Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (39 page)

Javier Negrete was born in
Madrid in 1963 and teaches Greek. He is one of the best stylists of
the genre, with a marked preference for the classics and epic
stories. This is apparent in the artistic skills displayed in his
novels like the
Las miradas de las
furias
[
The Gaze
of the Furies
], which won the 1997
Ignotus; or the alternate history
Alejandro Magno y las águilas de Roma
[
Alexander the Great and the Eagles
of Rome
], which won the 2007 Ignotus, in
which he portrays nothing less than a face-off between the best
military strategist in history and the incipient Roman Empire. He
also wrote an epic fantasy trilogy with science fiction
echoes:
La espada de fuego
[
The Sword of
Fire
] which won a 2003 Ignotus; the
mythological
Señores de Olimpo
[
Lords of
Olympus
] in 2006, which won the first
Minotauro Prize; and
Atlántida
[
Atlantis
] in 2010. He currently
combines writing speculative fiction novels with historical novels,
his specialty.

Félix J. Palma, born in
Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Cádiz, in 1968, is a writer whose dedication
to short fiction has earned him more than a hundred prizes since
the early 1990s. His elegantly-styled stories about everyday life
are marked by absurdities and humor. His short works have been
collected in
El vigilante de la
salamandra
[
The
Salamander’s Guard
] in 1998;
Métodos de supervivencia
[
Means of
Survival
] in 1999;
Las interioridades
[
Innermost Beings
] in 2002;
Los arácnidos
[
Arachnids
] in 2004; and
El menor espectáculo del mundo
[
The Smallest Show on
Earth
] in 2010. In 2008, he earned
widespread fame with his first novel,
El
mapa del tiempo
[
The Map of Time
], which won the
Ateneo of Seville prize. It is the first part of a Victorian
trilogy that pays tribute to the works of H.G. Wells, and rights to
it have been sold in twenty-two countries. The second part
was
El mapa del cielo
[
The Map of the
Sky
], published in 2012, and the series
should end in 2013. He has also edited the 2012 anthology
Steampunk: Antología retrofuturist
[
Steampunk: A
Retrofuturist Anthology
], which includes
some notable stories in the subgenre.

León Arsenal was born in
Madrid in 1960 and is a writer whose indispensable short story
collection
Besos de alacrán
[
The Scorpion’s
Kiss
] won the 2000 Ignotus award. His epic
fantasy novel
Máscaras de matar
[
Masks to
Kill
] won the 2004 Minotauro award. An
African alternate history novel,
Bula
Matari
, written in 2000 with José Miguel
Pallarés, features a Zulu warlord who faces the all-powerful
Carthage Empire. Since then, he has almost entirely left the genre
to dedicate himself to historical novels and thrillers.

Eduardo Vaquerizo was born
in Madrid in 1967 and is an aeronautic engineer. After writing many
short stories and some novelettes in the 1990s, in 2005 he
published the novel
Danza de
Tinieblas
[
Dance
in the Darkness
], a brilliant and
imaginative alternate history in which the Spanish empire forged in
the 16th and 17th centuries lasts until 1927, the year when the
book takes place. The second part,
Memoria
de tinieblas
[
Memory of Darkness
] was just
published in 2013. In addition, in 2009 he published the
novel
La última noche de Hipatia
[
The Last Night of
Hypatia
], a beautiful and tragic story of
love across time framed by the city of Alexandria at the end of the
4th century. Vaquerizo is a stylist capable of both short and long
works, intimate stories, cyberpunk, surrealism and hard science
fiction.

Victor Conde, born in
Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1973, is a systems programmer. He began
writing pulp space operas, and in 2002 he published his
ambitious
El tercer nombre del
emperador
[
The
Third Name of the Emperor
], the first
title in his Multiverse saga. After that he published
Mystes
[
Mystes
] in
2005;
Crónicas del Multiverso
[
Chronicles of the
Multiverse
] in 2010, which won the
Minotauro prize; and the young adult novels
El dragón estelar
[
The Stellar
Dragon
] in 2007;
Heraldos de la luz
[
Heralds of Light
] in 2010; and its sequel,
Heraldos
del bien y del mal
[
Heralds of Good and Evil
] in 2012; a
steampunk novel
Los relojes de
Alestes
[
Alestes’
Clocks
] in 2010; the fantasy
El teatro secreto
[
The Secret
Theater
] in 2008; and the horror
novels
Naturaleza muerta
[
Still
Life
] in 2009 and
Hija de lobos
[
Daughter of Wolves
] in 2011. His
style shows a marked tendency toward adventure, hard science
fiction, and metaphysics.

