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173 BOOKS IN REVIEW mechanisms through an imaginative lens.—Anthony Enns, Dalhousie University Spirited Debates. Luis C. Cano. Los espíritus de la ciencia ficción: Espiritismo, periodismo y cultura popular en las novelas de Eduardo Holmberg, Francisco Miralles y Pedro Castera [The Spirits of Science Fiction: Spiritism, Journalism and Popular Culture in the Novels of Eduardo Holmberg, Francisco Miralles and Pedro Castera]. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2017. 266 pp. $65 pbk, $29.99 ebook. As Luis Cano says in the introduction to Los espíritus de la ciencia ficción [The Spirits of Science Fiction], the study of Spanish-language sf has undergone a transformation, having progressed from the preliminary phase of “curious, tentative glimpses” (17) to the essential work of compiling histories and identifying important themes and styles, to the present happy state of widespread academic acceptance and the publication of first-rate critical analyses. Many of these seek to theorize and situate works of Latin American sf within their national literatures. Cano’s erudite, informative, and thoroughly researched study joins other book-length studies—such as Rachel Haywood Ferreira’s The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (2011), Sarah A. Buck Kachaluba and Aaron Dziubinskyj’s critical edition of Eduardo Urzaiez’s Eugenia: A Fictional Sketch of Future Customs (2016), and Cano’s own Intermitente recurrencia: la ciencia ficción y el canon literario hispanoamericano [Intermittent Recurrence: Science Fiction and the Hispanoamerican Literary Canon, 2006]—that seek in these earliest expressions of Latin American sf new insights into continental literary aesthetics and their contributions to the late nineteenth-century debates over nationhood and progress. Los espíritus de la ciencia ficción is a comparative analysis of three key novels, one each from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, that were written when leading intellectuals in the newly independent Latin American countries were promoting national development agendas based on scientific theories and technological advances that radically challenged traditional authorities and ways of knowing. Cano’s project is both literary and sociocultural in nature. His aim, on the one hand, is to identify science-fictional elements common to his chosen texts in order to add to our understanding of how sf developed in Spanish America (Cano uses the term Hispanoamérica and the scope of his study does not include Brazil), and on the other hand, to situate the three novels in the context of late-nineteenth-century society, particularly the fashion for spiritism and the role of the print industry (chiefly newspapers and periodicals) in determining and popularizing certain cultural expressions. The heart of the book consists of three long chapters, each focusing on one of the three novels and bracketed by an introduction and a shorter chapter of “final considerations.” Before delving further into this review, a word about these novels, three of the earliest works of Spanish-American sf known to date: Eduardo L. Holmberg’s Viaje maravilloso del señor Nic-Nac al planeta Marte [Mr. Nic-Nac’s Marvelous Journey to the Planet Mars, 1875], Francisco 174 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) Miralles’s Desde Júpiter: Curioso viaje de un santiaguino magnetizado [From Jupiter: The Curious Journey of a Magnetized Man from Santiago, 1877], and Querens [Querens, 1890] by Pedro Castera. Important as these texts unquestionably are to literary history, they are not now nor were they then page-turners. Querens, for example, is a text that critics find hard to praise for its narrative merits; Cano himself calls the novel “lenta y morosa” [slow-paced and sluggish] (187). As I suspect anyone who has read these works will agree, their authors cared much more about the prodesse aspect of Horace’s maxim than they did about the delectare part. Cano is to be commended for acknowledging this and for offering an explanation as to why Holmberg, Castera, and, to a lesser extent, Miralles so often interrupt the flow of their narratives with long, dull pedantic passages. Largely, Cano argues, it has to do with the writers’ personal convictions about the elevating function of art and, especially in Castera’s case, with the rise of the Latin American Modernist belief in “art for art’s sake.” One of the many...

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