(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: spacecraft takeoff)
Varsavsky background, non-spoiler discussion
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.
This month we're talking about Galaxy magazine's international reach. In particular, in this segment, we are discussing the Argentine magazine Más Allá, or Beyond, which was kind of an affiliate of Galaxy—not exactly a direct Spanish translation of Galaxy, but definitely close enough that it justifies heavy inclusion in this episode.
For our previous segments in this episode, we discussed the American magazine International Science Fiction, which was run by Galaxy Publishing House and imported science fiction stories from all over the world to the American market. We also talked about a couple of stories from the Italian magazine Galassia. One of those appeared in International Science Fiction, and one is an original translation, which you can read on our Blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com.
Our last segment that we posted deals with the background of the magazine Más Allá, as well as two stories written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, one of which was co-written by his brother Jorge. So definitely check those out if you are interested in more historical background on what we've been talking about so far.
But this segment will focus on Oscar Varsavsky, aka Abel Asquini, who wrote three stories for Más Allá. Varsavsky was a pretty interesting figure. He was born in Buenos Aires on January 18, 1920, to a Jewish immigrant family from Ukraine. Though his surname would indicate that the family was at one point from Warsaw—the Polish name for Warsaw being Warszawa (pronounced "Varshava")—I'm not sure why the English language doesn't make any effort to pronounce cities the way they're actually pronounced in their own native languages and just kind of makes stuff up. But that's what the English language does, so that's what we have to work with.
In 1943, he worked at the Philips Radio-Technical Research Laboratory in Argentina. At Philips, he worked with a multinational team, including a French engineer, Laverne; an Italian physicist, Levialdi; and an Argentine mathematician, Alberto González Domínguez, and a radiotechnical engineer Ciancallini, I would imagine some of these people get directly satirized in tonight's stoires.
Varsavsky received a doctorate in chemical sciences from the University of Buenos Aires in 1949 and started teaching there the following year. In 1955, he briefly worked at the Institute of Mathematics of the Department of Scientific Research (DIC) of the University of Cuyo, and in 1956 and 1957 participates in the creation of the university of Bahia Blanca's Institute of Mathematics.
He returned to the University of Buenos Aires in 1958, and aside from a brief stint in Venezuela in 1959, he remained at the university until 1966, where he directed a team of researchers formulating the first economic models for Argentina and published algebra textbooks for secondary schools. After the 1966 Argentine Revolution, where the president was overthrown by the military, the military began intervening in the education sector, and there were mass resignations, including Varsavsky's.
Varsavsky lived in exile in Venezuela from 1966 to 1968, where he worked at the Center for Development Studies, or CENDES, at the Central University of Venezuela. On his return to Argentina in 1968, he founded the Center for Mathematical Planning, and around this time began to author his main works on scientific education and policy, which he is chiefly remembered for today.
Varsavsky rejected the idea that science happens in a vacuum and argued that science is inherently linked to politics and culture. In the book “Towards a National Science Policy,” published in 1972, he rejects the idea that Argentina becoming a scientifically advanced nation means that it is just emulating what the Americans are doing, and instead argues for a separate, independent way of structuring scientific development.
In this book, he argues "that contemporary world science is ideological in the same way as technology, production, and education, and that each type of society requires its own style of science, differing in content, priority problems, research methods, and practical criteria of truth, as well as in the sociological characteristics of the group of researchers." He argues that "our universities, in their not very successful following of Northern trends, are incapable of understanding the techno-scientific needs of that social transformation and end up as mere instruments of cultural colonization."
He goes on to conclude that "today the university teaches a science, a technology—physical and social—a concept of the professional role, and an attitude toward society that are imitations of what is done in the Northern Hemisphere. This cultural followership reinforces our economic dependence and hinders every attempt to reorganize our society on fair foundations and with more human, less reifying criteria."
He had a brief period in Peru, where he worked at the Center for the Study of Popular Participation in Lima from 1972 to 1973, and died in Buenos Aires in 1976, his health having been failing for quite some time at that point. So while he died around the same time as Oesterheld and Rodolfo Walsh and other left-wing figures who were murdered by the regime at the time, his health gave out before he was caught up in all that stuff, despite having been forced out of the country by the previous coup in the late 1960s.
In addition to his writings on science education policy, he was extremely prolific in writing mathematics and science publications, having around fifty published works throughout his career. His early work was on physics, logic, and mathematics, and the bulk of his bibliography is on mathematical economics, simulation, planning, and modeling from the early 1960s onward until his death.
