How Latin America Saved the World and Other Forgotten Futures

Latin America saved the world and didn't many times over in texts written in the 1950s, the incubation period for genre sf in the region. The forward-looking 1950s produced much source material for today's retrofuturist longings, rather than generating many of those longings of their own. This article draws from some twenty-five fictional works by Latin American authors published in the Argentine magazine Mks Alla [Beyond], an affiliate of Galaxy Science Fiction, between 1953 and 1957. I'm interested in exploring these past images of the future to think about questions such as to whom the future belonged in Latin American sf, what those futures looked like, and which of those past futures we are and are not living in today and why. I'm especially interested in how Latin American writers did and didn't challenge Northern assumptions about the future and about the genre and in the impact this has had on subsequent genre writers and readers.