In 1966, Ángel Rama famously characterized a group of writers who did not fully inhabit the latitudes of realism as “los raros,” the weird ones.Footnote 1 The term was a rhetorical choice, a euphemism to avoid saying that several influential writers Rama held in high regard incorporated fantasy and science fiction (SF) elements into their work.Footnote 2 The problem for Rama (Reference Rama1966, 10) was that these two genres were detached from reality and therefore not sufficiently serious. For him, fantasy and SF implied an evasion or disregard for real social and political struggles.
The category “los raros,” far from being atypical, was symptomatic of how literary critics perceived these two genres. SF, for instance, has occupied a marginal space in the region during most of its history. The rejection also applied to the literary market, as Ramiro Sanchiz points out in the introduction of Mundo weird, an anthology of short stories characterized as new weird—a hybrid genre at the edges of SF, horror, and fantasy, which this article returns to as a central analytical category.Footnote 3
For most of its history, Latin American SF writers remained underground, without achieving other forms of circulation beyond the magazines they published. Paradoxically, this lack of visibility and opportunity fostered a certain creative autonomy. As the internet became more accessible in the 2000s, writers began founding magazines and sharing their work on blogs. Free from concern over potential reception in the market or academia, their literature circulated within a small but fertile sphere of experimentation. This marginal position for SF was not unique to Uruguay—where Rama and Sanchiz are from—or to Latin America.Footnote 4 As Fredric Jameson (Reference Jameson2005, xiv) observes, there has been a more general “conventional high-cultural repudiation” of the genre among literary critics worldwide.
Nonetheless, Latin American SF has become increasingly visible. Among the most recent contributions to this field are several academic books, including the two volumes of Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana, edited by Teresa López-Pellisa and Silvia G. Kurlat Ares (Reference López-Pellisa and Kurlat Ares2020, Reference López-Pellisa and Kurlat Ares2021), and Recalibrando los circuitos de la máquina, edited by Jonatán Martín Gómez and Patricio Sullivan (Reference Martín Gómez and Sullivan2022).Footnote 5 This recent circulation is not only taking place in academia: Alfaguara, Random House, and Anagrama are editing writers who belonged to the world of independent publishing some years ago, and the international media is also paying attention. In a New York Times article titled “Science Fiction from Latin America, with Zombie Dissidents and Aliens in the Amazon,” Emily Hart (Reference Hart2023) provides a general map of some of the most influential authors on the scene. Among many others, such as Sanchiz, she mentions three names: Agustina Bazterrica, Michel Nieva, and Erick J. Mota.
Each of these three writers arrived at the genre through independent publishing circuits before gaining international visibility. Bazterrica gained global recognition with Cadáver exquisito in 2017. She had an established literary trajectory before gaining worldwide popularity, and her work has since received growing critical attention, focused almost exclusively on the latter novel. Fernando Valcheff-García (Reference Valcheff-García2025), for instance, examines Cadáver exquisito as an aesthetic-political device that challenges the capitalist logic of the assembly line, reading its formal strategies not as a representation of neoliberal violence but as a disruption of it from within. Where that scholarship focuses on the formal operations of the novel, the present article turns to Las indignas (2023), a more recent and critically underexplored work.
In a similar vein, Nieva wrote several books before he gained notoriety with “El niño dengue,” which appeared in the prestigious British magazine Granta in 2021. In 2023, he extended this short story and transformed it into the novel La infancia del mundo. Mota (Reference Mota2022, 1), a physicist, initiated his SF literary career by publishing in virtual and independent magazines. In 2004, he founded the e-zine Disparo en Red, and nowadays he is one of the genre’s most important Latin American figures.
The literary production of Bazterrica, Nieva, and Mota engages directly with the landscapes of contemporary destruction rather than offering escape from them. SF, therefore, is a privileged platform that provides “an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction,” which is one of the general purposes of literature (Jameson Reference Jameson1981, 77). The formulation “an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction” comes from two sources: Althusser’s work on ideology, more specifically his fundamental “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” and Lévi-Strauss’s reading on myth. These imaginary resolutions, Jameson claims, operate only at a symbolic level, which means they cannot generate real transformations in the world. What circulates in literature, then, are the ideologies, defined as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence” (Jameson Reference Jameson1991, 51). Even though they cannot fully transform reality, literary symbolic acts constitute a way to understand the problems of a given epoch. For Jameson, this symbolic operation is the only way to access history—which the subject cannot fully grasp since it belongs to the Real, a Lacanian concept that Jameson, following Althusser, reworks into his own framework of ideological analysis (Lacan Reference Lacan1977). In this sense, SF is not about what could come but about the contemporary conditions of existence and the imaginary relationships we have with the present.
One way to account for the emergence of these ideologies in contemporary Latin American SF is to ask what historical conjuncture makes them possible. Read from this optic, what circulates in contemporary Latin American SF can be understood as aesthetic responses to the failure of modernity’s promise—that technological progress would translate into social cohesion and the satisfaction of collective needs—a promise increasingly undermined by the intensification of neoliberal policies and the dismantling of the state institutions once responsible for meeting basic social needs. What capitalism offers in their place is nearly the opposite: technological advances in the service of accumulation, organized violence, and planetary devastation. Where existing scholarship has approached comparable tensions through posthumanist frameworks—such as J. Andrew Brown’s Cyborgs in Latin America (Reference Brown2010) and Liliana Colanzi’s “Of Animals, Monsters, and Cyborgs” (Reference Colanzi2017), both of which engage with Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles to theorize hybrid figures in Latin American SF—the present article takes a different optic. It locates the weird moment in Latin American SF as the point at which prevailing ideologies show their fissures and open the scene to something new. Read as an ideological symptom of the contradictions of capitalist modernity itself, this article asks what relationship to that modernity and its alternatives these fictions open up. This opening, however, operates at the symbolic level alone: The article treats literature as a relatively autonomous practice that cannot be collapsed into political praxis.
