(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: anomalous phasing)
Más Allá background
Nate:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, JM and Gretchen, and tonight we're talking about Galaxy's expansion into the international market.
In the previous segments in tonight's episode, we focused on the American magazine International Science Fiction, which imported science fiction stories from all over. And we also focused on Sandro Sandrelli's story, which was published in Galassia, which was affiliated with the Italian version of Galaxy. But for the second half of tonight's episode, we're going to be focusing on the Argentinian magazine Más Allá, or "Beyond." And as we mentioned earlier in the episode, it wasn't exactly a Spanish-language version of Galaxy, but it was closely connected with Galaxy, republished most of its stories from there, and frequently used Galaxy's cover art.
So before we get started, I'd like to mention Carlos Abraham's book "Argentinian Science Fiction Magazines", which more or less takes the same approach as the Ashley books, but with Argentina instead of the United States.
JM:
Yeah, and it's just really amazing that somebody decided to do that. I just remembered that I should tell my dad that we're doing this episode, because he's very into Argentinian stuff. He's visiting Buenos Aires and stuff like that. I don't think he knows anything about Argentinian science fiction, but yeah, interesting area that's not been covered much over here, that's for sure.
Nate:
Definitely. Yeah. And the book is incredibly, incredibly thorough. He did an insane amount of work. He conducted interviews with hundreds of fans. He unearthed some previously unknown information about magazines that were just in draft form, or where only one issue exists. It's a really fascinating story, incredibly thorough, an amazing amount of research, and it's still in print, so you can buy a copy of this book. We'll link the book, which is only in Spanish, but we'll put it in the description in case you have any interest in digging further. And we really recommend that, if you do have further interest, you check it out, because it's certainly the definitive work on the subject, and I can't see that changing anytime soon because it's incredibly thorough.
So for English-language sources, there's a twenty-page booklet on the FANAC website, "A History of Science Fiction and Fandom in Argentina", by Claudio Omar Noguerol, and there's also two articles by Rachel Haywood Ferreira, whose work we drew extensively on when we covered the stories from Latin America in the pre-pulp magazine days. Her article "How Latin America Saved the World and Other Forgotten Futures" focuses on the Más Allá stories, not necessarily from a historical standpoint, but analyzes the stories for how Argentinian characters versus American characters are represented in the magazine from a cultural standpoint. Her other article, "Más Allá, El Eternauta, and the Dawn of the Golden Age of Latin American Science Fiction (1953-59)", focuses more on "El Eternauta", but as we'll be hearing shortly, Héctor Germán Oesterheld was heavily involved with both, serving as editor of Más Allá and author of "El Eternauta", or "The Eternaut", so there's definitely a strong link between the two.
For further Spanish-language sources, the September 1979 issue of Expreso Imaginario has a nice overview of the Más Allá stories, and a good piece on the magazine from Soledad Quereilhac, all of which we'll link in the bio.
While I'd recommend reading the Abraham book for a full history of science fiction magazines in Argentina, it's worth mentioning that Más Allá was not the first magazine in Argentina devoted to science fiction. Previous science fiction magazines existed, most notably Hombres del Futuro, or "Men of the Future", which ran for only three issues in 1947. Despite the fact that Hombres del Futuro ran for only three issues, it's the longest-running of the precursor science fiction magazines in Argentina. Some ran for one issue, some ran for two, and one existed only in draft form and was never actually published at all.
Again, the Abraham book goes into all the ins and outs of these details and is really quite interesting, so definitely check out his book. I do want to mention that one of these precursor magazines, Centuria, did publish two thirds of a novel, "Three Tombs on Venus" ("Tres tumbas en Venus"), before they folded, and the novel itself wasn't published in its entirety until 1967. It has a pretty awesome-sounding title and premise, so I believe that is the only Spanish-language science fiction piece that was published in magazine form prior to Más Allá, but I could be mistaken on that.
The other thing I did want to mention from this era was that there was a long-running weird fiction and horror magazine called Narraciones Terroríficas, which ran from 1939 to 1952, across 76 issues, and like Weird Tales, they didn't publish a lot of science fiction, but would occasionally publish the odd piece here and there.
JM:
Yeah, so it'd be interesting to see some of the best stories from that. Maybe not for Chrononauts, but I'd just be curious to see how it was similar to Weird Tales or not, or whatever, right?
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, they definitely published translations of the standard Weird Tales set, like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and so on, but I'm pretty sure they published some original stuff as well.
So while Más Allá wasn't the first magazine to publish science fiction in Argentina, or the first magazine focused exclusively on science fiction in Argentina, it was the first one that was both focused more or less on science fiction and to run more than a couple issues and actually have a lasting impact. Más Allá spread further than just Argentina, but also to other Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America and to Spain. A nice example of this is the Spanish magazine Nueva Dimensión, that is, Spanish as in from Spain. They did a special tribute to Más Allá in 1973, in their issue number 49, which was where they surpassed Más Allá in terms of total issue count, as Más Allá ran for 48 issues.
So you could say this was "Beyond" beyond, and what they did here was publish reprints of most of the fiction from Más Allá that was originally written in Spanish, though there were a few notable omissions. Más Allá could be considered the turning point for Spanish-language science fiction fandom in general, as it was really the first Spanish-language science fiction magazine to have both this broad reach as well as a letters column, which, as we've discussed previously in our episodes on the American science fiction magazines and our fandom episode, was one of the factors in establishing an actual community rather than a one-way relationship between the author and the reader. And a couple of those precursor magazines did have letters columns, but again, they were only very, very short-lived and didn't have a very lasting impact, whereas Más Allá ran for a few years, it was distributed everywhere across the Spanish-speaking world, so it really provided a long-running forum for the fans to communicate with one another. It wasn't just like a one-off blip.
So getting into the magazine itself, Más Allá was published by the publishing house Abril, "April" in English, which at the time was an established publisher that had done a lot of Spanish translations of Disney comics like Donald Duck, and had success publishing Argentinian comics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some of these titles included "Salgari" from 1947, "Misterix" from 1948, "Rayo Rojo", or "Red Lightning", from 1949, and "Cinemystery".
Cesare Augusto Civita, the head of Abril, made contact with Robert M. Guinn, who was the owner of Galaxy Publishing, in October of 1952 to try to obtain Spanish-language publishing rights for Galaxy. The intent was to eventually shift to a magazine that would be entirely reprints of Galaxy stories, and indeed the intended name was to be Galaxia, but that name had already been taken by a textile company.
