Antolín Rato, Mariano
Entry updated 20 January 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1943-2025) Spanish author and translator from English, French and Italian, for which he received the National Award for the Work of a Translator in 2014; also known by his pseudonym Martín Lendínez. He translated into Spanish works by members of the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs), Lost Generation (William Faulkner, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound), Generation X (Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis), and other influential authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Raymond Carver and Malcolm Lowry. Within the sf genre he translated around 100 works, including novels and short stories.
He wrote six sf novels, five of them published in the 1970s and the 1980s following the style of the New Wave, which in Spain was called Nova-Expression. He is therefore considered the initiator and greatest exponent of this movement in Spanish. His sf debut Cuando 900 mil mach aprox ["When 900 Thousand Mach Approx"] (1973) is considered the first Spanish underground novel and was hailed by critics as "the best literary representation of an acid trip". The title refers to the dispersion of Spaceships that transport surviving humans to the stars after a cosmic Disaster. It won the New Critics Award in 1975.
His second novel was De vulgari Zyklon B manifestante ["De vulgari Zyklon B protester"] (1975), an even more demanding work than the previous one, which offered an allegory of an approaching apocalypse. Entre espacios intermedios: WHAAM! ["Between Intermediate Spaces: WHAAM!"] (1978) was a kind of allegory of tomorrow that included physical and psychic journeys, Drugs and Humour; it won the Zikkurath award. The novella Mundo araña ["Spider World"] (1981) focused on the mechanisms of control and social manipulation by those in power. His last novel belonging to the Nova-Expression was Campos unificados de la conciencia ["Unified Fields of Consciousness"] (1984), an allegorical story about simulacra of living beings.
After that, he abandoned the speculative genre to write a dozen novels and several essays, some of which won awards. Finally he published the more conventional sf tale La suerte suprema ["The Supreme Luck"] (2022), in which an aging writer tries to find a way to rekindle his relationship with an explosive virtual woman after a global blackout, fleeing the environmental disasters caused by devastating Climate Change. It won the 2023 Celsius Award at the Black Week in Gijón.
Mariano Antolín Rato also wrote articles on the genre and reviews in magazines such as Nueva Dimensión, El Urogallo, El Viejo Topo and Zikkurath, for which he was a member of the editorial board.[MV]
Mariano Antolín Rato
born Gijón, Asturias, Spain: 8 December 1943
died Motril, Granada, Spain: 10 January 2025
works (selected)
- Cuando 900 mil mach aprox ["When 900 Thousand Mach Approx"] (Palma de Mallorca, Spain: Papeles de Son Armadans, 1973) [pb/]
- De vulgari Zyklon B manifestante ["De vulgari Zyklon B protester"] (Gijón, Spain: Júcar, 1975) [pb/Juan Calonge]
- Entre espacios intermedios: WHAAM! ["Between Intermediate Spaces: WHAAM!"] (Barcelona, Spain: Iniciativas Editoriales, 1978) [pb/José María Broto]
- Mundo araña ["Spider World"] (Madrid, Spain: Hiperión, 1981) [pb/Juan Calonge]
- Campos unificados de la conciencia ["Unified Fields of Consciousness"] (Madrid, Spain: Cátedra, 1984) [pb/]
- La suerte suprema ["The Supreme Luck"] (Oviedo, Asturias, Spain: Pez de Plata, 2022) [pb/]
links
- Mariano Antolín Rato at La Tercera Fundación ["The Third Foundation"] (in Spanish)
- Wikipedia (in Spanish)
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