The Big Book of Science Fiction by Ann VanderMeer

When Bioy Casares faced persecution under the Perón regime in Argentina, he and Borges wrote “savage satires” of Perónists under a pen name.

Both Ocampo and Bioy Casares were friends of Jorge Luis Borges, whose story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is included here. She was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares (represented in the Big Book by “The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink”), an author best known for surrealism, fantasy and detective fiction, according to the VanderMeers.

This artistic diversity is well represented in the Latin American writers included in The Big Book of Science Fiction. Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo (“The Waves”), for example, was also a poet and playwright who studied painting and translated many important works into Spanish. These Latin American writers came to science fiction with a certain freedom of thought, perhaps because they often had a broad background in many arts, were politically active, and, refreshingly, did not obsess over the technical details of the SF elements in their stories. Fortunately, in Latin America, writers continued broader traditions which led to the development of the magical realism of later writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In their introduction, the VanderMeers note the diversity of speculative fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before science fiction came to be seen as a narrow genre of stories about “dashing men in dashing machines having dashing adventures,” as it was in the US and UK during the heyday of the sci-fi pulp magazines. Latin American Writers & Human Perspective in Science Fiction - Lisa Mahoney

The Big Book of Science Fiction by Ann VanderMeer