Resumen de Afterword: Cervantes and Spanish Science Fiction

Dale J. Pratt

• español

  Tradicionalmente, no se menciona a Cervantes en la historia de la ciencia ficción. Sin embargo, un análisis de varias muestras de la ciencia ficción española contemporánea, tales como El mundo de Yarek (Elia Barceló), “El día que hicimos la Transición” (Ricard de la Casa y Pedro Jorge Romero), y “El centro muerto” (León Arsenal), demuestra que existen varios paralelos entre éstas y el Quijote. Se divisan, especialmente en el segundo tomo, vislumbres de algunos de los subgéneros y temas más importantes de la ciencia ficción, entre ellos la virtualidad y la construcción de mundos, las ucronías (con sus historias alternativas, viajes en el tiempo, y rarezas en el transcurso del tiempo), y las nuevas ontologías como las inteligencias artificiales y las identidades/memorias cargadas.

• English

  Over the course of the novels, we learn that during one pass, Akasa-Puspa captured our solar system away from the galaxy; the dense cluster is now inhabited by humans and other Terran flora and fauna, along with some extraterrestrial species, including the dreaded Griff (the "demons" of the title). Additionally, just as Cervantes's creative work as a writer is metafictionally mirrored throughout Don Quixote, Aguilera's and Redal's world-building of Akasa-Puspa is thematically mirrored in these novels by the work of great Terran engineers and scientists, who, during ages long forgotten, transformed the solar system into a Dyson swarm, the technological secrets of which drive the action throughout the novels. According to Don Quixote, the "sabios encantadores" who bedevil him throughout Part I have the power to alter reality (or at least its appearance) at whim. Palma's Trilogía Victoriana-El mapa del tiempo (2008), El mapa del cielo, and the aptly-titled El mapa del caos (2014)-displays magisterial world-building of several literary versions of nineteenth-century London and, like the Akasa-Puspa novels, metafictionally mirrors this world-building within the text through characters' myriad creations of virtual realities, time-travels, and shifting between dimensions of the multiverse.