Futurism

• They believe in looking to the past as a way to understand what may come next.
• Recently, I’ve grown interested in Latin American writers who explore an imagined future through speculative fiction.
• It’s a genre rooted in respect for both Peru’s ancestral memory and attention to present-day societal issues.

Writing to mirror society

• In Spanish, the verb “especular” relates to optics, such as a reflection in a mirror.
• As in English, it also means to speculate – or observe the world attentively and think about it inquisitively.
• The stories feature Native technologies like quipus or “talking knots”, an ancient system for recording and transmitting information, and “andenes,” or agriculture terraces.

Fiction grounded in Peru’s history

• But modern Peruvian futurism stories offer more than science fiction starring Peruvian characters or places.
• Sarko Medina’s “Microleyenda” tells of a golden condor suspended in flight in outer space while it holds a sphere of gold in its claws.
• These authors side-step the traditional science fiction focus on the technological progress of human society to explore the consequences of limitless dependence on digital tools.
• How does the human race and the natural world survive when racism and discrimination continue despite technological and scientific advances?

The future arrives for everyone

• Much classic science fiction from the United States, in contrast, imagines a future mostly starring Caucasian heroes and Western technologies.
• On the website Future Fiction, an editorial project to explore the diversity of the future, Italian science fiction writer Francesco Verso reminds readers that “we all tell ‘tomorrow stories’” and that the future arrives everywhere and for everyone, not only for those living in developed societies.