It's definitely beyond the scope of the podcast to analyze his technical output and his writings on science education and policy, and we'll link to several books in the description that do just that. But we're of course here to look at his fiction output, which is pretty much ignored by most of this secondary sourcing.
We mentioned previously that he answered the letters that appeared in Más Allá in the letters column, but he also had three fiction pieces that appeared between the November 1953 and January 1954 issues of Más Allá, or Beyond, while he was still at the University of Buenos Aires. These stories are clearly heavily based on his time at Philips. Rather than publishing these under his own name, he used the pseudonym Abel Asquini. I guess the Spanish pronunciation would be Abel "Askini", but it sounds to me more like he's trying to do an Italian name type of thing. So I'm not sure how he would have actually pronounced it, using the Italian or Spanish pronunciation, but that was the name he used.
It would appear that these are the only pieces of fiction that he ever wrote, which I think is too bad as well. These three stories are more or less the same story written three times. They're all pretty fun and definitely have a certain charm to them. And since they're all more or less the same story, unlike when we did the Arelsky “Tales of Mars” series of three connected stories, I think it makes sense, when we do the plot summary, to just run through all three as a set in a row.
Then I guess before we get into the plot summary, we can discuss how we feel about them in a non-spoiler section, and afterwards discuss how we feel about all three of them as a set. I guess, with that said, what do you guys think about “Protonickel,” “Nemobius Fasciatus,” and “Nyctalopes”?
JM:
I don't know. It was fun. I mean, I don't know. It doesn't seem like a great place to work, does it? Everybody hates each other.
Gretchen:
A lot of vindictiveness and pettiness.
Yeah, I think they're really fun. As you mentioned, they do follow very similar plot structures, so they all feel like the same story being told three times. But it is still a really fun read. You can see where the story goes, but there's still a fun little twist at the end. I thought it was nice to read.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know too much about Philips in particular and the characters involved there, but certainly at other research laboratories there was no shortage of huge egos in the mix. Probably the most famous example is William Shockley, who was one of the co-inventors of the transistor, and who founded his own company after leaving Bell Labs. A whole bunch of people left, whom he referred to as the “traitorous eight,” and they went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor.
JM:
But he didn't try to kill anybody, did he?
Nate:
No, no, but he poured the fame and prestige and money he had into funding eugenics research in the latter half of his life, and was apparently a huge, notorious asshole with a really abrasive personality. And while he didn't try to directly murder anybody, you could see that just pushing it a little bit further, you might be able to get there. So, I mean, this is obviously satirizing some of the egos.
JM:
Rock-star scientists, basically.
Nate:
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JM:
It's funny, I've been listening to a lot of YouTube channels where they talk about that kind of stuff, and the reason why bands break up, and stuff that I never really realized about some of the bands I listened to and the turmoil behind the scenes. And yeah, you would think that a bunch of scientists would be a lot more cool and collected, but I don't know. It seems like maybe Varsavsky is speaking from a little bit of experience here.
Gretchen:
I guess anyone can be susceptible to office politics, even very extreme ones like we see in the story.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, my day job puts me in contact with a lot of people who have been basically working in those exact same facilities for years and years and have advanced PhDs, and some are major award winners. Not to name any names or say what I do, but some of them are, let's just say, less down to earth than others, for sure. So it's definitely not a problem that is unique to the 40s and 50s, and I think it is very much continuing to this day.
Certainly the trap that some people with PhDs fall into is that when you get your PhD, you become basically the world's foremost expert on a particular niche subject when you write your dissertation. That gives people the idea sometimes that, well, if they're the expert on this in the world, they're also an expert on literally everything else, and it can lead to some really unbearable ego issues. Yeah, it just makes dealing with some of those things difficult sometimes.
JM:
You should start writing your own stories, man.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Just replace all the names and institutions. Everything will be fine.
Gretchen:
Yeah, write it under a pseudonym, you know.
Nate:
Yeah, right. I guess that's what Varsavsky did. I don't think he was ever directly mentioned in the pages of the magazine, either in terms of his fiction output or in writing the letters column. A lot of that stuff was elaborated on by Carlos Abraham's amazing work and some of the other scholars who have looked at this stuff before him. But yeah, Abraham, as we mentioned in the last episode, did an incredible amount of work digging into this.