In exploring the work of Bazterrica, Nieva, and Mota, I analyze two ideologies circulating in their fictions: Terminator (from James Cameron’s 1984 film, implying the capitalist destruction of society as the inevitable future) and Avatar (from Cameron’s 2009 film, suggesting a premodern answer to capitalist destruction), as Mark Fisher (Reference Fisher, Mackay and Avanessian2014, 343) puts it. With their respective aesthetics, these two ideologies or symbolic acts relate to one of the most urgent threats we face: the devastation of natural resources under the capitalist administration of modernity and the consequent climate change. Bazterrica’s Las indignas exposes Avatar’s violent reverse, its limits and inconsistencies, while Nieva’s La infancia del mundo depicts it as the only force capable of stopping Terminator. Mota’s Habana undergüater and El foso de Mabuya move away from this symbolic dichotomy (Terminator versus Avatar) to show another possible answer to the political conjuncture. Mota thus opens a window to imagine what Bolívar Echeverría calls “alternative modernity” and Fisher “postcapitalism”: another way of organizing social relations and technological advances. “Alternative modernity” as a concept disarticulates the ideological position that circulates in both literary pieces (Jorge Baradit’s “La conquista mágica de América”) and critical texts that describes modernity as a synonym of capitalism, where technology is defined only in terms of “megadeath-drive … that … can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t show pity or remorse or fear and absolutely will not stop, ever” (Fisher Reference Fisher, Mackay and Avanessian2014, 343). In other words, “alternative modernity” distances itself from the notion that modernity supposes a technical progression at the exclusive service of the destructive, expanded-scale project, which treats nature “as a simple repertoire of certain materials and certain energies” (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2010, 114).
“Megadeath-drive” versus “mother-planet”
Echeverría (Reference Echeverría1997, 137, 161) defines modernity as “a progress in production techniques” that allows “the conquest of abundance.” For him, modernity begins in the tenth century and consolidates with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2010, 19–21; Echeverría Reference Echeverría2021, 215). The technological advances enable humanity to produce goods and satisfy needs through a nonaggressive relationship with nature. Echeverría (Reference Echeverría2021, 216) argues that this revolution produces a “qualitative leap” in human work, raising human activity to a new level and opening unprecedented possibilities for creating and exchanging forms not seen in a millennium.
However, the capitalist mode of production of social wealth requires, to be established and maintained as such, an always renewed under-satisfaction of the set of social needs (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2021, 223). As Marx (Reference Marx1990, 789) notes, this dynamic produces a relative surplus population—workers expelled from or never incorporated into the labor force, and therefore unable to reproduce their conditions of existence despite a technical base that would make it possible. Echeverría (Reference Echeverría2021, 223) develops this argument adding that capitalism needs this “surplus population” so that “the purchase and exploitation of the labor force are ‘profitable,’ leaving a surplus value or profit for the owners of the means of production.” For this reason, Echeverría (Reference Echeverría2021, 223) continues, the primary task of the capitalist economy is “to incessantly construct and reconstruct an absolute scarcity precisely from the renewed possibilities of abundance: an artificial absolute scarcity.”
Moreover, the use of the technological and technical advances under the capitalist horizon of generating value for the sake of generating value leads to an “irrational or counterproductive exploitation of current nature (treated as a simple repertoire of certain materials and certain energies), which insists on destroying its own balance, if such destruction serves the interests … of capitalist accumulation” (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2010, 114). This “misuse” of technological advances reinscribes an archaic approach toward nature. Before modernity, during times of real scarcity, this aggressive metabolism involved a mandatory “strategy designed to defend one’s own existence in an always foreign domain” (Echeverría Reference Echeverría1997, 142); this way of interacting with nature to satisfy social needs through use values consisted of treating natural resources “like a threatening enemy that must be defeated and dominated” (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2010, 22). Modernity and its productive capacity allow humanity to abandon this conception of nature as something to be conquered and establish a relationship of “collaboration” instead—a vision that is in explicit dialogue with Herbert Marcuse’s (Reference Marcuse1974) rereading of the Freudian concept of Eros, the libidinal life force that points toward a freer form of social existence. However, the irrational capitalist exploitation reinscribes the archaic, warlike approach. Fisher names this destructive administration Terminator.
In his 2012 intervention “Terminator vs. Avatar,” Fisher (Reference Fisher, Mackay and Avanessian2014, 343) characterizes Terminator as the capitalist “megadeath-drive … that … can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t show pity or remorse or fear and absolutely will not stop, ever.” As Marx (Reference Marx1990) notes, the emergence of capitalism marks the first time in history when the satisfaction of needs is subordinated to the mechanism of generating value on an expanded scale. Here, the satisfaction of needs is secondary, just a means to a greater end called accumulation—endless accumulation. Terminator, then, shows the terrible environmental consequences of exploiting Earth’s finite resources as if they were infinite. The killing machine presents technology only in terms of destruction, an instrument of capitalist oppression and exploitation that creates a terrible dystopia.
