The Gadget Story: Machine Futures in Latin American Science Fiction

This dissertation considers how Latin American science fiction responds to unequal economic relationships between Northern and Latin American nations in the 20th and 21st centuries by highlighting a subgenre called the gadget story, a literary text that centers a plausible yet imaginary machine. My research intervenes in debates in Latin American literary criticism and science fiction studies using interdisciplinary methods including dependency theory, genre theory, feminist studies, and field research. Examining novels from Argentina, Chile, and Cuba, I ask how the gadget story sheds new light on literary responses to economic development in Latin America from early industrialization, the Cold War, and the neoliberal era. I find that because the gadget story necessarily focuses on technology, it must think through economic considerations from its historical moment, like systems of import and export or questions of access, which, in turn, tie the genre to Latin America’s efforts to escape economic dependency on the United States and Soviet Union. However, because it follows the formal conventions of science fiction, utopian aspiration is also embedded in this literary subgenre. As a result, my research traces the history of the Latin American gadget story as both a theory of economic development and a history of utopian thought in the region. This, in turn, brings to light a new recognition in the broader field of Latin American literary criticism: how, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, utopian thought and economic dependency developed in a dialectic, both in opposition to and in conjunction with one another.