When a Robot Decides to Die and Other Stories

By Francisco García González

A manufactured and pre-programmed serial killer; a suicidal robot; a romantic necrophiliac; and an archaeologist who feeds the perverse desires of aficionados of the apocalypse—Francisco García Gonzalez's stories map out literary and metafictional approaches to the sci-fi universe in ways that echo the humor and violence of Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosa Montero, and Roberto Bolaño.

With a scholarly introduction by translator Bradley J. Nelson that introduces García González's oeuvre to contemporary readers and scholars of Spanish-language literature, this science fiction collection introduces Anglophones to this unique author.

García González turns a black mirror on contemporary society and its relation both to history and to the future. His insightfulness and relevance draw comparisons with Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and China Miéville, though his verbal economy and elegance are more akin to Cormac McCarthy, producing both disturbingly uncanny violence and unexpected comedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780826502230

Francisco García González

Francisco García González is a writer, editor, and screenwriter. He was born in Havana in 1963. He won Cuba’s Hemingway Short Story Prize in 1999. Bradley J. Nelson is a professor of Spanish at Concordia University.

Book preview

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-touristic 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