Like in Cameron’s movie, Terminator supposes that the only thing left for humanity is to survive in a devastated world that does not offer a potential solution or an alternative path to the “megadeath-drive.” Fisher (Reference Fisher2009, 14) defines this horizon as “capitalist realism,” a symbolic representation in which “capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” Fisher’s “capitalist realism” resembles Echeverría’s ethos realista. According to Echeverría, the ethos realista is a way of understanding and interacting spontaneously with capitalism as if it were the only social formation possible. For this militant position, the current social formation has no contradictions. Therefore, it is impossible to imagine “an alternative world” (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2000, 110).
In contrast to Fisher’s category of “capitalist realism” as the totalizing ideology of our times, Echeverría writes that besides ethos realista, other ways of interacting with the social formation exist. This is the case of the ethos barroco, which he describes as a way of integrating capitalism and modernity as a historical fact while resisting subordinating the use value to the universal abstraction of value and capitalist accumulation. Its concrete mechanism, which Echeverría calls codigofagia, consists in inhabiting the dominant cultural code from within and transforming it rather than rejecting it outright. Yet the distinction is not without its tensions; Echeverría himself acknowledges the difficulty of sustaining the ethos barroco as a differential mode of inhabiting capitalist modernity—and thereby opening the door for another kind of modernity. He points out that the operations of the ethos barroco tend to be subsumed by the ethos realista, the dominant position within capitalism. Echeverría (Reference Echeverría2010, 154) warns that even those artistic forms that survive outside the dominant logic of reproducibility end up being integrated “as ‘zones of research’ and ‘talent scouting’”—artistic projects aligned with the ethos barroco do not remain external to the dominant regime either. This is the tendency that Terminator embodies by describing a scenario without a feasible alternative to the capitalist “megadeath-drive.” Terminator, somehow, has been deeply introjected into our psyche, and destruction seems to be the only available “representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence” (Jameson Reference Jameson1991, 51). The source of the famous phrase equally attributed to Jameson and Slavoj Žižek is precisely here: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (in Fisher Reference Fisher2009, 8). For Fisher and Echeverría, then, capitalist realism and ethos realista comprise a symptomatic and dominating ideological force that, against all odds, we need to resist: The elusive how haunts them, but for neither can the answer be found in the voice of Avatar.
In contrast to the ideological conceptualization of Terminator as a symbolic act, Avatar refers to humans as “primitives organically linked to the mother/planet” (Fisher Reference Fisher, Mackay and Avanessian2014, 339). This second symbolic act expresses the need to return to premodern forms of social organization. In some cases, it acquires the form of a community that enacts a sustainable way of life and knowledge—different ways of understanding justice or property, for example—that capitalist technological advances have displaced or eradicated. These fictions present the recovery of something lost, an ancient essence, which must be reactivated to save the world from the Terminator “megadeath-drive.” These fictions can introduce Avatar in an isolated form, that is, without the dystopian deployment of technology under the capitalist administration. However, Avatar is usually articulated with Terminator, as in Cameron’s Avatar itself. The movie presents the premodern way of life as a method of fighting back and resisting the capitalist “megadeath-drive,” a narrative arc that has become very popular in several recent fictional works.
There are many examples of this symbolic articulation between Terminator and Avatar in Latin American SF. In the short story “La conquista mágica de América,” included in the SF Latin American anthology El tercer mundo después del sol, Baradit (Reference Baradit and Bastidas Pérez2021, 22) re-creates the conquest of the American continent by the Spanish Empire against the original populations. The “red race,” as he calls it, is integrated by “eagle-warriors from Anáhuac Mexico, young Quechua men, crocodile women from the Amazon, young shwars capable of becoming invisible, jaguar shamans from the Atacama Desert, Mayan soldiers who know the secrets of dream combats.” The resistance to the conquerors, embodied by Cortés and his weapons of destruction, is not material but magical. At the end of the text, a character called “la machi”—a female shaman in Mapuche culture—says that the only way to stop the conquerors’ “senseless violence” is not with weapons (Baradit Reference Baradit and Bastidas Pérez2021, 22). The only way to fight back, she suggests, is with magic.
For Fisher, Avatar is not a feasible solution to the “megadeath-drive.” On the contrary, it is a fantasy and an intrinsic part of the capitalist imagination: a cultural form from the past that the dominant order has reactivated and repurposed for its own reproduction. In Cameron’s movie, Avatar’s imaginary—humans as “primitives organically linked to the mother/planet” (Fisher Reference Fisher, Mackay and Avanessian2014, 339)—is precisely this kind of reactivated past that capitalism produces. As Fisher (Reference Fisher, Mackay and Avanessian2014, 339) identifies, “We can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic idyll of Pandora.” And he warns us that “at the moment, too much anti-capitalism seems to be about the impossible pursuit of a social system oriented towards the Nirvana principle of total quiescence—precisely the return to a mythical primitivist equilibrium,” without Starbucks and iPhones (Fisher Reference Fisher2012, 135). Similarly, Latin American SF is possible as a genre only because of the introduction of the printing press and the more contemporary internet, where several authors neglected by the market found a means to publish their work. Of course, this problematization does not mean in any way rejecting knowledge from native people and different forms of organization; rather, it refuses to deny modernity as a historical fact and proposes an articulation between the two spheres. As Echeverría (Reference Echeverría2019, 209) argues, even those populations “that escaped the genocide of the 16th century and were expelled to inhospitable regions, deprived as they have been of the ability to reproduce their ancestral identities, were only able to rescue certain remains of them under the pressure of the process of modern self-identification.” After the European genocidal conquest, Indigenous populations ended up dispersed in Spanish cities and lost “the civilizing vitality of their previous world” (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2019, 213). They could not be “Indians as before.” They accepted “the role of subjects of that process, which contributes to a mestizo identity” that re-creates and transforms their past whose present is inherently modern (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2019, 214).
