Destroying ‘Centuries of Evil Work’: Female-Authored Dystopian Science Fiction in Spain

By Angela Acosta

The Speculative and Surrealist Origins of Spanish Modernism

Ángeles Santos’s painting, Un mundo [A World] (1929), is a large surrealist composition one may easily miss if one is too eager to reach Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum. In 1929, at the age of seventeen, Santos presented Un mundo at the Ninth Autumn Salon of Madrid where prominent Spanish intellectuals like Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Vicente Huidobro, and Federico García Lorca noticed her work. The three-by-three metre painting projects a surrealist world not unlike literary utopias of the early twentieth century. A world in the shape of a cube hangs suspended by angels in the sky. Female figures clad in dark dresses race down a staircase, reaching towards stars that serve as anchors for this small world. The image is equally precarious as it is carefully crafted. Santos painted the self-sufficient world with the same dark, muted palette as the cloudy blue sky. There, one can see into buildings as miniature humans go to work, play sports, and ride the steam train that snakes its way across each side of the cube. What lives do these people lead? What references to modern Spain can be found in this painting and similar works of literature? How might we recognize the contributions of women within this milieu?

“Un mundo” by Ángeles Santos (1929) photographed by eckelon is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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Ukrainian Women in SF: A Roundtable Conversation

Interviewed by Michael Burianyk

Nataliya Dovhopol, Natalia Matolinets, Iryna Hrabovska, Daria Piskozub and Svitlana Taratorina are five young, diverse Ukrainian women writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Not only is their fiction significant but they also have a YouTube channel “Фантастичні talk(s)/Fantastic talk(s)” (@fantalks) where they discuss the history and current state of Ukrainian fantastic literature and interview foreign writers. All are fluent and articulate in English. More importantly they are expressive in their understanding of their own work and the importance of Science Fiction and Fantasy in understanding real life. Their insights into their writing reveal how it fits into contemporary Ukrainian culture and literature. Their responses are often touching and even harrowing, considering the horrific war they are experiencing.

Note for the following that both Nataliya Dovhopol and Natalia Matolinets share the same first name, spelled the same in Ukrainian, but use different English spellings.

What themes and topics do you explore in your work?

Nataliya Dovhopol I combine my interests in local history, mythology, art history and cultural studies with my degree in Theory and History of Art. I consider my novels to be historical fantasy (To Find the Amazon’s Land, The Knight of the Drevlyanian Land and the Lady Eagle) and ethnic fantasy (Wandering Circus of the Silver Lady). I also explore urban fantasy and like to experiment with genres and topics to reveal unknown pages of Ukrainian history, but always in the context of the real world. As well, suffering a lack of coming-of-age stories in my childhood, I want today’s youngsters to easily find exciting books by Ukrainian authors.

Iryna Hrabovska I’ve written in many genres, including detective stories and adventure novels. But most of all I love researching history. My debut was the steampunk duology Leoburg mostly set in a world with an alternate European history. My new trilogy (The Crystal Castle) is a sword and sorcery fantasy based on the events of the Hundred Years’ War. I am particularly proud of my mystical story The Closest to Hell, about the disappearance of miners in one of the first mines in Donbas in the early 20th century. It’s based on historical material about the small mining town of Snizhne, where I was born, and I want Ukrainians to see the Donetsk region not only as a place of war but also as a place of beauty and fantasy.

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Duchamp’s time machines: Paul Minott in discussion with James Gillham

Paul Minott worked as a leading graphic designer for over thirty years, working for
numerous international design consultancies in London and abroad. He ran a
successful partnership in London before embarking on a teaching career at Bath Spa University. He now works making one-off abstract prints using an etching press.

James Gillham completed a practice-led Ph.D. in Fine Art at the University of Reading in 2014, researching capability via the intersection of institutional demands and intersubjective expectation. He continues this research by painting the Humpty character from Olaf Stapledon’s Last Men in London, and by seeking similar representations in Science Fiction. James lives and works in Wiltshire, and is the cover artist for the latest issue (299) of Vector.

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. VIA CREATIVE COMMONS/COURTESY PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

Marcel Duchamp’s famous work The Large Glass (1915-23) has been duplicated numerous times, by artists such as Richard Hamilton (1965) and Ulf Linde (1961). Duchamp’s approval of these pieces emerges from his established interest in the ready-made, but also points to a more nuanced conception of time situated in popular contemporary European Modernist thought.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 (1912) is perhaps the most explicit example of this interest with temporality, but the glass mechanisms such as Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925) bring these engagements into clearer focus. These spinning devices suggest an investigational approach to time’s passage – expansions and contractions operating between objective measurement and subjective experience.

Duchamp’s ludic approach to time has interested artist and printmaker Paul Minott for many years, and is the impulse behind Minott’s latest work: Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps. Portrait de Voyage dans le Temps is an Artificially Generated visual essay, showing Marcel Duchamp alongside his various time machines.

Minott discusses Duchamp’s Modernist conception of time and how this appeared in Duchamp’s artwork – while finding parallels with contemporary use of Artificial Intelligence to generate images – with fellow artist James Gillham.

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