While most of its stories did indeed come from Galaxy, there were a few notable exceptions, including in the very first issue, where they published a condensed version of the novel "The Day of the Triffids". An interesting side note is that Abraham tracked down about a third of the people who submitted letters to the magazine and conducted interviews with 103 of them, which is just an incredible amount of amazing and valuable work, but he says, "unanimously they regarded The Day of the Triffids as the most memorable text published within the magazine."
JM:
Yeah, and we'll have to get our John Wyndham on at some point on the podcast in the future.
Nate:
Yeah, I actually haven't read it. I've seen the TV series that was, I think, early '80s or late '70s. I forget exactly when it came out.
JM:
Early '80s, I think. Like 1981 or something like that, the BBC one, right?
Nate:
Yeah. I thought that was pretty cool, but I would definitely like to read some of his work because I hear it's pretty well regarded.
Gretchen:
I've read quite a few of Wyndham's novels, and I've enjoyed them, especially "The Chrysalids" and "The Midwich Cuckoos". They're really good.
Nate:
Yeah, it'd definitely be cool to get him on the podcast someday, but "The Day of the Triffids" definitely made a big hit with the Spanish readers here, even though the novel was published in abridged form. Abraham notes that the magazine's own survey said that 40.2% of the readers were secondary-school or university students, which is why many of them were still alive by the time he conducted the interviews, and that 80% of the readership was male.
A few of the other non-Galaxy stories published here were "Service Call" by Philip K. Dick, "Dear Pen Pal" by A. E. van Vogt, "Brain Wave" by Poul Anderson, and a few others, but Galaxy encompassed the bulk of what they published, and some notable examples of Galaxy stories were "Unready to Wear" by Vonnegut, four other Philip K. Dick stories, Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles", "Baby Is Three" by Theodore Sturgeon, which would be expanded out into the novel "More Than Human", "Pebble in the Sky" and "The Caves of Steel" by Asimov, "The Puppet Masters" by Heinlein, "The Space Merchants" by Pohl and Kornbluth, "The Demolished Man" by Bester, and the list just goes on and on and on.
The translation quality of the stories is admittedly uneven. In an October 22, 1955, letter to Forrest Ackerman by Francisco Porrúa, who was the editor of the science fiction and fantasy book series Minotauro, Porrúa laments that Más Allá butchered the translation of Bradbury's stuff and the fact that a lot of the longer works, like "The Day of the Triffids", were abridged or greatly condensed. And this letter and tons of other letters are held by the Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center in the Forrest Ackerman Collection, which we'll be talking about more in depth in a few episodes' time.
But as alluded to earlier, the magazine ran for 48 issues between 1953 and 1957. It had a few editors. The most relevant to our conversation tonight are Héctor Germán Oesterheld, who Gretchen will be telling us about more in a little bit, who published two and a half stories in the magazine, and also Julio Aníbal Portas, who published four stories in the magazine. Alberto Löwenthal and Giorgio de Angeli are the two other editors cited by Abraham, but neither had any stories published in the magazine.
The letters were answered by Oscar Varsavsky, who had three stories published under the pseudonym Abel Asquini, and is someone who we'll be spending more time with tonight.
Like Galaxy, in addition to the fiction, Más Allá published a number of popular science articles, written by both the usual suspects in English like Willy Ley and articles written natively in Spanish by José Federico Westerkamp.
So while the magazine never claimed formal affiliation with Galaxy in the actual pages, the relationship between the two was quite strong, and indeed the magazine would often use cover art that appeared on the Galaxy issues. However, the reason we're talking about it tonight is that it published a number of fiction pieces originally written in Spanish, chiefly by Argentinian, though not exclusively Argentinian, authors. A total of 23, potentially 24, of these pieces appeared in the magazine.
What is that plus one, you ask? Well, we'll be talking about that a little bit later, but we're proud to announce that we've posted translations of all 23 canonical stories on our Blogspot, which you can freely read. And we'd like to thank the Archive of Historical Argentine Magazines for making the scans of the original magazines fully and freely available, which is where we sourced the original texts from.
So let's go over what stories appeared in the magazine, and I'd like to give brief overviews of the stories we're unlikely to cover in the future. We'll be discussing a number of them tonight, and spoiler alert, we'll be returning to the magazine in a few episodes' time, where we'll be covering some more, in addition to a number of publications from another magazine, which, if you've been checking out our Blogspot, you probably know what magazine that is. But that's for another time.
As mentioned previously, Julio Aníbal Portas wrote four stories for the magazine, and I hate to be harsh here, but he's kind of like the Argentinian Nelson Bond for me. When we had talked about Nelson Bond, JM, I know you had mentioned he was 0 for 4 for you, and unfortunately Portas is 0 for 4 for me.
Probably the best of these is "Rino's Fantasies", which is a somewhat flawed novella that largely deals with invisibility, but also has strong elements of the Edisonade, in that it focuses on a genius boy inventor. There's one absolutely awesome scene in it that I love, but ultimately it just doesn't come together as a satisfying story for me, and it has some stuff in it that I just don't like.
Two of his other stories, "Time Disintegrated", which involves, well, time itself disintegrating, and "Raw Material", which plays up both the idea of ancient aliens and caravans from Empire Algol, have some cool ideas in them, but ultimately don't come together as stories. And then there's "The Jump", a brief story that's just total filler, where a science fiction author imagines himself being turned into a locust, and it's just not good in any way, possibly the weakest to appear in the magazine.
For the authors we are covering, Héctor Germán Oesterheld's "Innocent Machiavelli Reinforced" is the one story we won't be covering by him tonight, and I know I've told you guys about what this one is about, so I'll pose this question to the listener. If I told you that you have the title "Innocent Machiavelli Reinforced", and that it deals with a set of quirky characters named "Einstein Rogers", "Hitler Müller", and "Jacobus Random", you'd probably expect that it's some sort of weird political satire. And you'd be completely wrong, as this is a story about corporate espionage in the bra industry, where a mad scientist floods the atmosphere with a carbon isotope that makes all the women on the planet grow supermassive breasts in order to boost bra sales. It's probably the most sexist story I've read for Chrononauts, and one of the most sexist stories I've read in general.
JM:
We had a couple here, but I mean...
Gretchen:
I think it's saying quite a bit if you say that.
Nate:
Yeah, it definitely is. Our fellow podcasters at Hugo, Girl! do a segment called "Boob Talk", where they highlight the male-gazey moments in these science fiction stories, and this one goes beyond that and is pretty much an entire boob story.