Baradit’s romanticization of the capitalist Avatar eradicates the possibility of thinking technological advances as a means of resistance or as a tool to build an “alternative modernity.” Jameson (Reference Jameson2005, 64) sees fantasy as a compensation for science fiction’s enduring technological bias, linking nature—often oddly paired with religion—to an imaginary regression to the past and to prerational forms of thought. The solution to the “megadeath-drive” is Avatar’s “magic,” which Jameson (Reference Jameson2005) links to fantasy and its characteristic binarism of good versus evil—a naive and ahistorical opposition between villains and heroes that embodies a dissatisfaction with modernity. For Jameson (Reference Jameson2005, 63–66), fantasy is mostly reactionary—it regresses to the pretechnological era, celebrating human freedom while omitting the material and historical constraints that make it possible. On the contrary, SF offers a more historical approach that addresses the contradictions in the mode of production of a given time.
There are, of course, several exceptions, that is, fantastic literary pieces that offer a more productive perspective than the ahistoric and anti-modern good versus evil medieval dichotomy. Consider Ursula K. Le Guin, who integrated fantasy and SF elements in her early work. This more complex articulation between the two genres is also the case for many new weird fictions produced in Latin America. Many Latin American new weird exponents treat fantasy non-reactionarily, providing a singular twist on SF and some of its aesthetic tendencies.
These antagonisms between the organic against the machine, nature against technology, and the historical mode of production against the simplistic good versus evil medieval formula are resignified in many Latin American new weird fictions. Here, the predominance of the first elements (e.g., SF, technology, cyborg, mode of production) over the second ones (e.g., fantasy, organic, magic, ahistorical good vs. evil) is displaced. Avatar’s function as the organic and magical entity that defeats the Terminator is also gone, and the two spheres of the dichotomy meet in a unique—weird—synthesis. To name just a few: In Luis Carlos Barragán Castro’s Parásitos perfectos (Reference Barragán and Carlos2024), the technological devices that allow humans to go beyond their “natural” limits are organic creatures, more specifically, insects.Footnote 6 In Maximiliano Barrientos’ Miles de ojos (Reference Barrientos2022), an old God is invoked through a Ballardian car crash in a sacred tree, producing the uncanny fusion between technology and humans. The analyses that follow trace this dynamic in the work of Bazterrica, Nieva, and Mota, showing how each negotiates the Terminator-Avatar binary.
Avatar’s dark reverse
Bazterrica’s Las indignas stages the Avatar ideology in its most claustrophobic form, exposing it as a patriarchal fiction that fills the void left by Terminator’s devastation. The novel is set after “el gran apagón”—a collapse triggered by the convergence of artificial intelligence and environmental catastrophe, leaving a world of wars over water, extreme climate shifts, pestilent air, and near-total extinction of animals and nature. In this desolate present, a hermetic vertical society of women survives enclosed in an ancient convent—the Casa de la Hermandad Sagrada—under the strict command of the Superior Sister, led by a holy man whose face is never seen, always referred to as Him, whom all women serve. Him is the Avatar stripped of its redemptive promise: the return to a premodern, pretechnological form of social organization does not recover a lost harmony but reinstates patriarchal domination in its most archaic form—a figure not unlike the terrible primordial father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (Reference Freud2012), whose absolute power over the community is founded on violence and sexual monopoly.
Las indignas is narrated through the scattered diary entries of a woman who writes in secret. The formal choice of the diary is inseparable from this ideological operation, as the pages seem written without hope of reaching any reader—and yet they do.Footnote 7 The diary entries carry no dates, suspending time in a perpetual present without future—a formal enactment of the very impossibility the novel thematizes. The words themselves are at times crossed out (“las mutiladas”) but not fully illegible, entering the symbolic order split, divided, never fully integrated. It is possible to read these words as a form of violence that is made flesh but not fully letter, incapable of being totally formalized: there is something of the Real that inscribes itself in the body of the character but not in the symbolic, as if the violence of the world could not be somatized, could not become totally legible on that surface. And yet those crossed words harbor the utopian impulse—the text cannot consciously articulate it (“el bosque” is one such crossed space)—a desire for another future; that is, another present, since we are living in the novel’s past, after all.
Nieva’s La infancia del mundo, in turn, performs a very different symbolic operation: It departs from an ideological equation of modernity as capitalism, where technology is described only in terms of “megadeath-drive.” In La infancia, modernity is at the exclusive service of the expanded scale destructive project, which treats nature “as a simple repertoire of certain materials and certain energies” (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2010, 114).
The novel takes place in 2272, in Argentina. The country has been flooded by the melting continental ice and reduced to a series of desert-like archipelagos. AIS-Influenza Financial Services-YPF (AIS) has transformed part of the country into the Caribbean Pampas, a tropical dream for tourism with two main cities: the wealthy Santa Rosa and the precarious Victorica. Here lives the novel’s central character, the Niño dengue (Dengue Boy), who ends up being a Niña dengue—a giant mutant mosquito born from the toxic overflow of capitalist extraction—with their mother, a domestic worker who travels daily to serve in the wealthy Santa Rosa, embodying the class division that structures the novel’s world.
