There are elements of science fiction in everyday life that we ignore: Hiram de la Peña

Writer Hiram de la Peña spoke with SinEmbargo about cool shade treea book of five short stories that explore different genres of science fiction.

Mexico City, March 25 (however). – “How can I not write Sci-fi If my childhood vacation spot was declared a UFO capital and had a street named Jaime Musan? What would they have expected if the colony where my ancestors lived had declared itself an alien hotspot? Really,” the Mexican writer wrote last November Hiram de la Penaauthor of the book of short stories cool shade treeEdited by Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) in the Tierra Adentro Collection.

Two of the two stories that accompany this work—one of which gives it its name—are built from the oral tradition built in communities in the north of the country such as Mexicali, where the author was born. “Always, as long as I can remember, along the roads in the north, across the great open spaces, people always look up at the sky, they watch birds, and whatever happens up there and in between those things also always mention UFO sightings, so on some holidays I have , especially in La Rumorosa, there have always been stories that someone has seen something. So this constitutes complete fantasy,” he said.

in this way cool shade tree He talks about the arrival of a being from another world that Dona Eva tells everyone about. A story that no one knows whether or not he heard it in full, in fact there are different versions, and despite doubts about what it may or may not mean, it has been seized upon by the people.

“My father and a friend told a story about a tree that was actually in a canal and they told you ‘Look closely at it, if you make an effort you will see it has the shape of a robot. And I actually looked at it and found that the tree had a human form, so they invented a story to make the trip more interesting, and leaving, it was a very imaginative thing, like this, offhand, which I found very interesting,” he pointed out.

In that sense, Hiram de la Pena stated that if we pay close attention to what’s around us and what people are saying, we’ll find these kinds of stories everywhere,” so what I’ve suggested here is to do from the frontier, from this place and in a sci-fi key that sounds interesting. To give it a twist and it’s interesting that the characters in the stories have questioned some events or others, but there are others who have blind faith or have a tendency to be guided entirely by fact out of a desire to entertain, they accept completely improbable truths, which also seems basic to me To survive as a human being in this world.”

Hiram agreed that orality itself informs exactly this kind of story about different narratives that may exist roughly on the same event, an aspect that he accommodates in his narrative that splits at least two of his stories with the hard science fiction we know.

“I think it happens more often than we think with sci-fi stuff on a daily basis, and it’s nothing more than that we don’t pick up on it or ignore it, that is, it gets included in addition to technology or things like from another world, maybe it makes us curious but I feel like it’s being Getting rid of them very easily, unlike the gossip very properly among the people who wonder about them there because they are people you see every day, etc., but the main thing there is the work you do, everything by contributing to history.”

This is not to say that hard science fiction gets away with it. An example of this is the story Hard science which talks about the exploration of the human race on other planets with sciences such as anthropology as a means of conquest.

“So it is Sci-fi Totally difficult. In the future, under certain conditions, because this science is primary, just as the science that invented these ships is primary, by some technology they can travel to other constellations and because the work of a linguist, who interprets texts, is also primary. Sacred to the community to see how he gets in there, and then I also think it’s part of the game.”

Hiram in this text does not escape the essence of man’s triumph nor romanticize space exploration, on the contrary, he explores the anthropological concept of entering society. “The conditions for entry into the field can define your relationship in all of your ethnographic work, so what I was suggesting to myself was also how a successful entry into the field would be created and I think in the historical example when the Spanish arrived it turns out the Aztecs had such all these myths about Quetzalcoatl and his return. So Here you say “Well, how do you artificially recreate that” or “Could we humans have the means to do that artificially?” And I think the answer is yes, so from there I started to speculate on this idea and the whole point of observation comes up.”

public file It’s another sci-fi genre story that, far from going to outer space, embarks on a journey into the mind and the resources that can be used to explore it. “Just thinking about today’s world, you said there are people who can in no way be in therapy, pay money and throw themselves away, two years, three years, five years to explore their inner being, so how the same style, of capital, of production, And the efficiency that drives us to be in this state, how in a certain way can it get us to function again.”

Finally explore dystopia in Desert StormMexico in the year 2032 where the asados ​​are being regulated due to high levels of pollution. “A few years ago there were bans on barbecues, that is, they didn’t get to the point where they come to your house and they close you, but places that don’t have a lid or an air filter come in and you close them, it happened, for a few years and then in an epidemic it started to happen and in Mexicali It happened precisely because pollution in winter increases a lot and they were looking at how to reduce it and that was like the government’s response.”