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language: Spanish
country: Bolivia
year: 2016
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 20.6.23-23.6.23
Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Las visiones is a collection of fourteen short stories set in the ambiguously-situated corporate colony that was the focus of his novel Iris. as a (kind of) sequel to Iris it is incredible — a kaleidoscopic view of Iris from different perspectives, both colonizers and colonized. as a standalone collection I think it would probably be near-incomprehensible.
the stories are concerned with some of the same questions that drove Iris: how do the relations created by colonialism affect both colonizer and colonized? how did the brutal violence of the American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq — and so by extension of other colonies — become not only normalized but expected? what if there were a brutal corporate colony whose foot soldiers were de facto indentured servants trying to escape their pasts, where the colonized were in the middle of a religious revival-cum-anticolonial uprising, and everyone were on wild hallucinogenic drugs the whole time?
there are a few stories that I think would stand okay on their own, particularly “La casa de la Jerere”, which is about two corporate soldiers who’ve gotten lost in the wilderness and are trying to figure out if the ruined building they’re in, apparently a temple to the Irisino deity la Jerere, is part of one of the cities that was destroyed during nuclear tests fifty years ago or not.
most of the other stories rely heavily on prior knowledge of world-building from Iris (it’s not unlike Yoon Ha Lee’s Hexarchate Stories in that way), and many of them are at least tangentially connected — Dr. An and his experiments with chemical weapons (notionally illegal but readily deployed by SaintRei anyway) are looming background figures in several stories, and then “El doctor An” provides a fuller picture of his experiments and his eventual death as an effect of one of his weapons, which has become a kind of contagion.
it’s a harrowing collection, but also one that never abandons the possibility of radical change: the figure of the revolutionary leader Orlewen is also a constant background presence, never — here — fully manifesting but always a possibility. the revolution is coming, soon; SaintRei are collapsing, consuming themselves. the title of the collection is appropriate: many of the stories are concerned with visions: religious visions, political visions (both revolutionary and wildly reactionary), literal hallucinations (or are they?), parents’ visions for their children, individuals’ visions for their lives.
if you read Spanish and haven’t read Iris, I would highly recommend it, and then afterwards you should read Las visiones, too.
moods: dark, emotional, mysterious, reflective