JM:
Also sounds like another sort of advertising satire, right? It's like, how can we sell bras? I know, we'll just make the boobs bigger.
Nate:
Yeah. It's pretty ridiculous, and I don't know, it might be reminiscent of something you'd see in Playboy. I don't know if they were actually publishing science fiction at this time, but it definitely has a very sleazy vibe to it.
JM:
Yeah, they definitely had some. Playboy actually had — I'm sorry, I was getting on a bit of a soapbox here — but Playboy actually had really good stories around this time, and even Isaac Asimov wrote stories for Playboy.
So did Ray Bradbury.
Yeah, I mean, they weren't all lurid and ridiculous, either. They usually did have a little bit of sexual element, and sometimes it did seem like it was thrown in, but you can actually get both "The Playboy Book of Science Fiction" and "The Playboy Book of Supernatural Horror Fiction", which are pretty large collections. I don't know when they were published, definitely back last century now. I guess they might be a little hard to find, but you might be able to find them online. They're pretty interesting collections of stuff. There's a lot of interesting stuff from all kinds of authors.
Nate:
But yeah, this one's definitely sleazy, and again, it's incredibly sexist, so that's pretty much the reason why we're not covering it tonight. So read at your own risk.
There's also Francisco Baltzer, who we'll be talking about later tonight, who published another story called "The Factory Ship". We won't be talking about that one, and while it starts off in a totally awesome way, where a ship explodes and the sole survivor is literally floating in space amidst the wreckage and corpses of his crew, awaiting certain death, when suddenly he's picked up by a massive and strange alien object, the subsequent 75% of the story is just kind of lame, even though it does contain some interesting science fiction ideas. There's also some possibly unintentionally homoerotic elements here, which certainly had me raising my eyebrows at multiple points, but I'm not sure if those were intentional or just me reading it with my mind in the gutter.
And rounding out the one-offs we won't be covering are two Kang and Kodos-type stories, where we have a bunch of evil aliens cackling to one another while they do evil alien stuff, namely Antonio Ribera's "The Deadly Planet" and Luis Rodríguez Torres's "Nothing But Earthlings". "Nothing But Earthlings" is possibly one of these that I might want to cover in the future, because it's not a bad story, it's just really, really short.
JM:
It's definitely a bit weird.
Nate:
Yeah. It just kind of left me puzzled and unsure what to make of it, whereas "The Deadly Planet" is just pure filler regardless of how you want to slice it.
There's Juan Pedro Edmunds's "Discovery", which has some alien explorers romping around a strange planet, with an incredibly obvious twist at the end that the magazine itself spoiled in the teaser line, and I didn't really like it.
Félix Vosalta's "The Space Clown" is a really disappointing one in that it deals with the topic of post-traumatic stress disorder and the psychological state of the main character in processing trauma. But when it actually details the event that causes the trauma, it's really, really dumb. And I was just like, are you fucking kidding me? And likewise, the solution to his post-traumatic stress disorder is equally dumb, which produced the exact same reaction.
And finally, there is Juan Fernández Oviedo's "Professor Particular", which can be more figuratively translated as "Private Tutor", rather than the overly literal "Professor Particular", but I just like "Professor Particular" and think it has an awesome science fiction ring to it that I wanted to keep. So it's a pretty cool story about robots in the education industry with a fun, if not completely predictable, twist at the end, but it's just so, so short, well under a thousand words, probably like half the length of the Sandrelli story that we just covered, that I don't really have anything meaningful to say about it other than the fact that it has a neat twist. Maybe if we cover tons of those ultra-ultra-short stories, it would be a fun one to get in there.
But the rest of the stories that appeared in the magazine we'll be covering either tonight or in a few months' time, so you have that to look forward to. And as Rachel Haywood Ferreira notes, the quality of these stories is definitely uneven. While I don't think any of these are particularly lost masterpieces, I'd say that several of them rise to the level of being pretty good, or like an 8 out of 10 rating. And given that even in Galaxy they weren't knocking it out of the park with every single story, a solid collection of 8 out of 10s is, I think, a good addition to the science fiction corpus, and again, now available in English for you to read.
So what is that plus-one story that I alluded to earlier? This was one of my disappointments in going through these magazines, because at first I was all excited I was going to have an original scoop not mentioned in any of the sources, because this story is indeed not discussed anywhere in any sources whatsoever, including the otherwise incredibly thorough Abraham book.
JM:
Yeah, so it's interesting that they decided to leave that out as well.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, and we'll see why pretty shortly, maybe. Or maybe it was just overlooked. I'm not sure. But this story is Mary Latini's story "Interplanetary Messenger", from issue number 24, May 1955. Possibly one of the reasons it was left out is that the magazine claims it was originally written in Italian. But was it?
While we haven't done any super, super deep dives on Italian science fiction, we have dug into it enough to come across the fantascienza.it bibliography website, which is incredibly thorough, and indeed is one of the resources we've used for the Italian authors we've covered in previous segments tonight. It's more or less the Italian ISFDB equivalent, with virtually every Italian magazine and book publication ever indexed in a very searchable and findable form. And this story is nowhere to be found anywhere. It's pretty clear it was never published in Italian and that the only place it was published anywhere is in this issue of Más Allá.
JM:
And to be honest, Mary Latini definitely has the smell of a pen name about it.
Nate:
Yeah, it does. So I don't know: was it initially written in Italian, or was it written in Spanish under a pseudonym? I did want to do this both for the scoop angle and because it would be nice to talk about a story written by a woman, as all the other authors were all men, in both Más Allá and the other magazine we'll be discussing in a couple months' time. But after reading the story, I didn't want to move forward with the translation, and that's just because it's incredibly, incredibly racist.
The plot of the story is that a UFO crash-lands somewhere in colonial Zambia and is discovered by a young American mining engineer. However, his local guides, who are a Black African and an Arab Muslim, end up destroying it, because in-story, the Black African character is just too superstitious and dumb, and the Arab Muslim is too eager to resort to violence. And if it were only for the kind, intelligent guiding hand of the white man, they could have easily entered the UFO and discovered its secrets. It's incredibly unsubtle and ugly, and kind of surprising to read in the magazine, and really quite disappointing. And I didn't want to go forward with the translation and have it on our Blogspot. So if you want to read it, you'll have to get it from the Archive of Historical Argentine Magazines.
JM:
It certainly doesn't fit with what you think of as what was happening in, I guess, science fiction mainstream.
Yeah, maybe a story from seventy or eighty years previously, you could maybe give it a couple of excuses if it was written well. But yeah, I don't know, that's not so good.
