Bazterrica, Agustina
Entry updated 10 March 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1974- ) Argentinian author, active from before 2015; her third novel, the Near Future Cadáver exquisito (2017; trans Sarah Moses as Tender Is the Flesh 2020), is set in a world where a Pandemic caused by a fatal virus very readily transmissible from animals to humans has generated a point of Transition, after which, all "lower" creatures having been destroyed, it has become necessary, if only in a culinary sense, for humans to become food. Suspicions are aroused that the governments of the world – overwhelmed by Climate Change which is responsible for increasing waves of desperate migrants, and human Overpopulation which is rampant at a time when all other planetary species have been exposed to the Sixth Extinction – have created the Transition to solve these problems. Migrants being occasionally resistant, factory farms have been established to breed human livestock (see Dystopia; Horror in SF; Slavery). The tale takes place seemingly some decades after cruel adjustments have been made to human society, in order for this transformation to become the modus vivendi, with strict censorships and curfews, but no crowding: the Satire is both deadpan and exorbitant. Echoes of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents or their Country and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick (1729 chap) seem entirely deliberate.
Bazterrica's next novel, Las Indignas (2023; trans Sarah Moses as The Unworthy 2025), is also set in a devastated Dystopian Near Future world, and again a cohort of those who have survived – in this case vulnerable young women (see Feminism; Women in SF) – are scapegoatingly fixated upon for savage treatment. The setting, once a monastery, is a coercive Zone run by sadists at the behest of a Secret Master, their main function being seemingly to inflict tortures upon virgins (see Religion; Clichés) whose fate after being Chosen is grim. The world is not expected to end well. [JC]
Agustina María Bazterrica
born Buenos Aires, Argentina: 1974
works (selected)
- Cadáver exquisito (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Alfaguara, 2017) [pb/]
- Tender Is the Flesh (London: Pushkin Press, 2020) [trans by Sarah Moses of the above: pb/]
- Las Indignas (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Alfaguara, 2023) [pb/]
- The Unworthy (London: The Pushkin Press, 2025) [trans by Sarah Moses of the above: hb/]
collections and stories
- Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (London: Pushkin Press, 2023) [coll: trans by Sarah Moses: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry