When a Robot Decides to Die and Other Stories Read online

  When a Robot Decides to Die

  When a Robot Decides to Die

  & OTHER STORIES

  Francisco García González

  Translation and Introduction by

  Bradley J. Nelson

  Vanderbilt University Press

  Nashville, Tennessee

  English translation and introduction copyright 2021 by Bradley Nelson. Copyright © 2015, 2017, 2021 by Francisco Garcia González. Published by Vanderbilt University Press 2021. All rights reserved.

  “True Killer” and “Fucking Swedes” were originally published in Spanish in Asesino en serio © 2019, Sudaquia Editores.

  “The Year the Pig,” “Waiting for the Wagon,” “Why Do Dogs Bark at the Moon?”

  “Yusnavy, the Eclipse of a Star,” and “How Nicely She Walks” were originally published in Spanish El año del cerdo © 2017, Editorial Alexandria. “The Visit” was originally published in Spanish in The Walking Immigrant © 2015, Editorial Alexandria.

  ISBN 978-0-8265-0222-3 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-8265-0223-0 (epub)

  ISBN 978-0-8265-0224-7 (web PDF)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA ON FILE

  LC control number: 2021016902

  LC classification: PQ7390.G3384

  In memory of my mother,

  Marianne Caroline Nelson (1941–2019)

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION. Dystopia Is Now

  PART 1. Of Robots and Other Perversions

  When a Robot Decides to Die

  True Killer

  Fucking Swedes

  The Visit

  PART 2. Uchronias

  The Year of the Pig

  Waiting for the Wagon

  Why Do Dogs Bark at the Moon?

  Yusnavy, the Eclipse of a Star

  How Nicely She Walks

  INTRODUCTION

  Dystopia Is Now

  The Reality of Science Fiction in Francisco García González

  FULL DISCLOSURE, I met Francisco García González when he was a graduate student in a course on medieval Spanish literature that I taught a few years back at Concordia University in Montreal. He had decided to use an essay from that course to complete part of the Master’s degree requirements in Hispanic studies at Concordia University, and so we began working together more closely to hone that project. I have always found it both exhilarating and humbling to teach native speakers of Spanish, many of whom arrive in Canada with impressive records of creative or academic achievements already in hand. A case in point, by the time he enrolled at Concordia, García González had published several collections of short stories in his native Cuba, the United States, and Canada, as well as co-authoring a humorous and devastatingly ironic history of Cuba with NYU professor Enrique del Risco called Leve historia de Cuba (2018; Slight history of Cuba). As we worked through his graduate essays, he would pass me his books, and in reading them I soon realized that his narrative prose was as audacious, challenging, and beautiful as his everyday persona was generous, understated, and sincere. His is an artistic voice every bit as self-aware and aesthetically erudite as those of Jorge Luis Borges, María de Zayas, and Miguel de Cervantes. And so, with Francisco’s permission, I took it on myself to find some way, other than incorporating his stories into my scholarship on early modern Spanish literature, to bring his works to the attention of a broader readership. A fair number of his short stories, along with a recently completed novel, are science fiction, although they are not sci-fi in the conventional sense, and so it occurred to me that a focused anthology would be a good fit for this collection of translated works being organized by Vanderbilt University Press. García González’s sideways approach to sci-fi is one of the main reasons I think that more readers, Spanish and English alike, should become acquainted with his writing.

  All of that being said, I am starting with a Spoiler Alert! This is a more or less scholarly introduction to an anthology of nine short stories, much of whose intellectual and emotional power comes from the reader’s slow realization—or sudden insight—that something is radically amiss with a seemingly straightforward presentation of a recognizable narrative situation. Although I will not give away any of the endings, some of the pleasure of reading these stories is necessarily lost by being led into them by a scholar who can’t help but talk at some length about the wit, beauty, and power of a writer who brings a unique, aesthetically erudite, and adventurous mind to a genre, or series of genres, ubiquitous in the artistic and media landscape of late modernity. In short, if you want a more immediate and uncluttered literary experience, you have my permission to come back to these comments after you have read the stories for the first time, or the second time.

  Science fiction is often characterized by the detailed and plausible manner by which its creators project imaginary scenarios of scientific and anthropological progress or regression. García González’s stories, by contrast, stand out due to the stark and schematic nature of the temporal, political, and cultural landscapes in which his protagonists are placed. Short fiction does not afford the luxury of delving too deeply into contextual details—Ted Chiang’s novella-length narratives aside—to wit, the stories included here drop you into an unfamiliar world and expect you to find your way through their twisted and tangled corridors that, in classic Cervantine fashion, compel you to take notice of the narrative structures themselves. I liken them to the thought experiments that a writer like Neal Stephenson includes in his vast works of speculative fiction in the sense that they propose a curious theorem and then follow it to its logical conclusions, no matter how uncomfortable or morally twisted these conclusions may be.1

