bienvenidos al nuevo mundo” is a kind of dark academia story: an administrative worker in the “global liberal studies”, the only humanities program at an unnamed, new STEM-focused university in Carson City, provides graduate students with university-sanctioned (in fact university-mandated) drugs that connect them with alternate realities into which some of them disappear. rests partly on a bit of too-real wordplay: he tells the students they’re being prepared for “the other side”, which several of them take to mean “academic careers after graduation” but which in fact refers to the alternate realities.
I have found Paz Soldán’s prose really gripping in previous encounters, and this book was no exception. it’s slightly less grim than Iris or Las visiones, insofar as it’s not about a colonial occupying force committing genocidal violence — its predominant tone, I would say, is cynical: it has a certain bleak sense of humor about its subject matter. and it’s really fucking good. if you read Spanish and haven’t read any of his sci-fi please do yourself a favor and go find some.
moods: dark, mysterious, reflective