📘 Angelica Gorodischer, Trafalgar
Trafalgar is a set of ten related stories, proclaimed 'a novel' in the edition published by Small Beer Press, but left uninflected in the edition published by Penguin Science Fiction. First, we read a quick biography of Trafalger Medrano, a long-time resident of Rosario, Argentina, printed in Who's Who in Rosario, published in 1977, just two years before the publication of Gorodischer's book. Following this, there is a note from the author where she asks us to read the stories in order so we may "understand each other more easily" and then the book begins in earnest.
Each story is premised in Rosario, with the protagonist, Trafalgar Medrano, sitting down with a friend, usually the author, telling tales of his adventures as an intergalactic businessman, over copious amounts of unsweetened black coffee. The structure of the stories renders the collection metafictional; the narrator/writer is often found telling Trafalgar that she will be writing his memoir at some point, although in the very first story, the narrator appears to be a lawyer, and since i found no evidence of Gorodischer ever studying law, i wonder if this particular narrator was completely identified with the writer. By the second story, however, i found it firmly established that the narrator was an incarnation of the writer, recounting her time listening to Trafalgar's stories, even if she wasn't in the room listening to them herself — sometimes she has inexplicable access to events from which she is absent, sometimes a condescending aunt relates some outlandish tales Trafalger told her.
I'm also almost certain that Jorge Luis Borges was one of Trafalgar's companions at the Burgundy... well, there was a man called Jorge with a briefcase full of books and a pipe, i'm not quite canny enough on Borges' biographical details to confirm or deny this, but the metafictional tendencies of the collection do raise suspicions. the only Argentinian fiction writers i've read so far are Leopoldo Lugones and Jorge Luis Borges, both known for their contribution to the genre that we'd recognise as weird fiction, often considered a subgenre, or at least loosely related to, science fiction1, the latter is Gorodischer's quarry in Trafalgar, and this fact further deepens my suspicion.
Aside from that, every story Gorodischer/Trafalgar tells is one of an intrepid adventure on an inhabited planet in galaxies far, far away. The most interesting part is that each planet is inhabited by aliens who are quite discernable as humans, and Trafalgar, who has some experience in travelling through the universe believes it to be infinite, to the point that he stumbles upon another Earth nearly identical to ours, but in the year 1492 and history altering hijinks ensue. The entire time, i read that story, and every story in the book, i could not help but think of Giordano Bruno, or at least, Giordano Bruno as he'd been described to me by Alexandre Koyre.
Interestingly enough, each story picks up a literary device that has been established within the diocese of science fiction and plays with it. Now one might say, that's exactly how all science fiction short story collections works, but there's a level of finesse to how the author spins these tried and tested sci-fi premises that demonstrates a firm grasp of the genre; the premises are already dated by 1979, but each tale is nonetheless surprising, and the worlds that classic science fiction from the United States once took entire novels to weave, Gorodischer weaves in the space of a short story. She even articulates the machismo of the golden and silver ages of American science fiction by telling them through a rather chauvinistic male protagonist, one who goes so far as to insult the writer herself; Gorodischer's commitment to the bit is astonishing.
China Mieville's essay Weird Ficton was published in the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction↩