But yeah, I think if you combine maybe the Varsavsky stories with the bureaucratic existential horror of the “Gormenghast” series, you might have a pretty good description of what the modern scientific and engineering research and development world looks like. Which is, I don't know, maybe less fortunate than it could be.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. I do kind of wish he had just told one story and made it more tight and awesome, and maybe a little longer. But yeah, I mean, it's fine the way it is. I guess in a magazine, it's a little different. It's not like he probably imagined that these stories would ever be put into some kind of book back-to-back or anything like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I can imagine it works a little better having it broken up by the other stories in each issue. Obviously, the way I read them is that I did just sit down and read them all back-to-back in one sitting, which, when you do that, obviously the similarities really pop out—probably more than they were intended to.
Nate:
Yeah, and in the magazine form, they're all really, really short. I think the pages in the magazine fit a larger word count than the pages of Galaxy, despite the fact that they're the same physical size. They have a smaller font, so they put more words on the page. But these are all two or three pages in the magazine, bookended by a bunch of 25-to-50-page novellas, novelettes, and other very short stories. So they're definitely among the shortest pieces that fit in the magazine here.
JM:
The way he set up the background and everything really made me think of a scientific detective story, right? I've always been kind of fascinated by the idea of science fiction detective stories, like this idea that in the future we might have something like that. I don't know. I appreciated that aspect. It's just, yeah, they were over when they practically began, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It's fine. I'm glad he told these stories, but I just, yeah, it's sort of the same thing that I sometimes have, even as a fan of really short stories, with a couple of these. I wouldn't say, oh, this, you know, just pick something and stick with it, and maybe add a little more depth to it or something. I can't even pick right now, and I thought about this, and I can't even pick which one I liked more than the others, really. Maybe the third one, just because it's the last one I read. I don't know.
“Nyctalopes.” I keep forgetting that, but that's also the name of a French weird supervillain-type novel series, “The Nyctalope.” Anyway, yeah, I can't even remember exactly if any of them stood out more than the others. I guess by the time I read the third one, I was kind of used to the format. So I knew it was pretty easygoing, just because I expected something like this. And there's always a bit of a twist at the end, but it's not really a twist, because you know something like this is going to happen, right? So yeah, I don't know. It was cool, though.
Gretchen:
They do kind of blend together when you read them all in a row like this.
It does remind me a bit of thinking of when you said, Nate, that this would be bookended by a lot of longer works, a lot more of a variety of works in the magazines. Almost similar to certain magazines that might have a comic or something in there that would just be a running gag or a theme that goes through a different magazine.
I will say that even though they all do follow the same structure, it is interesting that all three of them tackle a different field of science, or, you know, a little bit of a change in which scientific area of the crimes that we will get to. They all kind of differ in their own ways, which is pretty fun as well.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, a lot of those research labs were literally working on everything. Again, I'm more familiar with Bell Labs in the 40s and 50s, and they had their fingers in pretty much every emerging technology at the time. And I'm sure Philips was the same way, because they were a Dutch company and they had a foothold in Argentina. It's just kind of crazy how some of those corporations were able to spiral out in an international way relatively early on.
(music: echoey scratches)
spoiler summary and discussion
Nate:
So, all right, let's take a look at what actually happens in these stories. Like I said, I'm just going to run through all three at once, and afterwards we can just talk about them.
The first one up is “Protonickel,” which is the first of the “Crimes of the LIO” series, and appeared in the November 1953 issue of Más Allá, or issue number six. It opens with our antihero Caldero, the Spanish word for cauldron. And I think it's the only punny last name I didn't note in the text, as it is an actual Spanish last name, unlike the other ones.
Mr. Caldero is fed up with all the pranks the neighborhood youths are playing on him, the “mad wizard.” He furiously kicks a wallet tied to a string, which normally would be pulled like a fishing line by these youths, but today he almost takes off one of their fingers by kicking it, exerting an incredible amount of force on it, causing a bit of injury to one of the kids on the other end of the line.
He hasn't gotten wise to their pranks, but is incredibly angry at the snub he got at his workplace, the LIO, or the Laboratory of Investigation, Orselec. Lío in Spanish means something like mess, disorder, or tangle, which prompted a whole bunch of giggles from the locals in Buenos Aires, as it was a foreign acronym coming from New York. And again, I would imagine that something like this probably happened when the Philips organization had something that they named internally from the Netherlands that probably did not translate well into Spanish.
One week ago, Caldero had presented his boss, Nogler, with the plans to develop protonickel, which Nogler scoffs at and hands over to El Petiso Trapisóndez, who finds several flaws with the plan. This is another one of our punny names, where petiso means short and trapisonda is a synonym of lío, like mess or disorder. Naturally, El Petiso has to die.
The idea is that since an atom's nucleus occupies a volume that's billions of times smaller than the volume of the entire atom, if you were able to scrub off the electrons that are rotating around the nucleus, you could fill all that empty space with other nuclei to create a superdense material: in effect, the first successful nuclear polymerization.
At home, his housemaid's iron is shorted out, one of the tricks played on him by Sebo, the wallet fisherman from the beginning. Caldero ignores this and goes to his laboratory, where he's already fabricated protonickel and will use it to kill Trapisóndez. In creating a superdense sphere, he'll only need a little of it to suspend over Trapisóndez's head via magnetic coil. And when the power is cut, the sphere will fall, its superdensity piercing the skull like a bullet. But since it's so small, it will leave no trace: the perfect crime.
Not so fast, however. As Sebo continues to play his tricks on Caldero, shorting out his cook's iron again, this causes the power in the apartment to trip, thus causing the protonickel sphere to fall through Caldero's skull, killing him without explanation. The doctors rule the cause of death as a stroke. So yeah, that's the end of “Protonickel,” with Caldero accidentally killing himself through an accident. Or actually, I guess in a way he killed himself, even though the cause was exerted by Sebo, not an intentional prank.
This brings us to our next story, “Nemobius Fasciatus,” appearing in the next issue, from December 1953, where we get a similar setup. Flaco Puntualini—the punny name of flaco meaning skinny, and Puntualini being some kind of Italian construction of punctual—is perpetually late to work, and thus he's being reorganized to work under El Petiso Trapisóndez. This won't do, so now he'll also have to kill El Petiso, and musing it over, arrives at Pavlov's conditioning.
So what he does is train a giant dog to respond to an ultrasonic tone, one that the dog can hear but humans can't, and attack a dummy. Poor Fusible, the dog, is shocked with electrodes to get the training, but eventually he tears up a human-sized object when the tone is produced.
Unfortunately for Flaco, the field cricket, scientific name Nemobius fasciatus, produces the same sound. So when one nearby makes this ultrasonic chirping, Fusible the dog sees the nearest human-shaped object, which just so happens to be Flaco, and tears him limb from limb.
And then our last story, “Nyctalopes,” appears in the next issue, from January 1954, opening up with Nogler posting a cryptic job posting in a local newspaper. And I would say out of all the translation work I've done, this was probably the biggest puzzle I had to work with. While I had to bend it a little bit to get it into English, I'm satisfied with how it worked out.
So basically, it's been made into very cryptic shorthand. The posting is “A. f. res. l., e. k. elec., req. CV to LIO,” which he intends to say, “Assistant for research laboratory, extensive knowledge of electronics required. Send CV to LIO.”
JM:
Oh yeah, I bet this was a lot of fun, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. Just trying to figure out how to do this.
Nate:
It definitely was, and again, not 100% literal from the original. So if you want to check out how the original is versus my translation, we link to the scan of the original magazine in the Blogspot posting. But yeah, it's fun to have these interesting linguistic puzzles here.
And if the applicant isn't smart enough to figure it out, well, they don't want them anyway. Instead, they get hundreds of applicants thinking it says, “Apartment for residential living, enormous kitchen, electric, send required credit verification to LIO.”
JM:
Yeah, this was funny, actually.
Nate:
Yeah. It is a pretty good joke. And I think this one, the third one, has the most jokes in it.
JM:
Yeah, for sure. That's probably why I liked it best, right? Because it's more memorable.
Nate:
Yeah. Applicant number 261 comes in from a certain Cupídez, with help from Gladys, the LIO secretary. Cupídez, living up to his name, is in love with every woman he sees, including Gladys. And during his interview, he's impressively expounding on noctovisor technology while simultaneously fixated on Gladys and sighing frequently in her direction.
This thoroughly embarrasses El Petiso Trapisóndez, who decides he must kill Cupídez. Nogler assigns the two of them to work on the noctovisor technology, but El Petiso wants all the credit for himself. He rigs up an elaborate scheme, which is basically like an elaborate “Road Runner” cartoon, where he's going to have the night-vision visors make it seem like the road is flat and straight, but in reality, it's a dangerous curve going over a cliff.
Unfortunately for him, Cupídez has the exact same idea and beats him to the punch, which El Petiso realizes at the last second before his car careens off a cliff.
And I do want to comment on the illustrations on this piece, as they are illustrated by Luis Ángel Domínguez, credited as just Domínguez, as opposed to the previous two pieces illustrated by Pedro Olmos, credited as just Olmos. Both Gladys and the scientists are depicted with darker skin and features that clearly show them as not being Americans, unlike most of the other illustrations in the magazine. This somewhat ties into Varsavsky's anti-colonial themes, which he would address later in his nonfiction writing.
These are very much depicted as people living in Argentina, not generic Northern Hemisphere European-American types that you would see in a lot of the pulp science fiction. So it's interesting to see that cultural element come out in the illustrations for this story, probably more so than any of the other stories that appeared in it.
JM:
That's interesting, yeah.
Nate:
So yeah, that's our three stories, where we get basically three scientists trying to kill somebody, and only our Cupídez is successful.
JM:
This one had some futuristic car technology, though. That was cool.
Nate:
Yeah, it was.
JM:
Yeah. It made me think of, like, yeah, a lot of people have screens on their dashboards now, right? It's a different idea about how to use stuff. It's not like a computer or anything like that, but it's, yeah, I don't know. It was kind of neat.
And yeah, I enjoyed the little double-meaning joke at the beginning there. It reminds me of something I listened to a while ago, where a guy was talking about the band The Shaggs, and he was like, “Well, even the name is a mystery, right?” And he's like, “Well, is it a bird? To an ornithologist, sure. Is it a type of tobacco? Yeah, to a smoker. And to a prog rock fan, it's a remote glimmer of a possibility.” Yeah, I don't know. Like, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I also do like the added detail that Cupídez does end up filling the ad only because he had a clue from the secretary, rather than actually understanding what the ad was.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. Somebody needs to point out to the egghead that it's not what he thinks it is, right?
Yeah, and then you've got your applicant, who's actually a really good scientist and is like the wonder kid, right? And all the office staff are into him, apparently. And he's making sighing noises while he's rattling off formulas. Like, okay, he's okay. I wasn't sure exactly what was happening there, but it was funny.
Yeah, yeah. It was like, what is he doing? He's just looking at them.
Nate:
Yeah, just flirting with Gladys the entire time while he's doing this interview on night-vision technology, while talking about capacitors and the latest innovations from the North American research labs at the same time. Quite the ladies' man, it would seem.
JM:
Yeah, so naturally his rival, you know, is consumed with jealousy and wants to make sure that he gets all the credit for the invention and stuff like that.
Yeah. Will the rivalries and murders at the laboratory ever end? Who knows, who knows?
Nate:
It doesn't seem so, because presumably if there had been a fourth one, there would be more murders to go around.
It would be cool if he did different crimes in each of the stories. I mean, as you were saying, Gretchen, I do like the idea of him focusing on different technologies in each of the stories, but if he just came up with another idea of crimes that these evil bastard scientists could be doing, I think it would have made them stronger.
JM:
Yeah, they could even have the story take place after the crime, and have somebody come in and try to figure out exactly what happened. That might have been fun.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
Because I feel like the potential to have more than just murder at this giant laboratory, you know, there are all sorts of fraud and thefts that you could do as well. But mostly murder. “The Murders of the LIO” I think perhaps is a bit more apt.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
Although I will say, now knowing a little bit more from the background, I think it's really interesting that there is that emphasis on LIO being a joke name because it came from somewhere in New York. The North American offices made this decision, and it kind of ties into this idea that, oh, this is a South American country trying to do what North America is doing and taking in that colonial mindset, and just backfiring and making it just another joke in this work.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. And his writings on science policy, and I guess the anti-colonial themes that come out in his views on what Argentina should be doing as far as science education and national research and development, all that kind of stuff, were way later than these. These were pretty early in his career, written in the early 50s, while he was writing that stuff in the late 60s and early 70s.
But I mean, there's clearly an anti-colonial theme that runs throughout here, even though it's not in the forefront. We, I guess, see the joke from the New York office as well as, I guess, a kind of international cast of characters, which is kind of hard to say with Argentina, as Argentina has a lot of immigrants from all over the world, really.
