New Worlds Collide: Science Fiction's Novela de la Selva in Gioconda Belli and Santiago Páez

The science fiction form adopted by Santiago Paez, in "Uriel" (2006), and Giaconda Belli, in Waslala (1996), owes the rudiments of its literary structure to early colonial narratives of New World encounter. Such science fiction not only contains strong traces of what Mary Louise Pratt has famously called the “rhetoric of discovery,” but also employs tropes directly or indirectly inherited from colonial travel narratives. However, Paez and Belli associate this science fiction form with a legacy of United States neo-imperialism, in which colonial narratives have been invoked and repeated triumphantly in the construction of national imaginaries. In Central and South America, conversely, the novela de la selva—the other clear structural source for Paez and Belli, and a literary form equally indebted to colonial narratives of New World encounter—remains conscious of its enunciation as a postcolonial form critical of its colonial narrative sources. While the novela de la selva, then, shares a literary taproot with sci-fi narratives of futuristic exploration, Paez and Belli utilize the latter to renovate and reactivate the former’s critique of an imperialist legacy by exploiting tensions that arise between these two disparate literary forms whose central tropes so often coincide. I argue that by adapting the ecologically aware New World imaginary peculiar to the novela de la selva, in which positivist ambitions of national expansion are checked by a forest that nevertheless becomes part of a national imaginary, Paez and Belli fundamentally alter the New World imaginary that underwrites high science fiction narratives of exploration and expansion. Resumen "Uriel" (2006), del Ecuatoriano Santiago Paez, y Waslala (1996), de la novelista nicaraguense Giaconda Belli, utilizan una forma especifica de la ciencia ficcion, la cual debe los elementos basicos de su estructura a las narrativas coloniales del "descubrimiento" del Nuevo Mundo. Este sub-genero de la ciencia ficcion no solo demuestra lo que Mary Louise Pratt ha llamado una "rhetoric of discovery," sino que tambien emplea varios tropos heredados – directamente o indirectamente – de las cronicas coloniales. Sin embargo, en la obra de Paez y Belli, este sub-genero se asocia principalmente con una tradicion estadounidense de neoimperialismo, donde estas narrativas coloniales se celebran como parte integral de los imaginarios nacionalistas. En contraste, en Centroamerica y America del Sur, la novela de la selva – otra fuente narrativa para la obra de Paez y Belli, e igualmente fundamentada en las narrativas del descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo – reconoce su propia enunciacion como forma poscolonial y se mantiene critica de sus fuentes coloniales. Asi, mientras la novela de la selva comparte una raiz narrativa con este sub-genero de la ciencia ficcion, Paez y Belli hacen productivas las tensiones que surgen entre estas formas distintas cuyos tropos centrales, con mucha frecuencia, coinciden y entrechocan. En este ensayo argumento que el imaginario del Nuevo Mundo particular a la novela de la selva, marcado por una conciencia ecocritica, sirve aqui para modificar y criticar los usos narrativos del Nuevo Mundo tipicos de las narrativas futuristicas de exploracion y expansion inter-galacticas.