Trip the Mexican Fantastic

"Variation on a Theme of Coleridge" by Alberto Chimal from Chris N. Brown on Vimeo.

(Video by Daniel Rojo of Mexico City/Tijuana, postproduction by Morgan Coy of Monofonus Press/Teleportal Readings in Austin.)

The video embedded above features Mexican author Alberto Chimal reading his wonderful short short "Variation on a Theme of Coleridge" from the new anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, which I had the good fortune to co-edit with Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, and which is being published by Small Beer Press this month.

As chronicled on this blog, I have had the good fortune to travel from Texas to Mexico on many occasions over the past three years. Those trips exposed me to the work of many younger and emerging Mexican authors of fantastic literature, and got me excited about the possibility of introducing their work to English-language readers. When my co-editor and I both independently pitched Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press on the idea of doing something to showcase contemporary Mexican short stories of the fantastic, Gavin was enthusiastic, and after a great deal of hard work—especially by my co-editor, who found the majority of the stories, and the dozens of volunteer translators who contributed their work—we have a wonderful volume of 34 diverse stories to share (introduced with characteristic insight and élan by Bruce Sterling).

The stories come from both the highbrow literary mainstream and the ghettos of genre—the authors insist a book collecting all of them under a single cover could never happen in Mexico. The stories represent a fresh literature of globalization—reflecting a multicultural 21st century society defined by electronic communications networks and the narratives and memes they feed into people's heads more than the usual folkloric signifiers of Mexican culture you might find at your neighborhood import shop. Our anthology showcases writers who use the tools of science fiction and slipstream to liberate themselves from the tropical languor of old-school magic realism, and express the authentic feeling of a media-drunk, technological mediated, postmodernly alienated contemporary life—one where if La Virgen appears, it will probably be in the lo-rez pixels of YouTube.

I will be posting more about these matters over the coming weeks (including many more subtitled video readings); in the meantime, here's more about the book from Small Beer Press:

"This huge anthology of more than thirty all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Stereotypes of Mexican identity are explored and transcended by the thoroughly cosmopolitan consciousnesses underlying these works. It is a landmark of contemporary North American fiction that deserves a wide readership."



“By turns creepy, self-consciously literary, and engagingly inventive, these 34 stories selected by translator-scholar Jiménez Mayo and writer-critic Brown offer some excellent and ghastly surprises. . . . These are punchy, ghoulish selections by south-of-the-border writers unafraid of the dark.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Encompassing a definition of fantasy that includes the extraterrestrial, the supernatural, the macabre, and the spectral, these stories are set in unusual locales and deal with bizarre characters. All are very short (some just two pages), and most offer a surprise twist at the end, though occasionally the only reaction these endings may elicit from the reader is “Huh?” The universal scope of the themes transcends the Mexican provenance; for example, one detects an apocalyptic influence in Liliana V. Blum’s “Pink Lemonade,” and Argentine Julio Cortázar’s “Bestiary” influences Bernardo Fernández’s “Lions.” Most of the volume’s 34 authors, half of whom are women, are relatively unknown to American readers, and for many of them, publication in this anthology represents their first exposure to an English-reading audience. The translations, several of which were done by the editors, convey the individuality, if not idiosyncrasies, of these tales. VERDICT This collection will appeal mostly to fans of fantasy and sf and, to a lesser degree, those interested in contemporary Mexican literature.”
—Library Journal

“Langorous, edgy, sumptuously beautiful by turns, Three Messages expands our understanding of contemporary Mexican literary production, collapsing high-low boundaries and pre-established ideas about national identity.”
—Debra Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Spanish Literature, Cornell University

“When one talks to Mexican science fiction writers, the subject of ‘Mexican national content’ commonly comes up. Mexican science fiction writers all know what that is, or they claim to know, anyway. They commonly proclaim that their work needs more national flavor. This book has got that. Plenty. The interesting part is that this ‘Mexican national content’ bears so little resemblance to content that most Americans would consider ‘Mexican.’”
—from the introduction by Bruce Sterling

Table of Contents (not final order)

Lucía Abdó, Second-Hand Pachuca
Maria Isabel Aguirre, Today, You Walk Along a Narrow Path
Ana Gloria Álvarez Pedrajo, The Mediator
Liliana V. Blum, Pink Lemonade
Agustín Cadena, Murillo Park
Ana Clavel, Warning and Three Messages in the Same Parcel
Yussel Dardón, A Pile of Bland Deserts
Óscar de la Borbolla, Wittgenstein’s Umbrellas
Beatriz Escalante, Luck Has Its Limits
Bruno Estañol, The Infamous Juan Manuel
Iliana Estañol, In Waiting
Claudia Guillén, The Drop
Mónica Lavín, Trompe l’œil
Eduardo Mendoza, The Pin
Queta Navagómez, Rebellious
Amélie Olaiz, Amalgam
Donají Olmedo, The Stone
Edmée Pardo, 1965
Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, The Last Witness to Creation
Carmen Rioja, The Náhual Offering
René Roquet, Returning to Night
Guillermo Samperio, Mister Strogoff
Alberto Chimal, Variation on a Theme of Coleridge
Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Photophobia
Pepe Rojo, The President without Organs
Esther M. Garcia, Mannequin
Bernardo Fernández, Lions
Horacio Sentíes Madrid, The Transformist
Karen Chacek, The Hour of the Fireflies
Hernán Lara Zavala, Hunting Iguanas
Gerardo Sifuentes, Future Perfect
Amparo Dávila, The Guest
Gabriela Damián Miravete, Nereid Future
José Luis Zárate, Wolves