One of the first things that La infancia exposes is that the disaster caused by the economic activity of large capital conglomerates is an event that can be capitalized. From the capitalist perspective, everything has a financial return and can be transformed into a commodity, including the planet’s destruction. In the novel, climate change, with the subsequent melting of the glaciers and the deforestation of the Amazon, generated the displacement of flora and fauna. This chaos led to the spread of terrible viruses and diseases, and a new opportunity to accumulate wealth:
[AIS] calculated the likelihood of future pandemics and monetized their potential impacts through various financial instruments and stock packages…. The company … had developed the now-famous FVI (Financial Virus Indicator), an index processed by monumental quantum computers that could predict with 99.99% accuracy which viruses would spark the next pandemic. This ingenious mechanism, while causing losses in other sectors of the economy, enabled many speculators to direct their capital toward betting on diseases’ success in triggering pandemics—effectively turning viruses into tradable assets. (Nieva Reference Nieva2023, 45)
All the technological advances in La infancia—geoengineering, computers to speculate on the future, ships to travel from one planet to another—are at the service of capital expansion. In its infinite diversification, AIS starts exploiting one of the hydrocarbon deposits discovered in Antarctica after the melting of the glaciers. Inside those deep wells, it discovers an “ancient geological form—an incomprehensible, primordial substance frozen for millennia in the Earth’s depths. Said to be a kind of pre-life, these primeval protoplasmic microorganisms flourished long before life as we know it existed on Earth” (Nieva Reference Nieva2023, 33–34). The predatory activity carried out by these conglomerates awakens a dormant force called Gran Anarca (Great Anarch). This entity offers an alternative to capitalist destruction since its emergence would eliminate “the distance between things, and ultimately … that of private property” (Nieva Reference Nieva2023, 153). In other words, Nieva’s novel introduces the Terminator as a technological capitalist threat and the Avatar as its magical premodern (prehuman, actually) antidote. The Gran Anarca, as a dark Avatar, does not oppose Terminator from outside but is activated by it as its own reversal: It destroys capitalism—and with it, the world as we know it. La infancia thus suggests that the only way to imagine the end of capitalism is to imagine the end of the world as we know it.Footnote 8
Nieva’s formal operation mobilizes the neobaroque legacy of Osvaldo Lamborghini—oscillating between epic and farce, crude humor and bodily excess—and fuses it with cyberpunk speculation and the gauchesca, the nineteenth-century poetic genre from Argentina and Uruguay that re-creates the voice of the gaucho as a political and aesthetic device. The choice of the pampas as setting reinforces this literary inheritance: The vast rural plains of Argentina, historically associated with those whom the nation-state deemed barbaric, are a recurring presence in Nieva’s work. Looming over La infancia is Sarmiento’s Facundo, o Civilización y barbarie (Reference Sarmiento1845), the foundational text of the civilization-barbarism tension.
Nieva reactivates this tradition through a weird gesture: making the gauchesca and the pampa coexist with speculative fiction, turning the iconic landscape into a geoengineered tourist paradise grotesquely repurposed by capital. The result is a weird act of estrangement—a fusion of aesthetic registers that “do not belong” together: the neobaroque and the cyberpunk, the rural and “barbaric” plain and the hypertechnological, rendering the tragedy of capitalist accumulation through grotesque comedy and scatological extravagance.
Nieva inherits from Lamborghini this radical rewriting of the gauchesque tradition—a gesture that, as Néstor Perlongher (Reference Perlongher1997) famously argued, Lamborghini himself performs in El fiord (Reference Lamborghini2003), his savage rewriting of Esteban Echeverría’s El matadero (Reference Echeverría1999). What Nieva does not inherit is the sadistic enunciative position that runs through Lamborghini’s literature: where Lamborghini’s literature assumes the narrative position of the Other from which violence is inflicted upon the imaginary other, Nieva displaces that position without abandoning the radical impulse that animates his predecessor.
Unlike Bazterrica and Nieva, Mota’s (Reference Mota2022, 333) steampunk uchronia El foso de Mabuya moves away from both poles of the Terminator-Avatar binary by articulating magic with technology, the spiritual world with material reality, as an emancipatory means to imagine an “alternative modernity.” In it, Colón comes to America for the first time in 1492 and faces the power of Leviathans, marine entities that destroy one of his ships. The fantastic creatures, described as a “giant species of sea snake of the genus Hydrophiinae, native to the Caribbean Sea,” are the first fantastic element that resists the Spanish sailor as the embodiment of European imperialism and capitalist modernity. These entities are not enough to prevent the Conquest, which takes place anyway. To end colonialism, expel the European presence in Cuba, and achieve autonomy, revolutionary local forces use a sort of protocomputers called “differential devices” and “analytical machines” fused with the power of an old Taíno God—Mabuya—to predict future scenarios and start their rebellion.
The rebellion unfolds through a multigenerational network of sailors, spies, Indigenous leaders, and spiritual figures—a speculative world in which zeppelins dominate the skies. Mota’s prose is clear and functional, subordinated to the speculative machinery of the plot. El foso narrates all this through letters, diary fragments, reports, news dispatches, and found manuscripts—the same archival instruments through which Europe recorded and legitimized the Conquest, now repurposed to narrate its failure and its alternatives. The formal innovation lies not in the style but in the ideological reappropriation of the colonial archive itself, turned against itself.
Mota’s fiction articulates magic with technology, the spiritual world with material reality, and ancient knowledge with modernity as an emancipatory means to respond to the European colonial threat. His fiction combines two elements that should be separate since the Taíno God “does not belong” to the protocyberspace of the differential devices and analytical machines. The old God inhabits the most modern technology, creating a weird scenario. His work thus moves away from the ideological formula that equates technology with capitalist imperialism. It also moves away from the fantastic dichotomy of good versus evil by invoking a magical entity, Mabuya, who despite Spanish misconception is a “defender of chaos and not of evil, a concept, the latter, non-existent in the Taíno worldview” (Mota Reference Mota2022, 157).
