When folks think of great 20th century science fiction authors, they tend to think about Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, J.G. Ballard, and folks like that. But at the forefront of the Latin American fiction in the first half of the 20th century, there is a figure just as globally influential as any other writer named above. Jorge Luis Borges is the greatest writer of speculative fiction you may not have read. Here’s more from Terry Miller:
Did Borges, a man whose contemporaries were Joyce and Hemingway, foresee the creation of the internet, the rise of artificial intelligence, the destabilising spread of fake news, or the eventual merging of man and machine? There are no advanced technologies in Ficciones – no cyborgs, no robots, no Matrix. Nor are there any other science fiction tropes or clichés. How then can we categorise Borges as sci-fi?
Borges’ Ficciones may seem out of place on the shelf next to J. G. Ballard and H. G. Wells, but only at first glance. Consider for a moment the chapter titles in Ana Maria Barrenechea’s study of Borges’ life and work, Borges the Labyrinth Maker: ‘The Infinite’; ‘Chaos and the Cosmos’; ‘Time and Eternity’; ‘Idealism and Other Forms of Unreality’. These headings seem better suited to, say, Carl Sagan, or perhaps Richard Feynman. Whatever the surfaces of Borges’ stories, his deeper concerns are extra-literary, his preoccupations squarely within the boundaries of science (fiction or otherwise).
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