Events
January 26, 7PM, Book People, Austin, TX
Chris N. Brown, Bernardo Fernández and Pepe Rojo celebrate the publication of Three Messages with an event at one of Austin’s premiere indie bookstores.

January 28, 2PM, Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street, Houston, TX 77005
Join Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, Bruno Estañol, Horacio Sentíes Madrid, and Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, for an afternoon celebration of the book at one of Houston’s pre-eminent indie bookstores.

January 26, 6 – 9PM, Creativity and the Brain Conference, Texas Diabetes Institute, 701 S. Zarzamora, San Antonio, TX 78207
Featuring editor Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and three contributors, Bruno Estañol, Horacio Sentíes Madrid, and Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez


We've had an astonishing number of pre-orders for the book—you can get yours here:

Pre-order from Small Beer Press.

Pre-order from Amazon.

The Terror Telestrator

I recently had the pleasure of watching the Alex Rivera film Sleep Dealer, an amazing work of Mexican cyberpunk about info-maquilas and memories for sale in near-future Tijuana. One of the more over-the-top plot elements was a reality television show in which viewers help drone pilots select their terror targets.

Or so I thought.

This morning's NY Times has an amazing report about the Pentagon's struggle to figure out how to process the huge quantities of data it is receiving from the proliferating network of Predator/Reaper drones patrolling the skies of the earth. Last year the drones were in the air for 200,000 combat flight hours, each generating a constant feed of live video and other data. That content is amount to exponentially increase, not only through the addition of more drones, but through the addition of eyes. This year the Reapers will be able to begin recording video in ten directions at once. Next year it will increase to 30 directions at once, and after that, 65. That's a lot of eyes in the skies.

To better harvest the actionable intelligence contained in these planetary surveillance tapes, the brass in charge of the Geospatial Intelligence Agency has been hanging out in ESPN broadcast vans, learning how football game video is transformed into a real-time data feed that gives the viewers a better understanding of the totality of what's happening—through a mix of text, live video, replays, and graphical augmentations of the filmed reality—than most of the coaches probably have during the game.

Government agencies are still having trouble making sense of the flood of data they collect for intelligence purposes, a point underscored by the 9/11 Commission and, more recently, by President Obama after the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound passenger flight on Christmas Day.

Mindful of those lapses, the Air Force and other military units are trying to prevent an overload of video collected by the drones, and they are turning to the television industry to learn how to quickly share video clips and display a mix of data in ways that make analysis faster and easier.

They are even testing some of the splashier techniques used by broadcasters, like the telestrator that John Madden popularized for scrawling football plays. It could be used to warn troops about a threatening vehicle or to circle a compound that a drone should attack.

“Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

Pretty interesting stuff. But how much are the dudes in the DOD trailers in Orlando going to be able to do with the multiple "games" represented by several hundred or thousand drones in the air at any one time?

Isn't the more likely result the birth of the ultimate in open source intelligence — an application of the SETI@home distributed computing model to fighting the war on terror? Imagine if the Pentagon set up a separate YouTube channel in which the raw video was made available (even if only on a time-delayed basis for ex post facto analysis) to the general public for analysis? If the FBI has an iPhone app for information on the most wanted terrorists, how much of a leap would it be for DOD to turn the aerial surveillance of the brown highways of the Yemeni interior and the black spots on the map of Waziristan over to the enthusiastic entrepreneurs of augmented reality apps? Let the zeitgeist achieve what it wants, and allow the private sector to turn the video into the basis of a real-world tactical game, in which teenage boys in suburban Chicago tag the Talis for special attention.

Regarding the narcotic effect of eating giant ant eggs

"We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror."

— Snaut, the cyberneticist, from Tarkovsky's Solaris, as quoted in my paper "Feeling Very Estranged: Science Fiction and Society in the Aftermath of the Twentieth Century."


[Pic: Mark Dery about to dive into a hearty meal of escamoles (eggs harvested from the abdomens of very large ants) and some sort of fried grub.]

I am back from a week in D.F. con los Mexicanos Fantasticos. The three-day colloquium on Parallel Worlds as the literary track of the Festival de Mexico, featuring Mark Dery, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, Bruce Sterling, Linda Nagata and me, moderated by authors Mauricio Montiel (who put together the amazing program with the encouragement of Festival director Jose Wolffer), Bernardo Fernandez (BEF), Alberto Chimal, and Pepe Rojo ended Thursday, but I am just now collecting myself from the experience.


