A spaceship lands near a small town in the Amazon, leaving the local government to manage an alien invasion. Across Latin America, shelves labeled “ciencia ficción,” or science fiction, have long been filled with translations of H.P. Now they might have to compete with a new wave of Latin American writers who are making the genre their own, rerooting it in their homelands and histories. Shrugging off rolling cornfields and New York skylines, they set their stories against the dense Amazon, craggy Andean mountainscapes and unmistakably Latin American urban sprawl. The avalanche of original science fiction is timely, arriving as many readers and writers in Latin America feel choked by the folksy tropes of magical realism and desensitized by realist depictions of the region’s struggles with violence.

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Persons: Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, New York skylines Locations: America, Wells, New York