The Aura of Science in Fantastic Tales by Leopoldo Lugones, Macedonio Fernández, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

According to some critics, there is no such thing as science fiction in Argentina. Remarkably though, literary figures such as Leopoldo Lugones, Macedonio Fernández, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Santiago Dabove, among others, have tried their pens at fantastic stories that offer variant models for science fiction. In their utopias or dystopias, science intermingles with literary imagination and superb prose to shed light on the multiple facets of the human condition. Comments on and reviews of their best-known and most anthologised stories more often than not address the presence of the unknowable and the inexplicable rather than the inspiration of scientific knowledge as a way to understand how things work in the world. Jorge Luis Borges figures as an exception to the above statement, because much has been written on the influence of science on his work. The same could be said of some of Julio Cortázar’s short stories and Bioy Casares’s La Invención de Morel [Morel’s Invention], long considered a masterpiece of Argentine science fiction. I will therefore restrict the present study to those less-explored features of what are nonetheless representative pieces of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, without enquiring into the differences between science fiction and fantastic literature, since the subtle line dividing both concepts is still a matter of controversy among critics.