Paul Plotkin: No. “Brazil of the south” is not a fiction that pretends to predict the future, what I sought was to imagine an alternative reality, an imaginary scenario in which the political circumstance allowed me to play with new rules and a map of global power that would have transformed the world.
Q.: Does the book give an account of the new world order after the Third World War?
PP: That is not said. Something happened that devastated everything, produced a drastic reduction in the population and a reordering of the hegemonies. What is best known through the story is the South Brazil Administrative Center and, among other places, due to a key trip of the protagonist, China, which is a key pole in the new global conformation.
Q.: Is it science fiction, a heroic fantasy, an adventure novel?
PP: I was interested in the adventure component. The boat trip that the protagonist must make, in a covert commercial mission, with the appearance of pirates. He was encouraged to try a record a la Stevenson. I like that of inserting, in a science fiction novel, an escape towards the adventure novel of the 19th century.
Q.: A society where you live with holograms, in which Absolute Happiness is programmed, refers to the dystopias of Orwell, Huxley, Dick or Collins.
PP: Not specifically to Aldous Huxley from “Brave New World”, nor to Suzanne Collins from “The Hunger Games”, but to the dystopias of Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy or JG Ballard and, locally, those of Marcelo Cohen. But “Brazil of the South” is not strictly a genre novel.
Q.: Return to a dystopian Buenos Aires.
PP: In the first Buenos Aires was one more character, with a very strong presence of certain neighborhoods, in this one everything is sophisticated, the landscape is rarefied, it is less neighborhood. The porteñidad in the voice of the characters comes out to me all the time and I did not want to neutralize it, I did not want to make it anachronistic with a neutral language in order to give credibility to a futuristic dystopia.
Q.: Does the soft dictatorship of the libertarian project of Absolute Happiness fail?
PP: This subplot of history has to do with political speeches that propose a refoundation of the country and that usually lead to failure. When I used the word libertarian it was not in circulation among us. Here the civilization or barbarism conflict reappears, but civilization does not seem so civilized and barbarism not so barbaric, they are all quite barbaric and apply systems of control and coexistence different from unifying. The soldiers and officials who operate for each side contradict each other and launch ideas that cannot be realized. Science fiction asks questions and does not look for answers, it imagines consequences and possibilities, it is a critique of reality, it reconstructs what surrounds us and shows how it can be disrupted by moving just a few elements and making them have a new function.
Q.: Your novels are installed in a genre rarely frequented among us, but with antecedents in Borges, Bioy, Cortázar and Gorodischer.
PP: Argentine literature has a strong tradition in the fantastic, horror and science fiction story, not as genres from which it was written. Borges, who translates and introduces Bradbury, describes his fascination with his stories and wonders what makes these fantasies about an alien planet so captivating. For a time there was a gap that made these narrative genres seem banished from our literature, in recent years they have become more visible, but not by presenting them in an identifiable Buenos Aires or Rosario or Córdoba. Perhaps the great Argentine dystopian work, set in a recognizable Buenos Aires, is the comic strip by Héctor Oesterheld “El Eternauta”. People commented interested and even a little surprised that there was an apocalypse in the River field or a fight in Plaza Italia. Luckily today there are more authors who play in these narrative genres, currently with a marked interest in the Gothic.
Source: Ambito
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