Nate:
Yeah, especially when Varsavsky had a heavy hand in editing the magazine and doing the letters column, and he was very, very left-leaning in his political thought. We'll be talking about him a little bit later tonight. So yeah, it's a weird authorship mystery, and what language it was actually written in is another one of these obscure crappy-story mysteries that we'll probably never get to the bottom of.
JM:
And I mean, we've debated and tossed the ball back and forth over whether we want to talk about certain stuff like early "Buck Rogers", for example, where the origin of that character is buried and forgotten because of how racist it is, right?
Yeah, nobody remembers that, and probably with fine reason, you know. But it's just like the nature of the character changed when he came into the comics and the TV shows and stuff like that, and the nature of the story changed.
Nate:
So yeah, definitely disappointing to read. Because again, I thought for a second I had this amazing scoop, but no.
Additionally, a few science fiction poems were published in the magazine, which I didn't translate, as I'm not sure my translation skills are good enough to work with poetry, which is substantially more difficult to translate than fiction. Although going from Spanish to English is certainly an easier task than, say, Hungarian or whatever, as a substantial portion of the vocabulary is shared between the two languages. I don't know, maybe it's a project for the future.
So aside from this material, you can read the canonical 23 stories on our Blogspot, which we certainly highly encourage you to do. And again, while the quality is a bit uneven, they're all at least interesting as cultural artifacts, and most of them are pretty short. So with this background on the magazine out of the way, let's get into the actual stories themselves, first up with Héctor Germán Oesterheld.
(music: pounding machinery)
Héctor Germán and Jorge Oesterheld background
Gretchen:
Born in Buenos Aires on July 23, 1919, to a German father and Basque mother, Héctor Germán Oesterheld would be taught early in his life a belief in equality and inclusion from his left-wing parents. These ideals would inform his artistic and political intentions throughout the rest of his life. Oesterheld also enjoyed science fiction from an early age, with Jules Verne being among his favorite authors. This interest also contributed to his embrace of the genre and his continual use of it to depict and comment on the violence and injustice found during the authoritarian periods of Argentine leadership during his lifetime.
Oesterheld is best known for his work in comics, but he initially started out working in more traditional literary professions, first as a proofreader at a publishing house, and then as a writer for the newspaper La Prensa in the early 1940s. Eventually, though, he left the paper due to its conservative outlook and trust in European colonialist powers. La Prensa was also against Juan Domingo Perón, whose democratic election as president followed one of the multiple military regimes that would occur before and after his time in that position. Oesterheld, like many Argentines, saw in Perón, but especially in his wife Eva, a better future for the country. Later in his career, he would write about Eva in a comic called "Evita: Vida y Obra de Eva Perón," or "Evita: Life and Work of Eva Perón."
However, his first turn to comics was his work for the publisher Abril, publishing his first pieces in the genre in its magazine Cinemisterio after leaving La Prensa. Though his initial strips were not very political, in 1953 he published a comic called "Sargento Kirk" in the magazine Misterix, which was about a U.S. soldier deserting the army after being forced to massacre Indigenous Americans, instead defending them often against the U.S. government. The expression of social justice in "Sargento Kirk" would be carried into Oesterheld's future works.
Also in the early 1950s, Oesterheld married Elsa Sánchez, and the two would start their family. Oesterheld and Sánchez had four daughters: Estela, born in 1952; Diana, born in 1953; Beatriz, born in 1955; and Marina, born in 1957.
Around the late 1950s, Oesterheld, along with his brother Jorge, also founded and ran a publishing house called Editorial Frontera, which published a weekly magazine, Hora Cero Semanal, and two monthly ones, Hora Cero Mensual and Frontera Mensual. For the former magazine, Oesterheld created "El Eternauta," which ran for 106 weekly episodes between 1957 and 1959. Starting after Perón was deposed and exiled in 1955, and the use of Peronist symbols, even Perón’s own name, was deemed a criminal offense, Oesterheld used the comic’s narrative about an alien invasion to mask his political stances.
However, the publishing house began to decline, leading Oesterheld to sell it to Abril. While Oesterheld’s work in the early ’60s took a step back from the political intentions it had the previous decade, another coup against a Peronist leader who had come to power drew him back into political commentary once more. The most notable example of this is Oesterheld writing a comic biography about Che Guevara in 1968. As the Argentine government was vehemently against Guevara, Oesterheld’s comic was immediately suppressed. Copies were withdrawn from circulation, and the book’s printing plates were destroyed.
This suppression was extended to his aforementioned biography of Evita, published in 1970. In 1973, he began publishing the comic called "450 Years of War Against Imperialism," a leftist history of Argentina. In 1974, a secret police force known as the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance locked the workers of the newspaper where the comic was published, El Descamisado, in their office and held mock executions while interrogating the journalists. El Descamisado was a newspaper run by a left-wing group known as the Montoneros, freedom fighters who, alongside printing their own newspapers, also claimed responsibility for multiple assassinations and bombings, funding themselves through ransom on kidnapped executives and bank robberies.
JM:
I don’t think we’ve ever had an author on Chrononauts who met this kind of—I’m sure I’m trying to think back to a couple of those Soviet writers, maybe, and I guess you could say Čapek, but really it was Čapek’s brother who met, I suppose, the more tragic fate in a lot of ways. So it’s just crazy how this story ended for him.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, it is really interesting to see the way that Oesterheld’s life was influenced by the politics of the time, and how he took such political stances during that time.
But yes, while Oesterheld joined this group as a member of their press committee, creating works for both El Descamisado and their other paper Las Noticias, it is possible that he also eventually joined other sections of the group and committed some of the violent political actions for which the Montoneros were also known. Oesterheld’s four daughters were also involved in the Montoneros. Unfortunately, all five would be punished by the authoritarian government of the late 1970s for their involvement.
In 1976, the same year military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla took control of Argentina after the deposition of Isabel Perón, Juan Domingo Perón’s third wife, Beatriz, and then Diana, pregnant at the time, disappeared. Oesterheld himself was arrested several months later, evading authorities by changing his appearance for only so long. He was taken to the detention center El Vesubio to await his execution. A survivor of the center, psychologist Eduardo Arias, later reported on a moment he shared with Oesterheld:
“The guards gave us permission to take off our hoods and smoke a cigarette. They also allowed us to talk to each other for five minutes. Then Héctor said that, as he was the oldest, he wanted to shake hands with all of the prisoners present, one by one. I will never forget that handshake. Héctor Oesterheld was around sixty years old when this happened. His physical condition was very bad indeed. I don’t know what happened to him. I was freed in January 1978. He stayed in that place.”