Another of Mota’s novels is the cyberpunk uchronia Habana undergüater (Reference Mota2021). Like El foso de Mabuya, Habana undergüater opts for a clear, fast-paced prose—abundant in dialogue, action sequences, and this time, urban atmosphere—subordinated to the construction of its speculative world rather than to formal experimentation. The novel follows Pedro and Pablo, two mirrorlike figures navigating a semiflooded Havana, where the Soviet Union has won the Cold War and Afro-Caribbean religious corporations control entire neighborhoods. In this fiction, the magical element is also possible only through technology and cyberspace—the term popularized by William Gibson’s ([Reference Gibson1984] 2000) Neuromancer to describe a global computer network—is inhabited by humans and divine entities called Orishas. The Orishas are deities of Yoruba origin, brought to Cuba through the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century and venerated in Afro-Cuban religious practice. In the novel, these spirits are not fully regulated by the rules of cyberspace. Like Mabuya, they have an ethic—a different sense of justice, for example—that differs radically from the dominant one. In Habana, the Soviet Union won the Cold War, and both the ideological and the technological developments are, the reader can assume, primarily Soviet. With this, the fiction establishes a distance from the first world represented by the defeated United States and the second world represented by the Soviet Union. Against this Cold War dichotomy, it presents a kind of Latin American autonomous tercera vía that operates outside the coordinates of the dominant ideology and is latent in the Orishas’ cyberspace presence.
Habana simultaneously disarticulates the characterization of technology as capitalist domination (Terminator) and the reactivation of an organic idyll past (Avatar). The Orishas embody a different understanding of life that the dominant ideology cannot entirely subsume—they exercise their autonomous power only through a technological device, making technology their very condition of existence. The operation Echeverría describes as codigofagia—the concrete mechanism of the ethos barroco—is not a rejection of the dominant form but its inhabitation and internal transformation. The Orishas do not oppose cyberspace from outside; they inhabit modern infrastructure, bend its logic, and produce from within it a form of life that, like the baroque subject Echeverría describes, neither surrenders to the dominant code nor pretends it does not exist. This ideological synthesis departs from modernity as a reality and allows us to move away from the binarism pitting Terminator against Avatar, portraying technology as something other than a “megadeath-drive” and cyberspace as a platform for what Echeverría calls an “alternative modernity.”
Taken together, these works—Las indignas, La infancia, El foso, and Habana—register a broader symptomatic tendency in contemporary science fiction, including in Latin America: the difficulty of sustaining a fully articulated vision of radically different social relations. Even where the horizon of an “alternative modernity” appears most explicitly, it remains structurally constrained. The silence is eloquent and systematic. Fernanda Trías’s (Reference Trías2023, 276) dystopia entitled Mugre rosa, in which a terrible toxic wind threatens to finish human life, ends like this: “Like a body without entrails, the city will also be emptied, a clean carcass that in the distance will shine with its bad light. That will be the city, a will-o’-the-wisp on the horizon.” Even more auspicious fiction follows this path, like Alejandra Bruno’s La hija del delta, where a natural disaster leads to a scenario with different human clans killing each other to consume human meat as a means of survival. As an alternative, there is a hidden community that avoids this kind of violence and finds a way to live in communion with nature without killing each other or exhausting their resources. However, how this possible community lives is only suggested and never made fully explicit. In the end, the main character, a young woman who has abandoned her cannibal family, finds this alternative community and describes it from a distance. In the last lines of the novel, she says: “New bonfires had been lit, and they were like rows of stars. Flashing lines, shorter, longer, shorter, our welcome code” (Reference Bruno2023, 178, my italics). All these endings are symptomatic of Fisher’s “capitalist realism” and Echeverría’s ethos realista. There is the willingness to break from it, but it seems like a symbolic barrier persists. As Jameson (Reference Jameson2005, 289) notes, SF’s “deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future … the imagination of otherness and radical difference.” And yet, the urge to go beyond “capitalist realism” and ethos realista keeps emerging from some of these works, in Bazterrica’s crossed-out “bosque,” in Nieva’s Gran Anarca, in Mota’s Mabuya and Orishas, and in Bruno’s “welcome code.”
Although fiction cannot transform reality directly, it can open—even in its silence—a symbolic window through which we can visualize another kind of present contained in the possibilities of modernity. Jameson (Reference Jameson2005, 409) asserts that “the utopian text is not supposed to produce this synthesis all by itself or to represent it: that is a matter of human history and for collective praxis. It is supposed only to produce the requirement of the synthesis, to open space into which it is to be imagined.”
Against Avatar’s “eco-narcissism”
Even though this might be the case for some writers, it is problematic to homologize the ideologies displayed by the fiction with the author’s own ideologies and establish a unidirectional relationship of transparency. Pierre Macherey makes a clear difference between the two. For him, the writer does not articulate the total structure of an epoch but offers “a unique and privileged glimpse” of it, while also engaging in “a novel relationship to the history of his time by drawing on an ideology which is not ‘naturally’ his own” (Macherey Reference Macherey2006, 126–127).