[Pic: Author and comics auteur Bernardo Fernandez (BEF) and author, organizer and Dharma Initiative member Mauricio Montiel Figueiras.]

The program featured two tracks each day: a noon round table discussion featuring two of the gringo autores answering questions from the moderator and the audience, with an evening presentation of lectures/essays by two of the speakers. Thematically, much of the discussion seemed to focus on science fiction as the literature best equipped to understand contemporary identity in a technologically mediated world.

Some of the highlights (in addition to those previously blogged here, including remarks by Mark Dery and Christopher Priest):

M. John Harrison on the idea of personality. The idea that we are all cpmpiling our personalities moment to moment. The twenty-first century will reveal all that, and cure it.

"I was raised with fixed cultures as being wholly determinative of the individual's identity... The collapse of culture may already have happened, and we may be on the other side of it, and it's probably a good thing."

We live in era in which the self exists in mediated feedback loops, in which media inputs impact personality. How you interrupt those loops remains to be seen. The Adbusters approach does not seem to be the answer.

The writer's task is to "write about individuals who are constantly being mediated and re-mediated. Not alienated, but pureed."

"If you want to break an orthodoxy, the first thing to do is to break the medium itself."

"While I think of myself as a subtle propagandist, I am propagandist for my own ideas."

"I write to find out why I'm writing what I'm writing."


[Pic: M. John Harrison and Christopher Priest enjoying a long lunch properly lubricated for the discussion of temas fantasticas.]

Linda Nagata: "Could it be that as a sign of intimacy, we show more identities to each other?"

Bruce Sterling: The fluidity of the idea of national identity.

The idea of "developing countries" is a bogus anachronism. Places like Mexico City are better thought of as "areas of global urbanization." Mexico CIty is much closer to the reality of Shanghai or Lagos than rural Chiapas or Oaxaca. Mexico CIty as the "global capital of Latino globalization."

The ascendant role of the *city*, which establish national economic archetypes and don't care about borders, in a world where the nation state is slipping away, as the national governments lose control of their economies and borders.

"People talk about emerging economies. What about *submerging* economies -- places like Detroit...parts of D.C. where the AIDS rates are higher than Uganda."

"In the future, the poor will not be able to avoid becoming posthuman, because they just can't afford it."



[Pic: Los Nagatas, comiendo.]

"Nationalism is mostly useful when you are being invaded by another country...If no one invades you, you can disintegrate, expecting invasion, like Russia, but instead getting total collapse."

We started in the 20th century with the self characterized by a condition of modern anomie and alienation. We then moved into the postmodern condition, characterized by technology and subjectivity fragmentation. We are now moving into something else, the precise characteristics of which remain to be seen...

Envisioning a viable future that is not disastrous, Bruce considers the possibility that (i) we might get to where our technology is sustainable, (ii) we get rid of material poverty — food and shelter and rudimentary health care, and (iii) we secure extended lifespans in which it is common to be 100-110 years old. The result? "A serene Ft. Lauderdale society run by old people who are healthy and enjoy themselves...The 20-year-olds may rebel, but mostly they wait their turn."

The early indicators of posthumanism:

- athletes
- celebrities
- supermodels
- political/cult heroes

Terri Schiavo was the first celebrity posthuman, and there was recently an Italian Terri Schiavo. Keep your eyes out for the next one.


[Pic: Mark Dery and M. John Harrison debating posthuman ethics outside El Opera.]

Mark Dery:

On the space age: "Was it all just a moonage daydream?"

A mythology of the next five minutes.

"In the age of YouTube, we've learned to stop worrying and love the Panopticon."


[Pic: Bruce Sterling, Christopher Priest, and M. John Harrison relighting the pilot light on their sense of wonder at the Templo Mayor.]

Christopher Priest:

"The general novel (and also the fantasy novel) can of course contain actions or decisions, with consequences for which the characters become responsible...the point I am making is that only in the modern speculative novel is responsibility the core, the argument, the message.

"When ideas are suppressed, the tyrants move in to manipulate ordinary people. When expression is made less free, then ideas start to suffer. I hold as axiomatic the belief the fiction should express ideas, should defy tyrants and governments, that it should speak directly to the reader, and provide entertainment and provocation in equal measure. This is the cause for which I stand."



Mexico City is a truly magnificent 21st century city, a cultural, ethnic, and architectural/archeological palimpsest where the pre-Columbian past and the colonial ghosts and the imminent future all coexist in a space where one sometimes expects to turn the corner and find Perdido Street Station. Our hosts were all smarter and more prolific than us (and infinitely more hospitable), revealing a Mexican sf and fantastic fiction scene that merits more attention from its northern neighbors (more on that later, but the early plans for a cross-border fantastic fiction fest in Juarez or Tijuana are abrewing). Most impressive were the audience members, who asked some of the most provocative questions on these topics any of us had ever heard.


[Pic: Mad genius collaborators Bernardo Fernandez (BEF) and Pepe Rojo, planning their epic film memoir of their trip through Morocco retracing the steps of William S. Burroughs.]