Yeah, other survivors have noted that Oesterheld still continued to write during his time while detained, up to 1978, when there are no more witness accounts of Oesterheld and what happened to him. Similarly, Diana has never been found, nor her child, who was likely raised as a ward of the state and indoctrinated into the regime. Beatriz’s dead body was eventually found. After Oesterheld’s arrest, Marina also vanished, and Estela died during a failed kidnapping attempt, all of them falling victim to the oppressive regime they tried to fight.
Elsa Sánchez blamed her husband for the fate of their daughters, as he encouraged their beliefs, but she also took up the cause of children of los desaparecidos, or the disappeared. After his disappearance, Oesterheld took on the same martyr status that Guevara had, especially among others in the field of comics. Amnesty International in Belgium published a comic anthology called "Pétition—À la Recherche d’Oesterheld et de Tant d’Autres!" or "Petition—In Search of Oesterheld and So Many Others!" In 1980, the comics festival Salone Internazionale dei Comics in Lucca, Italy, awarded him the highest award, the Yellow Kid, though as one article points out, no one could say for sure whether the award was posthumous. Oesterheld’s work also lives on in Argentina, with the iconography of "El Eternauta" still used as a symbol of leftist activism and resistance.
And I didn’t know exactly where to put this, but I also wanted to read this quote that he said about the work that he was doing in science fiction in Argentina. He said, “My stories try to express something in a way that is ours, that is Argentine. Neither that of Ray Bradbury, nor of Arthur C. Clarke, nor of Italo Calvino, nor of any of the other great sci-fi masters. Just that. Ours.”
We have two works here that we’ll be covering from Oesterheld tonight, both of which were, of course, published in Más Allá in 1953. The first one, "Beware of the Dog," was published in the August issue, while the second, "Boomerang," written by both he and his brother Jorge, was in the December issue.
(music: computer bleeping)
"Beware of the Dog" (1953)
Gretchen:
We can start with "Beware of the Dog."
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, I thought this was one that was pretty cool. Again, the twist is pretty obvious from when it starts off, but it’s nice to see the exaggerated bad guys get what’s coming to them. And again, yeah, definitely the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist mindset coming through in a pretty big way.
Gretchen:
Yeah, especially after reading about Oesterheld. I think that this story is definitely among one of those where he tried to work in those masked political allegories and stances that he took against the authoritarian rule that he had to face.
JM:
Both of these stories are kind of heavy on the tension, I think. There’s a lot of tension and darkness.
It’s weird, Nate, when you describe the other story, the one about the large breasts, it just doesn’t sound like the same—
Nate:
No.
JM:
—it’s weird. But yeah, I mean, I like this a lot, actually. I don’t know. I guess we’ll get more into it later on when we’re discussing the story, but there were a couple of things that it reminded me of, but it was in a cool way. It wasn’t like the Sandrelli story, where I was kind of like, yeah, I’ve seen this before. I mean, definitely interested in checking out "El Eternauta" at some point, actually, probably. It sounds pretty cool.
Nate:
Yeah, that has definitely been translated into English. There’s a sequel and a remake of it, in addition to a new Netflix show that they made out of it, which has gotten pretty good reviews. So the story is definitely out there, and the original comic has been translated into English. So if you’re interested in checking that out, you should be able to easily do so.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, I would definitely be interested in checking it out, especially given the significance of the story in the culture of Argentina, and even outside of Argentina, with the impact that Oesterheld had, especially after his disappearance. There’s something really interesting about the way that his story maps onto some of the other figures that he looked up to and depicted in his comics.
Nate:
And it’s just a crazy time for Argentina in general. I mean, he’s not the only writer who met that fate.
Yeah, there’s another author, Rodolfo Walsh, who was killed in a shootout around the same time that Oesterheld was kidnapped. He was also a member of the Montoneros group. And yeah, he wrote a piece of science fiction that appeared in "Los Cuentos Fantásticos," but again, it’s on our Blogspot. So yeah, I mean, just a crazy political situation that produced some really, really interesting writing and these just awful, tragic ends to really talented authors.
Gretchen:
Yeah, you were saying to J.M. that the kind of story that you think will stick with you, and that you enjoyed the most, was the Strugatsky story. And I think that is probably one of my favorites. But I think this one is also a contender for one of my favorite stories of this read.
JM:
Yeah, I can definitely see why.
Gretchen:
Should we get into the details of the story?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
"Beware of the Dog" is written from the perspective of a being from Venus named a-Kía, though the humans who are bringing him to Earth merely call him Venusian.
JM:
Yeah, I think this was really cool. That perspective actually makes it really cool, because yeah, a lot of the time you wouldn’t see that. And maybe it would be a more conventional scary story if it wasn’t. It kind of reminds me of, like, it would be more like—if that were the case, it would probably be more like "Black Destroyer" by A. E. van Vogt or something like that. Like, it would be very similar to that. And to be fair, we did get some of Coeurl’s perspective in that story. But this was entirely inside an alien mind. And you kind of get the odd feeling of what it’s going to be, but you’re not quite sure, right, where it’s going.
And one of the cool things science fiction can do is make you understand the other perspective, even if it’s really strange and maybe hostile, right? There is talk about colonization and stuff like that. And the way the alien thinks is pretty clearly laid out by the end. And it makes a lot of sense. And there’s the parallel with dogs too, right? That’s even in the story title, but he meets some dogs during the story.
And it’s kind of reminiscent a little bit of the Strugatsky story. And then the humans are just kind of blundering around, and they don’t know. They have no idea what they’ve taken on, right? Not a clue. They’re just like, “Oh, this creature is maybe kind of smart, but it’s probably not that smart. Oh, we’ll just take it around, we’ll drop it off at home, we’ll do this and that, and then we’ll go back, and he’s our friend,” right? And we just don’t know, right? It’s just sort of making assumptions about things and not really understanding what we’re tapping into kind of thing.
And it’s a little bit scary, but the fact that it’s all from the perspective of the alien makes it not really a horror story at the same time. It’s got that science-fiction-esque way of tapping into the other and the way it thinks. That’s really cool.
Gretchen:
I think why this story works so well is because of the perspective, and seeing it from the perspective of a-Kía, and not just one of the humans involved in it. And I think that transforms it, because yes, it is something that could be a very horrific event. But instead, because of this perspective—and Oesterheld, knowing his political leanings, is very intentionally doing this—it kind of comes off more as justice or something. Instead of being exploited, the exploiters will be exploited instead. Or, you know, there’s something that feels like justice to it.