  The first story, “When a Robot Decides to Die,” could very well serve as a writerly prologue in the way it deploys and summarizes many of the principal narrative, thematic, and political concerns explored and critiqued in the rest of the anthology. We settle immediately into the robot protagonist’s “mind,” in large part because we recognize the boredom of his job as a robotic stevedore on an assembly line of workers feeding an endless treadmill of consumerism. There are scattered references to his self-monitoring apps and communications from his supervisors, but these don’t create a temporal distance between Reynel and the readers; in fact, we immediately empathize with his anxiety and exhaustion, especially in light of the narrator’s sly reframing of twenty-first century capitalism within a futuristic society run by and for robots. This dehumanized and dehumanizing world reproduces the mundane horror of economic oppression and violence as portrayed in such sci-fi classics as George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Jordan Peele’s more recent Us. What is arguably most disconcerting here is that Reynel’s treadmill does not feed an endless hunger of human consumers, but of robots, who, like humans, have become increasingly desensitized to the banality of consumerism and its constitutive violence. The undertow of horror comes from the fact that everything else in the short story seems completely normal, and it is, except for the fact that robots are in charge and it is now humans who are the exploited species. But this is not presented as a mind-blowing moral and ontological inversion, or subversion, but rather as a yawn-inducing matter of fact, underlined by a billboard advertisement Reynel happens to pass on his way to an appointment with a literary editor—yes, our robot is a writer!2—“the train passed a barricade that advertised an establishment where you could have sex with human beings for modest prices” (27). The disturbance here arises from the comfortable normalcy of the capitalistic consumerist apparatus, right down to the conventional, which is to say violent, sexual desires and excesses of the robots, including their search for eco-touri
stic fantasies with human sex slaves in the tropics, or the loveless abuse of human sex surrogates. It is not unlike what we find in Angela Carter’s notion of moral pornography: “the moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes [or species]. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind” (1979, Kindle location 326). Carter’s thesis resonates in Reynel’s attempt to defend the sexual content and approach of his submitted novel to the head editor of a publishing conglomerate: “You don’t realize that sex can also be humor or pain springing from our darkest motivations, and that is exactly what I am searching for” (34). Reynel’s aesthetic manifesto reflects the normalized sexual violence onto the publishing industry and its primary role in both producing and mystifying economic relations through the sanitization of asymmetrical sexual relations. Indeed, the lopsided discussion between the robot author and editor is reminiscent of Cervantes’s quarrels with the artistic and literary institutions of his day. These three broad themes, economic and political oppression, sexual violence, and the role of art in both perpetuating and combatting the former, form the topical bedrock of García González’s fictions. The aesthetic twists and heuristic models that drive his fiction are analogous to some of the most powerful sci-fi works to date, such as District 9 (2009), in which the human race is held up to a mirror where we witness how our greatest enemies are our own prejudices and tendencies to favor mythical narratives of contamination and contagion over scientific evidence and reason.

  The next two stories come from García González’s 2019 collection Asesino en serio, which sports a clever title that exploits a silent play on serio, real or true, and serie, serial, asesino, killer. True to the title, the ten stories in the collection focus in serial fashion on death or murder, but not in conventional detective fiction fashion. It is debatable in many of these stories whether the deaths are real or metaphorical, what the actual causes of the deaths are, and what the role of the reader should be. In the noir universe, the reader generally accompanies a private, as opposed to institutionalized, detective who unveils the necrophilic social, economic, and political foundations of late capitalism. There is some of that in these stories, but much of the serialized violence that responds to the title is self-inflicted, and death often takes the form of emotional or psychological amputations or mortifications. And, as is the case in much of García González’s fiction, the reader is made complicit in the violence through movement toward an empathic and cognitive identification with these defective and/or delusional characters. In these focused predicaments of cognitive dissonance, interpretive choices have to be made, often with dire moral consequences, not unlike as with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. One has to take care to follow all of the rhetorical and narrative clues before investing empathy in an aesthetic object. The structural similarities between the dystopian worlds in the stories and our own social paradigms and predicaments become increasingly apparent, and the temporal and ontological barriers grow increasingly porous due to the calm and penetrating labor of the author.

  This is certainly what happens in “True Killer,” where humanity shines through a fabricated crime thriller when a surprisingly powerful moment of empathic identification causes a glitch in a manufactured serial killer’s software. Reminiscent of The Truman Show (1998) or The Hunger Games (2012), this story shifts between a kind of television studio where two police “detectives” follow the progress of an android that has been manufactured to create terror and fear in the population of a futuristic society, and the mind and actions of this same serial killer, who has been programmed to exhibit and emote the twisted necrophilia of a psychopath simultaneously attracted to and repelled by disabled elderly women, in this case one Mrs. Nadler.3 We learn through the internal dialogue of one of the detectives, Raoul, that this utopian world had once succeeded in eliminating violent crime altogether only to find that the absence of crime led to an epidemic of unexplained deaths and suicides: “What would happen to a world ignorant to violent crime? We already experienced it once, and it didn’t function; people died of sadness or committed suicide without even knowing why, and for that reason alone . . . ,” (51). As in the first story, we see first-hand how the culture industry and societal institutions create and exacerbate all kinds of social violence through the “defective” (ironic?) failure of one of their primary codes.