Baradit’s own work offers a first illustration of this principle: The short story “La conquista mágica de América” analyzed above and the novel Ygdrasil circulate markedly different ideologies—precisely because, as Macherey argues, the writer does not “naturally” own the ideological position his text produces. The short story deploys Avatar in its most straightforward form: magic as the only answer to the Terminator. Ygdrasil, nevertheless, is more complex and rather than opposing magic to technology, it fuses them: Its cyberpunk world is populated by Indigenous cosmologies and spiritual entities that coexist with nanotechnology, corporate cyberspace, and biotechnological implants.
In Nieva’s case, the ideological contradictions are not only established within his fictions but also between his fiction and his critical writing. In reading his essays, it is easy to establish that he does not believe that the answer to capitalist “megadeath-drive” and climate change should exclude technological advances or deny modernity as a historical fact. In Tecnología y barbarie (Reference Nieva2020, 22), rather than rejecting the modern advances, he calls to dispute that space to capitalist imagination and praxis. Echoing Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” he proposes a “technological politicization of art” that “desecrates the sacred aura with which the technological device has been invested in our time” (Reference Nieva2020, 22). This means, for example, as Eduardo Kac did in his polemic project Cypher, “the democratization of transgenic means of production, so that anyone could create new forms of life, or even intervene or sabotage those patented by large corporations” (Nieva Reference Nieva2020, 96).
Taken together, the presence of Terminator and Avatar in Baradit and in Nieva’s work expresses contemporary ideologies and exposes their inconsistencies: there are no alternatives to capital, and one of the few alternatives we can think of is a fantasy that denies modernity as a historical fact. From there, the analysis can expose the unsaid assumptions underpinning these symbolic acts, such as the equivalence between capitalism and modernity, or their inner difficulty picturing feasible alternatives. And yet, following Macherey, what critics should avoid at all costs is identifying themselves with the fictions and projecting onto the text their own ideologies, as if a given novel were an Other that exists to legitimate the subject’s own position in the world. This operation seems to be frequent when discussing climate change in SF. In its most common form, it assumes that we can recover our lost essence once we eliminate an alien element that alienates us from our true selves, an identity-based substratum that was taken away by modernity and could become fully complete again. It denies that capitalist modernity is a historical fact—as if Latin America were not part of modernity through both formal and real subsumption—and proposes restoring a past that is lost forever but, like in Cameron’s movie Avatar, never existed as such and is part of the capitalist imaginary.
This latter approach to literature falls under what Claudio Aguayo-Borquez (Reference Aguayo-Borquez2025, 9) describes as “eco-narcissism”—an impossibility “to distinguish the practice of literary criticism, of reading texts and literary works critically, and the ethical-subjective position of the critic himself.” The problem, then, is not the literary presence of Avatar but what we could conceptualize as “eco-narcissist” Avatarism: an ethical identification with the text’s imaginary solutions to the real contradiction between modernity (possibility of abundance) and capitalism (artificial scarcity), which consists of substituting both for a fictive magical past. Avoiding Avatarism is essential for at least two reasons: If we opt to follow Macherey, it is vital to move beyond ideological forms towards a more objective and accurate reading of a political conjuncture; if we follow Jameson, to avoid confusing imaginary relationships with the world with the real relationships with the world, as if Avatarism were the ultimate Latin American truth, and Avatar the ultimate collective praxis.
To argue that these fictions symptomatically reproduce Terminator and Avatar ideologies is not to demand that they be otherwise. No literary work can simply opt out of ideology or fully conform to a formal model—there is always a constitutive lack. As Macherey (Reference Macherey2006, 21) warns, a certain critical approach mistakes this lack for a deficiency, falling into a “normative fallacy”: subjecting the work to a set of external demands and identifying as failure whatever fails to conform to them. The critical operation this paper proposes does not measure the fictions against what they ought to say; it reads what they do not say about themselves—the silences, the contradictions present on the work’s surface, in its form and its ideological limits—to produce a critical reading. For Macherey (Reference Macherey2006, 87), “Truth is not there in the work, like a nut in a shell; paradoxically, it is both interior and absent”—and it is precisely from that absence that criticism can make visible the utopian impulse that traverses these fictions, even when expressed in its pure negativity. This impulse, as Jameson reminds us, is not a prescription: the utopian text is not supposed to produce the synthesis by itself but only to open the space into which it is to be imagined.
Toward an “alternative modernity,” or Eros’s “Walmartism”
The Terminator and the Avatar ideologies tend to equate modernity with capitalism and its various forms of exploitation. They propose two possible scenarios: the destruction of the planet or the reactivation of a premodern social order, with its respective recovery of a lost essence and idyllic past. Against this reduction, this article argues that there is a difference between capitalism and modernity: Capitalism has indeed appropriated technological progression, but that does not mean that technology is inherently a destructive force. As Echeverría expresses, it is possible to think of an “alternative modernity,” which means abandoning the project of creating value for the sake of creating value and establishing a playful, collaborative, and rational interaction with nature. In contrast to the Avatar and the Terminator variants, this perspective offers a rethinking of modernity, which is desirable since it allows us to cross the threshold of scarcity. It also makes it possible to satisfy human needs without assuming an archaic, warlike metabolism, that is, a destructive approach towards natural resources.
Echeverría’s proposal clearly follows a different path than the one Avatar and Terminator mark when he claims that the current technical basis of capitalism continues the archaic strategy of confronting nature through conquest and subjugation. Yet the new technical base generated in this process—although repressed and distorted by capitalism—embodies a latent possibility within modernity itself: to follow a “ludic telos” of creating forms in and with nature, opening a different, nonaggressive way of relating to it (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2010, 150).