Nate:
We all love a good revenge story.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yes. So a-Kía is tasked with recording his journey to and his experiences on Earth, as his Lord has ordered him to write. This includes writing the conversations between the two astronauts who have taken him aboard their ship, even if he does not understand them.
JM:
I love the way he describes that he’s writing the whole time. And it’s like the humans are kind of aware that he might be writing something, but they don’t really seem to be paying that much attention to it. They’re just like, “Oh, well, he’s making symbols. I don’t know. What does it mean?” Right? They seem to kind of know, but at the same time, they’re not that interested. Like, it’s just really—yeah, you guys are a little bit dopey.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it’s kind of circular logic. “Oh, this creature is not intelligent and doesn’t understand anything, so it doesn’t know how to write, and whatever it’s doing can’t be writing because it’s not intelligent.” It’s like a whole sort of circular logic of, “It’s not writing because he’s not intelligent enough to write.”
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
And even starting off, they kind of don’t pay attention at all to any of the names of Venus or the Venusians themselves. They just sort of brush over it. So yeah, it’s already showing that the human beings immediately are underestimating this being.
But the astronauts in question are Fred and Jack, and a-Kía assumes the latter is older because he is paler and appears to have less blood in him. The two men discuss how other Venusians could be brought to Earth to solve the labor problem if a-Kía can survive the planet’s environment. Fred has reservations about using them as laborers or slaves—which term is used is all the same here—but Jack counters that Fred doesn’t feel bad about the use of domesticated animals for labor or food. Venusians only have the intelligence of a toddler, no matter how expressive their eyes are. After all, horses and dogs also have very expressive eyes.
Eventually, a-Kía arrives on Earth, where he feels too heavy and has a harder time moving. There is too much light and too much heat. But he does what he should to please the humans, as his Lord has ordered him to. He also keeps track of the radiation counter his Lord has placed around his waist, which shows immense radiation on Earth.
He also encounters dogs, which initially scare him, but the humans tell him that the dogs are friends, obedient to humans, though if they were more intelligent, they could be even more useful.
JM:
I love how the alien is like, “Oh, could they be used to conquer a planet?” And the guy’s like, “Oh, no, what a silly idea. The dogs wouldn’t know what to do.” Like, our protagonist is like, “Oh, okay, that’s good. Yeah. Okay, fine.”
Gretchen:
Yes. Yeah. It’s like a-Kía asks if they could conquer a planet if they were more intelligent. The humans answer that they could probably help to do so, but as they are, they’re not good for helping to conquer even other men.
JM:
Yeah, that was really funny.
Gretchen:
Yeah. a-Kía feels a hatred for dogs that he hasn’t felt for any other beings, wanting to attack and kill them. He doesn’t, though, because he must please the humans for his Lord.
Eventually, after a-Kía has been subjected to a bunch of tests and been observed on Earth long enough, the humans decide that while Venusians are weak under the influence of Earth’s gravity, the large number of them on Venus would make them a good workforce. One man is worried, though, about there being more intelligent life on Venus. How do you explain the men who died on Venus, who appeared to be desiccated like mummies with no visible wounds? But the others wave the concern off, claiming all of Venus had been explored with no trace of other beings, supposing the dead men had contracted a disease or died for some other innocuous reason.
So a-Kía is once again boarded onto the spaceship to return to his planet and tell the Venusians humans treat him well, and convince them to also come to Earth. a-Kía, though, is more excited to see his Lord, about whom the humans don’t know. He and others like him live at the bottom of Venus’s swamps, and they feed off of radioactivity. With the large amount of radiation on Earth displayed by a-Kía’s radiation counter, his Lord and the others have decided to conquer the planet. And once they have, they will tame the humans so a-Kía and those like him can feed on their blood.
He and the humans reach Venus. Once the humans open the hatch of the ship, a-Kía has orders from his Lord to kill them: “My Lord has ordered me to kill, and this I am doing.”
JM:
Yeah, really interesting look at what I guess is going to eventually turn into an alien invasion and conquest attempt.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
A different way of looking at it. And again, it reminded me of a couple of other things. There’s a Robert Sheckley story that this did remind me of slightly, and there is definitely a good sense of building up the foreboding as to what’s really going on. And there seems to be a bit of a pattern in some of these stories that we’re doing, in that, yeah, the humans are operating among things that are unknown and going off and getting into things that are going to cause a lot of trouble, and nobody really seems to know, right? None of the human contingent, anyway, really seems to know.
And the Strugatsky one was very reflective. And here we have these humans blithely going on through. I guess there are some sort of exploitation and colonial themes happening here. And the humans just have no idea that there might be something else on this planet that they haven’t even found, right, that’s actually mastering the whole situation. And yeah, the tables are going to be turned, probably at some point, but we end just at the right point. It’s scary and cool.
Yeah, this was really good, for sure.
Nate:
Definitely that kind of colonial arrogance, that they assume they’ll just be able to conquer everything and everything’s inferior to them. So why would they expect danger coming?
JM:
Yeah, Nate, this was when you translated pretty early on, I think, and we were looking at this story and talking about how we wanted to throw it into something. But yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I don’t know if this is the first one that I translated from the batch, but it was definitely one of the first two or three that I translated. Again, it was mentioned by the Rachel Haywood Ferreira article.
JM:
Oh, she mentioned this one specifically? Okay.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was kind of my starting point into just digging into this set. And it’s relatively short, so it’s a good one to start off with. And most of the stories that were in the magazine are about this length, probably more than half, I would say. There are only a couple that are in the longer range.
But yeah, it’s definitely one of the better ones, for sure. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to cover it, both because it’s a good story, I think—it’s a really good story—and Oesterheld’s life is just such an interesting life. And he had such a big role in the magazine itself that I think it would just be a mistake not to cover something by him. And it turns out he had his hands in two stories that I really liked, even though he didn’t entirely write the next one, but he definitely had a hand in it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, like I said, this is probably one of my favorites of the stories that we read for this episode. I really enjoy that kind of, again, anti-colonialist—well, you can tell that this is written by someone who has that kind of political stance.
I also chose Oesterheld’s work and the Strugatskys to cover for this episode before I had actually gotten to the Strugatsky story. So I do think it’s very interesting that, very unintentionally, they work really well in conversation.
JM:
It feels that way, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, definitely. Especially comparing human beings and animals and where our position is. Look at how certain beings interact and stuff like that.