  The next two stories in the anthology provide opposing experiences for the reader, who is invited to identify with very different protagonists, although neither is quite as disturbing as the serial killer from “True Killer.” In “Fucking Swedes,” also from Asesino en serio, we accompany M. on a disastrous date with Celine, a very accomplished, beautiful, and philanthropic woman who has recently passed away.4 Necrophilia has been legalized in this futuristic world, starting with Sweden, which has taken its democratic liberal socialism to a simultaneously rational and spine-tingling extreme by deciding—democratically—that there are no victims when necrophiles carry out their natural desires, especially if the ostensible victim of what used to be considered an abominable crime has made the appropriate arrangements in her last will and testament. A philanthropist and tireless volunteer in third-world countries throughout her life, Celine’s dying wish is to continue giving after her premature death. Although not quite as macabre or intense as the mental contest and fusion between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham in the brilliant NBC/Netflix series Hannibal, the identification and estrangement dynamics the reader is subjected to are no less disturbing in this darkly hilarious tale. Again, the arguably pornographic thrust of this story places the reader at a critical distance from the ways in which death, or at least the death of feminine subjectivity, structure romantic desire in late modernity.

  The last story in the first section of the book, “The Visit,” comes from García González’s anthology The Walking Immigrant (2015), which takes the reader on an anthropological journey through the author’s first years in Canada after having emigrated from his native Cuba. The sixteen stories in that collection chart a course that begins with the desperation and exhaustion of a recent immigrant both condemned and “liberated” to take on and survive the most menial, physically demanding, and precarious jobs in a Gotham-like metropolis, and then moves inexorably through familiar and estranging encounters with immigrants from other places and varying personal circumstances. It culminates with a series of encounters with and among “native-born” Canadians, whose loneliness and desperation seem to equal if not exceed that of the immigrant if only because there is no easy explanation for the latter’s emotional and psychological displacement and loneliness. As the only sci-fi story in The Walking Immigrant, “The Visit” takes a more indirect and confounding trajectory to the empathic experience of the reader or viewer. A pair of intergalactic reapers harvest memories from recently annihilated worlds on the periphery of the cosmos to be sold to wealthy necrophiles of a galactic metropolis. These beings are easily recognizable as collectors of antiquities, art, or folk art from absent or disappearing worlds: in other words, eco-tourists or perhaps cultural and historical conquistadors. However, what begins as an unflattering portrayal of the violence and greed behind the commerce of artifacts of “authentic” cultural otherness turns into a poignant communion around the emptiness and desire that inhabit and haunt the experience of emigration to alien worlds. As the reapers uncomfortably watch one of the memories they have collected, García González unveils the true power of his art, which mesmerizes and humanizes at the same time.

  Up to this point, what we have seen in the anthology takes science fiction in surprising directions, upending both utopian myths of progress and dystopian visions of the apocalypse to come. However, we have not seen anything in particular that would mark these stories as Hispanic, or Cuban, other than the fact that they were originally written in Spanish. Nothing could be further from the truth in the
last five stories, which I have grouped in the exact same way they appear in El año del cerdo (2017; The year of the pig) under the heading “Ucronías” (Uchronias). For those unfamiliar with the term, uchronia describes a sci-fi genre in which we encounter a contemporary world, but one in which a major historical event has not turned out the way we assume that it has: “Fucking Swedes” is an excellent example. An aesthetic exploitation of chaos theory’s “butterfly effect,” as introduced by the mathematician Henri Poincaré and developed later by Edward Lorenz, some of the more well-known uchronias include Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its follow-up, The Testaments.

  What becomes apparent in El año del cerdo is that García González’s vision as an artist is at one and the same time serene and devastating, pitiless even, particularly where the economic and social conditions of Cuba’s totalitarian regime are concerned. The purposeful framework that anchors El año del cerdo, especially the five sci-fi stories that make up “Ucronías,” is a kind of naiveté, an unrecognized or unawares self-parody, starting with the temporal structure of the stories that takes Cuba’s permanent revolution at its literal word by imagining life under the regime some three hundred to five hundred years in the future. Each tale comes from the point of view of a character who is either too young to realize the gravity of the social and cultural violence and oppression that surround them, or too innocent in moral and political terms to comprehend how deep the structural and historical hole they are stuck in really is. In this world, humor becomes the only way to assimilate and critique the profound lack of awareness and vision of the regime itself as well as the catastrophic human cost of this same ignorance. There is a wry matter-of-factness that seems to disguise the horror underlying these humorous cultural portraits until the introduction of an enigmatic image forces the reader to face the macabre reality of a political system that feeds on both the spiritual and corporeal substance of its inhabitants. Obscene humor produces obscene laughter as the most effective critique of an obscene regime. Such obscenity is produced through the introduction of innocence, which is one of the fallback tropes of sci-fi, whether it is the childlike innocence of the newly discovered yet hopelessly backward alien species by comparison with the technological sophistication of the humanoid visitors/colonizers (see Avatar or any number of episodes from the original Star Trek, for examples);5 or the narcissistic naiveté of space travelers who are completely out of touch with the violent implications of their incursion into newly discovered alien civilizations, or of their enslavement of beings they themselves have created (e.g., Starship Troopers, Ex Machina). In either case, innocence and horror are frequent dinner companions in the world of science fiction.