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Fuentes, Carlos

(1928-2012) Mexican diplomat and author whose acerbic Magic Realism – a more worldly version of that idiom than found in the works of his coeval, Gabriel García Márquez (1928-2014) – featured in stories and novels from the 1950s on. From his first collection of short stories – Los días enmascarados ["The Masked Days"] (coll 1954; part trans Margaret Sayers Peden as Burnt Water, 1980) Fuentes made a foray into fantastic literature. In the same collection he included sf like "El que inventó la pólvora" ["The One Who Invented Gunpowder"], about a planet where Entropy seems to work faster, but this proves to be all a conspiracy of world industry to induce consumption. Constancia y otras novelas para virgenes (coll 1989; trans Thomas Christensen as Constancia; and Other Stories for Virgins coll 1990) is a series of complexly elaborate fables. In his last years he reunited his most famous fantastic short stories in one collection, Cuentos sobrenaturales ["Supernatural Short Stories"] (coll 2007), including short stories originally published in Los días enmascarados and Cantar de ciegos ["The Song of the Blind"] (coll 1964), and also adding three previously unpublished tales. Among these is a fine and ironic mixture of sf and Fantasy, "El robot sacramentado" ["The Sacrament Robot"] (2005 Revista de la Universidad de México). A new generation of Robots, developed and programmed in different countries and having the idiosyncrasies of each of them, help God to find Adam and Eve. As a reward, they are all christened, receiving new names and human capacities.

Novels of genre interest (very little of Fuentes's work is in fact purely mimetic) include Aura (1962 chap; trans Lysander Kemp 1965 chap), a ghost story which incorporates elements of vampirism, like the much later Vlad (2010; trans Alejandro Branger and Ethan Shaskan Bumas 2012), which is a savage Satire of contemporary middle-class Mexico featuring the undead Vlad the Impaler (see Vampires), who has come to Mexico City in order to negotiate a property deal. Titles of more direct sf interest include La Cabeza de la Hidra (1978; trans Margaret Sayers Peden as The Hydra Head 1978), set just before the outbreak of World War Three in Mexico; Terra Nostra (1975; trans Margaret Sayers Peden 1976), a vast Doppelganger-crowded Fabulation about the entire Earth (though ultimately centred in an Alternate History Paris), which climaxes with an Eschatological transfiguration as 2000 dawns; Cristóbal nonato (1987; trans Alfred Mac Adam and Fuentes as Christopher Unborn 1989), a Near-Future lament – set in a 1992 world imploding from accelerated Climate Change – narrated by a child still in the womb; La Silla del Águila (2002; trans Kristina Cordero as The Eagle's Throne 2006), a Satire set in a Near Future Mexico (the year is 2020) in which the United States has sabotaged Mexico's communications systems (in retaliation for Mexico's not taking the American line on an oil issue), forcing everyone to communicate by letters (the novel is itself epistolary); and La voluntad y la fortuna (2008; trans Edith Grossman as Destiny and Desire 2011), which is narrated posthumously by the severed head of one of its twinned protagonists, commingles myth (the "twins" who are in some sense incarnations of Castor and Pollux and/or Cain and Abel) and Near Future Politics, comprising in the end a culminating Equipoisally-thrusting vision of twenty-first Mexico. As from the beginning of his career, Fuentes's primary focus was is native land. [JC/MAFD]

Carlos Manuel Fuentes Macías

born Panama City, Panama: 11 November 1928

died Mexico City, Mexico: 15 May 2012

works (selected)

collections and stories

about the author

This listing is confined to works related to his sf or fantastic literature.

links

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 21:28 pm on 6 November 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fuentes_carlos>