Nate:
And this one makes the interactions much more spelled out on the other side too, where our a-Kía hero—I don’t think he’s ever physically described really in the story—but he’s very much meant to be like a sentient dog, pretty much.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It’s like bringing your Labrador on board with you or something like that, but he has some kind of thought patterns that he can communicate in some ways. And yeah, this is interesting to see.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I found too that this story had a tone to it. Like I did find sometimes with some of the stories—I don’t know, again, the fact that we’re not reading the original language—occasionally, I did feel like there was a certain, I don’t know, like there was a bit of a detached thing there, or I wasn’t really getting a sense of style or tone.
But from this one, I did kind of feel that that was a thing that was there. And again, it probably is just that Oesterheld maybe also holds a cut above a few of these writers, just in terms of being able to convey that. I got this real sense of foreboding, this dark mysteriousness. And that was sort of what I said about the Strugatsky too, but that was different. Like, the tone was different. This definitely had more of a—you could feel the horror might explode at any moment. It felt like there was a deception at play from the beginning. It’s kind of like, how can people be so oblivious, right? Like, you know.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And like Nate had said, there is more ambiguity to the Strugatsky story when it comes to how the interaction between humans and whatever alien being is out there that may have impacted people like Leonid. There’s sort of a sense that these are entities that aren’t necessarily hostile toward humanity, just a little bit more ambivalent toward us. Maybe they don’t have many strong feelings toward us. Whereas obviously here, there is a sense of hostility.
JM:
The humans did plan to exploit them, though, pretty blatantly.
Gretchen:
I think that it’s also like, here, there is maybe that sense of horror at the end, but it’s also—you do kind of feel like the humans deserve it. Like, I don’t feel necessarily as much horror as—
JM:
It’s from the creature’s perspective too, right? When you find yourself being like, yeah, just kill them, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah. After, you know, you see the cruelty.
JM:
Even though you might have this Venusian swamp lord or something like that, that’s very sinister, whom we haven’t ever met. But as for you, Mr. Dog, we totally relate, right? We want you to kill those humans. They’re terrible.
Gretchen:
You know, you’re allowed a little bit of blood from these humans. I think that’s okay.
JM:
Yeah. I think at the end, when we’re finished with all these, we might pick our top stories, and I think there might not be a lot of argument. This was one of the best ones too.
Yeah, for sure.
The next one’s not bad either.
Gretchen:
(music: rattling machinery)
"Boomerang" (1953)
Yes. The next one, as mentioned before, is "Boomerang," which was written mostly by Jorge, but Héctor did, I think, help polish it up.
Nate:
It’s another interesting piece, again, really, really short, but it definitely has a mood. It has anticipatory feeling of dread. What’s going to happen here?
JM:
This reminded me of a story from "Astounding," actually a pretty famous science fiction story from the Campbell years that gets brought up a lot. It’s called "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin, who doesn’t seem to be known for almost anything else, but he did write a few stories. I think this one’s from 1954. And I don’t remember exactly verbatim what happens in the story, but basically this guy is like a spaceship pilot, and he’s trying to deliver supplies somewhere. And this woman stows aboard the spaceship because she wants to get to that place because she has family there, or a husband, or something like that. I can’t remember. I know somebody will probably want to explain it to me now, but I have read this story, and it was over 20 years ago.
So essentially what ends up happening is that the fact that fuel is so rationed and space travel is so controlled and stuff like that—her being on the ship completely jeopardizes his mission, and now he’s not going to be able to deliver his vital supplies or something like that.
The whole idea around this story is that it kind of represents something about John W. Campbell, because apparently he had Godwin rewrite the ending of the story like 50 times or something like that, until it was exactly the way he wanted it. And by the end of it, Godwin was like, “I hate this story now.” This spoke to Campbell in some great way, and he’s like, no, this is the noble, powerful sacrifice in space. Like, more as an important grandiose statement and all this. And it reminded me a little bit of that story. Different, again, enough that it stands out in its own way, but the quandary reminded me of that. This was more like three sad men alone in a spaceship. I don’t know.
Yeah, it was a little different, but yeah.
Nate:
It also predates that story from "Astounding" by a year, which is also interesting, how they can bear similarities in plot. And it’s obvious Campbell never read this, but since the fact that it predates "The Cold Equations," it’s obvious that the Oesterhelds never read that either, or at least not when this was written.
Gretchen:
I feel like this one is pretty short. I think it might be best to launch into the summary of it, then talk a little bit more in depth after.
"Boomerang" opens on three astronauts, Spencer, Rocky, and Barry, doomed to die once the oxygen in the ship runs out. They have 336 hours of oxygen left. It is not enough for their mission to Mars. They are the third attempted manned mission to the planet, after nothing was heard from the other two. Barry and Spencer had also worked together on a mission to the Moon, which had been without incident. The former is the inventor of the power source used for the launch of each starship, while the other has made four voyages to the Moon and contributed to the establishment of the first Moon base. Rocky is new to space voyages, but has worked as a talented physicist. This mission will be the last for all of them.
Rocky brought a suicide capsule with him and uses it, leaving behind a note about his calculations on the trajectories that shows that the oxygen left on board is enough for just one of them to make it to Mars. He ends the note with, “I’ll leave the problem to you. I’ve solved mine.”
The remaining two men decide to verify his claim. As they work on the calculations, Barry starts to suspect that Spencer might kill him for the oxygen, using the paper knife on the table within his reach. He can barely concentrate on his work, wondering if he would let the other man kill him or if he would defend himself, when Spencer stabs himself in the chest. He tells Barry he didn’t do the calculations either, and that Barry will be the first on Mars.
Unfortunately, Spencer’s sacrifice was in vain. Barry has checked Rocky’s calculations only to find that the ship will just pass through Mars’s zone of attraction. He also concludes that the error in the ship’s journey happened at its start, with the insufficient initial thrust. Barry passes Mars, sees enormous cities there covered by ice, and continues on the path of the ship’s velocity. Before he dies from the loss of oxygen, though, he discovers that in 1,478 years, his ship will again come into contact with Earth’s orbit. In the year 3463, Barry’s diary and his perfectly preserved body are found after the ship lands back on Earth. He appears as though sleeping peacefully in his bunk, possibly taking his own life instead of waiting to suffocate.