Other outstanding writers
include: Domingo Santos, pioneer in the introduction of science
fiction in magazines and specialized story collections, and author
of the SF classic
Gabriel
, published in 1962, which
narrates the saga of a robot in search of its identity. Gabriel
Bermúdez Castillo, author of such classics as
Viaje a un planeta Wu-Wei
[
Voyage to a Wu-Wei
Planet
] in 1976 and
El señor de la rueda
[
The Lord of the Wheel]
in 1978. Miquel Barceló, known for editing
specialized story collections and the driving force behind the UPC
prize, as well as the author of the well-known book,
Ciencia ficción: guía de lectura
[
Science Fiction: a
reader’s guide
] in 1990. José Antonio
Cotrina, author of various young adult fantasies and some notable
cyberpunk novellas, who is known as the Spanish Neil Gaiman. Ramón
Muñoz, without a doubt Spain's best short story stylist. Ángel
Torres Quesada, who wrote a multitude of pulp novels in the 1970s,
most of them in the series
Orden
Estelar
[
Stellar
Order
]. Eduardo Gallego and Guillem
Sánchez, very popular for their humor. Manuel de Pedrolo, author of
the post-apocalyptic bestseller
Mecanoscrito del segundo orden
[Mechanoscript of the Second Order
]
in 1984.
José Carlos Somoza,
Sergio Mars, Carlos Saiz Cidoncha, Juan Carlos Planells, Armando
Boix, Carlos F. Castrosín, Daniel Mares, Santiago Eximeno, Juan
Antonio Fernández Madrigal, Carlos Pavón, Joaquín Revuelta, José
Ramón Vázquez, Lola Robles
and a long list of other outstanding writers.
In addition, some authors occasionally enter the
genre, such as Torrente Ballester; Tomás Salvador, author of the
classic
La Nave
[
The Ship
]
in 1959; José María Merino; Rosa Montero; and Eduardo
Mendoza.

2. The Publishing
Market

According to a recent
study, more than two hundred science fiction titles are published
each year in Spain, and the production of speculative fiction
overall —counting fantasy, horror, and other sub-genres as well as
science fiction— reaches about a thousand different books. Half of
these are originally written in Spanish and the rest are
translations, mostly from English-speaking countries. Only
one-fourth of them are e-books. Three out of four are new
publications, and most are published as paperbacks. Only one out of
ten is written by a woman. As far as sub-genres, space opera is the
most popular, although dystopias can easily be found (mostly in
young adult), alternative histories, military, post-apocalyptics,
steampunk, cyberpunk, futuristic thrillers, voyages through space
and time, near-future, post-human, genetic manipulation, clones,
mutant viruses, and more.

The current economic
crisis has reduced print runs, although this downward trend could
be observed earlier. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was common to find
mass market print runs for the general public that reached ten
thousand copies, but in the 1990s these dropped to two or three
thousand —except for more commercial works and authors, which could
reach five thousand copies. At the beginning of the 21st century,
the number dropped to a thousand, and now publishers who supply
production information report press runs of eight hundred copies on
average: modest numbers for a market that has not found a way to
exploit its potential export into Europe and South
America.

With this data in hand,
logically the great majority of authors must combine their writing
with another, principal economic activity. Some work in journalism,
teaching, or even the translation of genre works, which has reached
a high level of professionalism due to the reading public's growing
demand for quality —and which, paradoxically, means relatively low
readership for works in the original English, although this has
been changing lately.

The publishing sector itself is split into
about thirty specialized houses and an equal number that publish
genre books with relative frequency. Small- and medium-sized
publishers like Alamut/Bibliópolis, Gigamesh, La Factoría de Ideas,
Valdemar, and Sportula compete with large editorial groups that
periodically become interested in the genre: R.B.A, Planeta (its
genre imprints Minotauro and Timun Mas), Random House Mondadori,
Ediciones B of Grupo Z, and Alianza, among others. And we should
not forget amateur presses and self-publishing, which accounts for
fully 15 percent of the total.

3. Fandom

The main association that brings together
Spanish fans is the Spanish Association of Fantasy, Science
Fiction, and Horror [AEFCFT is its Spanish acronym], with the aim
of promoting the genres. It was founded in the early 1990s, and
each year it organizes an annual convention, HispaCon, which is
held in a different city each year, and presents the Ignotus
prizes, which are awarded to the best genre works in different
categories. It also publishes anthologies and other books.

In addition to AEFCFT, a
variety groups, conventions, and clubs meet all around the country.
In recent years, two events have stood out for attracting both a
large public and international authors who generate a lot of media
coverage. The Semana Negra de Gijón is a literary-entertainment
event originally dedicated to the
género
negro
[noir] but which has grown to
encompass other genres, such as historical novels and speculative
fiction. Its guest authors have included George R.R. Martin,
Christopher Priest, Lois McMaster Bujold, Robert Sheckley, Joe
Haldeman, and many others. The Celsius 232 Festival (a tribute to
Ray Bradbury's novel
Fahrenheit
451
, which is 232 when converted into
Celsius) began in 2012 and specializes in fantasy and science
fiction. It has featured international authors such as George R.R.
Martin, Joe Abercrombie, Steven Erikson, Robert J. Sawyer and Jon
Courtenay Grimwood.

Specialized magazines and
fanzines played a fundamental role in the development of the genre.
The legendary
Nueva Dimensión
has already been mentioned, and it was the most
long-lived, from 1968 to 1983, with 148 issues. Others were:
Anticipación
, in 1967,
with seven issues;
Géminis,
from 1967 to 1968, with 13 issues;
Kandama,
from 1980 to
1984, with eight issues;
Tránsito,
from 1982 to 1993, with 18 issues;
BEM,
from 1990 to 2000,
with 75 issues;
Gigamesh,
from 1991 to 2007, with 44 issues;
Cyber Fantasy,
from 1992
to 1994, with six issues;
Solaris,
from 1999 to 2005, with 27 issues;
2001,
from 2001 to 2002,
with seven issues;
Galaxia,
from 2003 to 2005, with 17 issues; and too many
more to name. In addition, the US magazine
Asimov’s
has had four authorized
incarnations: 1979 to 1981, 1986 to 1987, 2002, and 2003 to 2005,
for a total of 52 issues. The
Artifex
anthologies deserve special
mention, published from 1999 to 2009 with four “epochs” and 21
volumes with an emphasis on both speculative and literary
quality.