zuky:
Octavio Paz & Jorge Luis Borges.
Sci Fi Recs: Contemporary science fiction comprises a plethora of subgenres, national traditions, and fan cultures—and its roots are equally diverse. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just plain wrong to talk about the origin of sf and mention Mary Shelley and Hugo Gernsback but not Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian proto-postmodernist.
Borges didn’t do robots or rocket ships or any of the other superficial trappings of sf. Those are weird subjects; Borges weirded the story itself, and the teller — metafiction, the unreliable narrator, dreams and labyrinths and libraries and memory and time. There’s echoes of his stuff in many writers who write what I think of as “honorary science fiction”, like Eco, Calvino and Saramago, but a good many honest-to-goodness genre-ghetto sf writers count Borges as an influence as well: Jeff VanderMeer, Stanislaw Lem, Lucius Shepard, and (one of my favourite authors) Gene Wolfe, who once said “magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish”. Personally, I agree that when it comes to speculative fiction we should throw the net as wide as we can—which is why I think of Borges’ stories as sci-fi, plain and simple.
Online work:
- “The Library of Babel” (1941). Hey, who turned out the lights…?
- “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940). Takes the idea of “transformative works” to its logical conclusion.
- “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941).
TL;DR: Just read Ficciones, thank me later.
Big fan of both of these writers. Borges is good at blowing your mind and bending perception. I like that.