JM:
Yeah, and even just the names of our characters and the authors, we see quite a variety of potential influences, you know, Varsavsky being Ukrainian/Polish, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And I think it's interesting too that a lot of the puns, as you were saying, you had to add notes about, because they're very culturally specific to Argentina, to the language being spoken, which is always the case with wordplay. But I think the fact that he chose to write in this style and have all of those puns also speaks to him wanting to put that Argentine identity into his work.
Nate:
And I definitely wanted to keep that in the translation and spell it out with notes, rather than just translating the words themselves, like International Science Fiction magazine did with the Luigi Cozzi story. I didn't read that in the original Italian, but you had the last names of, like, “I'm a Believer” translated into English. So I don't know if he kept that in English, from the Monkees song, or if he actually wrote it in Italian.
But there are a lot of times in other stories where they will translate the puns and things like that. I think it just strips the cultural identity from the original stories when you do that. So I wanted to keep that in the story as much as possible, even though I don't know, I sometimes feel like I annotate the stories too much. But I would rather have more annotations than too few annotations, I guess, because I really do want to keep the cultural identity of these stories as much as possible.
JM:
Yeah, and it is good when you get a really good copy of a classic work translated from whatever language, and there are some annotations explaining a lot of things. And sometimes, yeah, maybe some of the notes are unnecessary because you might already have some basic knowledge, right? But you can't really assume that the readers are going to be conversant with a lot of stuff.
So the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations of Russian classics all have extensive annotations that explain everything from geography to what was going on in the newspapers at certain times, and social trends and stuff like that. They take the time to try to explain all that, if people want to read those. So I think that's a nice feature to have in a translated work, or even a classic work or something like that.
And yeah, these stories may be, from a certain perspective, minor works, but this is the first time anybody's really looked at them like this, in this fashion. So it's good to do that.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. And I guess one of the reasons that we're doing this is that we want to make this stuff accessible to more people. I mean, there have been a couple analyses of these stories in English, but Rachel Haywood Ferreira doesn't go over these stories, and I think they only get a cursory mention in the fanzine history of Argentine science fiction that was published. The Carlos Abraham book is still only in Spanish. So I mean, yeah, the English-language material that talks about these stories is pretty scant.
And these stories have never been published anywhere in English before, though they did get a minor republication in Spanish when the Spanish magazine Nueva Dimensión published them in the magazine. But they've never been collected in book form or anything like that. I think possibly the only stories that you can get outside of the magazines, that have been republished elsewhere, are the Oesterheld stories, which were collected in an anthology of his fiction.
JM:
He seems to be the most well-known as a writer.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
As a fiction writer, I should say.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know if any of the people that we were talking about, besides the Strugatsky brothers, are as important as Oesterheld is in Argentine fantastic literature, right? If only because of “El Eternauta.” But Asquini/Varsavsky is obviously more known for his scientific works. So yeah, again, maybe a well-known name in certain circles, at least his real name.
When he was answering the letters, what name would he use?
Nate:
I think there was just no name used in the letters. I think it was just like how they would do it in Galaxy, where they would publish the letters and then publish a response.
JM:
Right, right.
Nate:
Where it's like kind of snarky.
JM:
Yeah, all the magazines did that.
Nate:
Exactly, yeah. And I mean, it's cool that they had their own letters forum because, like I mentioned in the last episode, it allowed fans from not just Argentina, but all over Latin America and Spain, to now come into contact with one another through this new forum of science fiction. It really was the first magazine in the Spanish-speaking world to have that broad impact and influence. Although there were other magazines that appeared before, they had very limited distribution and reach, and didn't have the U.S. influence that this had. This was really the one to open up the floodgates, if you will. Certainly a bunch of other magazines followed in its footsteps after the magazine closed down after the four years it was operating.
But yeah, cool little pieces. Varsavsky's an interesting figure, and certainly his nonfiction work has been analyzed a whole bunch. And again, we'll link to all those sources in the description. But I guess now are we ready to go on to an author who's not really known for anything?
Gretchen:
Sounds good.
Bibliography:
Abraham, Carlos - "Las revistas argentinas de ciencia ficción" (2018)
Rietti, Sara (ed) "Oscar Varsavsky: Una Lectura Postergada" (2007)
Schoijet, Mauricio - "Ultra-left science policy and anti-modernization in Argentina: Oscar Varsavsky", Science and Policy, Feb 2002
Varsavsky - "Hacia Una Politica Cientifica Nacional" (1972)
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