Although modernity and capitalism are not equivalent terms, there is no doubt that modernity has been dominated by capitalism, that is, by the “misuse” of the technical base that modernity offers. However, we can continue to think of ways to use technology to configure a mode of production that does not necessarily respond to the logic of expanded scale and its conception of resources as “simple repertoire of certain materials and certain energies” (Echeverría Reference Echeverría2010, 114). In sum, we can say that technological advances are not necessarily capitalist and destructive—as happens in Terminator—and even those that are can be reappropriated, as Nieva proposes in Tecnología y barbarie.
Echeverría (Reference Echeverría1997, 148) reflects on different political alternatives to capitalist modernity as the cornerstone of his intellectual project, which gained special relevance after the downfall of actually existing socialism in 1989: “It is not out of place to once again question the old certainty … that takes for granted the identity between the capitalist and the modern: to find out again to what extent the utopia of a post-capitalist modernity—socialist? communist? anarchist?—is still feasible.” In a series of lectures Fisher gave in late 2016 at Goldsmiths, he uses the word postcapitalism to avoid the symbolic burden of past political experiences, especially Stalinism. Postcapitalism and alternative modernity can be social formations that differ radically from everything we have experienced so far, and the prefix post provides the semantic possibility of a flexible, nonprescriptive future, “a kind of neutrality that is not there with ‘communism,’ ‘socialism’” (Fisher Reference Fisher2020, 50). Nonetheless, in Acid Communism, Fisher’s last and unfinished work, of which we know only the introduction, since he died before completing the manuscript, he came back to the usual terminology—with a twist. In this text, he refers to the need for a “democratic socialism or libertarian communism” (Fisher Reference Fisher and Ambrose2018, 754). And then, he proposes the term acid communism, “the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist-consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movement with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticization of everyday life” (Fisher Reference Fisher and Ambrose2018, 757).
The British intellectual begins from a similar set of questions to those Echeverría posed: “Is it possible to retain some of the libidinal, technological infrastructure of capital and move beyond capital?” (Fisher Reference Fisher2020, 41). There is no easy answer: Capitalist realism and ethos realista dominate and neutralize our capability to imagine other possible presents. Fisher (Reference Fisher2020, 45) is convinced that if we want to fight this ideological constraint and answer yes, the path we should follow cannot be backward because, besides being undesirable, it is not possible: “There’s no space of primitive outside to which we can return.” If we want to imagine the foundation for a new kind of society, we should picture it, for example, in the infrastructure of Walmart, as Jameson once did. For Jameson (Reference Jameson2005, 153), Walmart could be seen as the anticipatory prototype of a new form of socialism—one in which the usual reproach of centralization proves historically misplaced. This represents a revolutionary reorganization of capitalist production, to the point that “Waltonism” or “Walmartism” might be accurate names for this stage.Footnote 9 Fisher understands that it is fundamental to take Starbucks, iPhones, and Walmart as our starting point.
Mota’s fiction enacts precisely this gesture: In Habana undergüater and El foso de Mabuya, technology and infrastructure are not rejected but seized and redirected—the Orishas inhabit cyberspace, Indigenous rebellions are coordinated through differential engines, the colonial archive is turned against itself. The premise not only accepts capitalist modernity as a historical fact but also assumes the desire people have for the goods and infrastructure this social formation offers: “We have to imagine a transformation out of where we are now…. We have to start from a full immersion in capital” (Fisher Reference Fisher2020, 193). This includes, for example, going to Walmart to buy cell phones, even though Fisher (Reference Fisher2020, 50) humorously recognizes, “I don’t think we’d want iPhones in postcapitalism.” The other option, embodied by Avatar’s idyllic past, is to “subdue our own desires” (Fisher Reference Fisher2020, 177). After all, there is a correlation between use values and individual desire that any political project should not ignore. As Echeverría (Reference Echeverría1997, 164) affirms, “The process of consumption of produced objects creates by itself new principles of enjoyment that tend to make the technical relationship between need and means of satisfaction a play of correspondences.”
We can argue that technological developments would have been very different without the bourgeois need to produce more in less time and the operation to raise the stolen labor time through variable surplus value. Nevertheless, if we put aside the conditions for production and labor exploitation, there is nothing intrinsically problematic with Walmart’s iPhones and their use values. In Mota’s fiction, this is not a theoretical proposition but a narrative one: The Orishas in Habana move through cyberspace and the rebels of El foso coordinate through differential engines not despite the infrastructure of domination but through it—bending its logic without dissolving into it.
Neither Fisher nor Echeverría specifies what a “postcapitalist” or “alternative modernity” would look like, but they suggest some attributes. As we have seen, Echeverría (Reference Echeverría1997, 189) indicates that an “alternative modernity” means following Eros’s model of a collaborative and respectful metabolism with nature to “invent new forms” and produce “useful products” that are not subordinated to wealth accumulation. This is the only path to finally realizing the modern potential of fully fulfilling social needs, and, unlike the Avatar’s “mother planet” fantasy, a feasible material alternative to capital’s Terminator “megadeath-drive.”
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Alejo Stark for pointing me toward Mark Fisher’s “Terminator vs. Avatar.” I also thank Claudio Aguayo, Ronald Strickland, Gavin Arnall, and Nicolás Campisi for their generous comments on earlier versions of this text. I owe much to the Marxisms Lab at the University of Michigan and the Pierre Macherey Reading Group, especially Garima Singh, for their stimulating discussions. Finally, I thank the Hispanic Studies Working Group, especially Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and Rudy Pradenas, for their engagement and support.
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