I think what is really interesting here, comparing it to "The Cold Equations," which I haven’t read but have heard about, and even the way that you were describing it, J.M., is that there’s this noble sacrifice. It all comes down to putting something else over yourself and making sure that the right thing is done. But what’s interesting in this story is that the sacrifices turn out to not work. He mentions that Spencer’s sacrifice was in vain. I think there is a sense of selflessness to these men that does seem to be admired, but there is also—I don’t want to say criticism—but almost like a pushing back on this idea of a noble sacrifice.
Nate:
It’s definitely an interesting take on it, because I mean, you would expect it to work. I think that’s how it would play out in an American magazine or something like that. But this is one that I do wish was longer. It’s incredibly short, and I just wish that he was able to have more space in the magazine to flesh out some of these scenes a little bit more and build up the tension and just the atmosphere and the mood. I mean, you don’t need more plot happening really in the story, but just kind of making these scenes drawn out a little more.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
This was definitely like, this is how space is scary, and it’s a little bit mad. It kind of made me think of—even though everybody seemed, I guess, sort of levelheaded in their own way—I mean, you know, it was like one of those space-madness kind of stories. It’s like the three of them just die one by one.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
The way the one character is a point-of-view character is just so convinced that the other guy is going to kill him. He’s waiting for the blow of this stupid little knife to cut off his life forever. And then it’s like, no, he did it to himself. And the other guy was swallowing the suicide pill. And I don’t know, it was just, yeah, it’s really sad, kind of the futility-of-everything kind of story. Because, yeah, at the end, I mean, I survived a little longer, but I’m still going to die, right? Like, I’m not going to get anywhere.
And it’s just, yeah, I don’t know, it was weird, especially reading that after all the Moon-launch thing that recently happened, the Artemis II. One thing that was, I guess, sort of surprising to people a little bit was how low-tech some of that was. In a way, like having to use a lot of old systems and stuff like that. And some of the footage they had, like the quality was just not that great. And it was just, just sort of like space travel was still, yeah, something that we don’t really—we haven’t really mastered, right?
So this is really interesting coming across this too. These kinds of stories back then were sort of common, I guess. We have this disastrous problem in space. How are we going to solve it? And maybe if this were a story in "Astounding," and John W. Campbell were the editor, maybe we’d have found a way to solve the problem. But that’s not this story, right? So, yeah.
Gretchen:
It’s interesting because part of it is like, it is very bleak about the futility of the sacrifice that these men made and the futility of trying to hang on when the ship will not reach its destination and will continue past that destination.
JM:
No matter what sacrifice there is, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I am kind of struck by just how at peace the men are after they still commit suicide. Like, even the last man, Barry, is described as being found in kind of a peaceful state. Spencer smiles as he tells Barry that he’ll be the first on Mars. And it’s really kind of interesting. I’m still kind of not sure exactly the tone or how I feel about the way it’s depicted. I still feel like it’s not completely bleak.
JM:
But yeah, it almost seems happy at the end, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
He didn’t want to wait any longer. I don’t know. It’s weird. There’s a little bit of a whimsicalness to it, maybe.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it’s bittersweet, I feel like.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I think it might also be that I am almost influenced by knowing about Oesterheld and kind of his involvement in political resistance, and almost this idea that he seems to be very interested in the idea of martyrdom and sacrifices made, even if it seems pointless or even if it seems like a futile gesture.
JM:
Even in the previous story, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, like there’s a sacrifice involved there too.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, this was good too. I definitely was impressed by both of these. Maybe the previous one a little more than this, but they were both good.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I think I can forgive Oesterheld for the awful bra story. I am a little disappointed that he made that, but at least he made two really great stories for the magazine besides it.
Nate:
And I know he has an anthology of pretty much all of his science-fiction short fiction that’s not in comic-book form, but in prose form, out there somewhere. So hopefully that’ll get an official English translation someday, because it definitely would be interesting to read more stuff from him aside from his comic work, which would also be cool to check out.
JM:
All right. Well, we have a trio of stories from a somewhat amusingly named—well, pen-named—Abel Asquini, right?
Bibliography:
Abraham, Carlos - "Las revistas argentinas de ciencia ficción" (2018)
Archivo Histórico de Revistas Argentinas, "Más Allá de la Ciencia y de la Fantasía" archive, https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/mas-alla-de-la-ciencia-y-de-la-fantasia/
Capanna, Pablo - "La sci-fi en Argentina", El taco en la brea, May 2018
de Pedro, Roque - "Los Primeros Pasos de la Ciencia Fiction Argentina: Acá también hay un más allá”", pp. 20-22, Expreso Imaginario #38, Sept 1979
Ferreira, Rachel Haywood - "How Latin America Saved the World and Other Forgotten Futures", Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (July 2016), pp. 207-225
Ferreira, Rachel Haywood - "Más Allá, El Eternauta, and the Dawn of the Golden Age of Latin American Science Fiction (1953-59)", Extrapolation 51.2 (2010), pp. 281-303
Hennum, Shea - "The Interrupted Eternity: How the ’70s Argentinian Government Removed Rebel Cartoonist Héctor Germán Oesterheld", Paste Magazine, 18 November 2025 https://www.pastemagazine.com/comics/the-interrupted-eternity-how-the-argentinian-governme
Lambiek Comicylopedia - "Hector German Oesterheld" entry https://www.lambiek.net/artists/o/oesterheld_hg.htm
Noguerol, Claudio Omar - "A History of Science Fiction and Fandom in Argentina" (1989) https://fanac.org/Fan_Histories/Argentina/history_sf_fandom_in_argentina.pdf
Porrúa, Francisco - unpublished letter to Forrest J Ackerman, October 22, 1955, Box 133, "Porrúa, Francisco 1954-1955, 1957, 1960" folder, Forrest J Ackerman Papers, Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections Research Center https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/a/ackerman_fj.htm
Quereilhac, Soledad - "Más Allá de la Ciencia y de la Fantasía: Revista mensual de aventuras apasionantes en el mundo de la magia científica (1953-1957)", Archivo Histórico de Revistas Argentinas https://ahira.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Presentaci%C3%B3n-M%C3%A1s-All%C3%A1-SQ.pdf
Standal, CJ - "Comics’ Own Martyr: Héctor Oesterheld’s Life and Death", Cartoonist Cooperative, August 2023 https://cartoonist.coop/journal/comics-own-martyr-hector-oesterhelds-life-and-death/
Tercera Fundacion, "Nueva Dimensión 49 (1973)" entry https://tercerafundacion.net/biblioteca/ver/ficha/7825
Thielman, Sam - "The Comic-Strip Writer Who Became a Legend", The New Yorker, 26 April 2023 https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-comic-strip-writer-who-became-a-legend
No comments:
Post a Comment