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Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral by Gabriela Mistral. Albuquerque. 2003. University of New Mexico Press. 407 pages. hardcover. 0826328180.

DESCRIPTION - The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalized into a ‘poetess’ of children and motherhood. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendor of her Hymns of America. During her lifetime Mistral published four books: Desolation, TENDERNESS, CLEARCUT, and WINEPRESS. These are included in the ‘Complete’ Nobel edition published in Madrid; the Poem of Chile, her last book, was printed years after her death. Le Guin includes poems from all five books in this volume, with particular emphasis on the later work. The intelligence and passion of Le Guin's selection and translation will finally allow people in the North to hear the originality, power, purity, and intransigence of this great American voice. CONTENTS: Foreword; Introduction - About Mistral; The Strong Woman; The Baby Left Alone; Torture; Love Unspoken; Inmost; God Wills It; Shame; Ballad: The Other Woman; Interrogation; Waiting in Vain; Verses: In my mouth. .; Poem of the Son; Verses: By the blue flame. .; The Bones of the Dead; Sea-song of Those who Seek to Forget; Patagonian Landscapes; To the Clouds; Autumn; Summit; Starsong; Rocking; Discovery; Dew; Quechua Song; The Sleep-Wave; Patagonian Lullabye; Song of Death; Mexican Child; Little Bud; Little Star; Weaving the Round; Give me your Hand; Child's Land; Color Round; Rainbow Round; The Ones Not Dancing; Round Dance of the Metals; All-Round; Fire Round; Let Him Not Grow Up; Fear; Given Back; The Empty Nutshell; The Bit of Straw; The Girl with the Crippled Hand; The Rat; The Parrot; The Peacock; The World-Teller; Wind; Light; Water; Rainbow; Strawberry; Mountain; Larks; Pine Woods; Sky Car; Fire; The House; The Earth; Little Feet; Hymn to the Tree; Flight; Riches; The Cup; The Midnight; Two Angels; Paradise; Grace; The Rose; The Death-Girl; Airflower; The Shadow; The Ghost; Bread; Salt; Agua; The Wind; Two Hymns: Tropic Sun, The Cordillera; The Corn; Absence Country; The Foreigner; To Drink; Four Queens; Things; Wall; Old Lion; Song of the Dead Girls; Undone; Confession; Old Woman; Pigeons; The Other Woman; Deserted; The Worrier; The Dancer; Set Free; The Sleepless Woman; The Lucky One; The Fervent One; The Farmwife; The Walker; A Woman; Prisoner's Wife; A Compassionate Woman; California Poppy; The Discovery of the Palm Grove; The Stone of Parahibuna; Death of the Sea; Ocotillo; Cuban Palms; Sharing Out; Message to Blanca; The Fall of Europe; The Footprint; Lady Poison; Eight Puppies; Anniversary; Mourning; A Word; I Sing What You Loved; Farm Tools; The Return; Doors; Jewish Refugee Woman; Dawn; Morning; Evening; Night; Last Tree; Discovery; In Thirst-White Lands; Nightfall; Elqui Valley; My Mountains; Mount Aconcagua; Clover Patch; The Valley of Chile; Palms of Ocoa; Herons; Bird Migration; Cormorants; Houses; Poplar Roads; Falls of the Laja; Bio-Bio; Araucanians; Austral Forest; Moss; Ferns; Lake Llanquihue; Fog; Four Seasons of the Huemul; Faraway Patagonia; Return; The Teller of Tales; Thanksgiving; Ballad of my Name; Electra in the Fog; A Brief Chronology of Mistral's Life.

Gabriela Mistral (7 April 1889 – 10 January 1957) was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and feminist. She was the first Latin American (and, so far, the only Latin American woman) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she did in 1945 'for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world'. Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note. 

Ursula Le Guin has published five volumes of her own poetry, an English version of Lao Tzu's TAO TE CHING, and a volume of mutual translation with the Argentine poet Diana Bellessi, THE TWINS, THE DREAM/LAS GEMALAS, EL SUEÑO. Strongly drawn to Mistral's work as soon as she discovered it, Le Guin has been working on this translation for five years.

V. B. Price, a UNM alumnus, is a journalist and the author of several books that are available from UNM Press. He is a distinguished poet and critic, and the recipient of the Erna Fergusson Award for Outstanding Achievement from the Alumni Association of the University of New Mexico. He lives in Albuquerque.

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The Moon Pool by A. Merritt. Middletown. 2004. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819567079. Early Classics of Science Fiction. 352 pages. paperback.

  
DESCRIPTION - One of the most gripping fantasies ever written, The Moon Pool embodies all the romanticism and poetic nostalgia characteristic of A. Merritt's writings. Set on the island of Ponape, full of ruins from ancient civilizations, the novel chronicles the adventures of a party of explorers who discover a previously unknown underground world full of strange peoples and super-scientific wonders. From the depths of this world, the party unwittingly unleashes the Dweller, a monstrous terror that threatens the islands of the South Pacific. Although Merritt did not invent the lost world novel, following in the footsteps of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Burroughs and others, he greatly elaborated upon that tradition. This new edition includes a biography of the author, and an introduction detailing Merritt's many sources and influences, including the occult, mythological, and scientific discourses of his day. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Author of 15 science fiction and fantasy novels, ABRAHAM MERRITT (1884-1943) was the most popular genre writer of his time. His talent for fantasy and science fiction writing was first recognized when the novelette version of this story appeared in a 1918 issue of All-Story Weekly. MICHAEL LEVY currently serves as Chair of the Department of English and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

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Memories of the Space Age by J. G. Ballard. Sauk City. 1988. Arkham House. 0870541579. Art Work by Jeffrey K. Potter. . 216 pages. hardcover. Cover art by MAX ERNST (1891-1976), one of the twentieth century's preeminent surrealists, is represented on the jacket by an apocalyptic landscape from his decalcomania period, Europe After the Rain (L'Europe apres la pluie II), 1940-42; oil on canvas, 5.

  
DESCRIPTION - The Space Age has passed into history. In the shadow of the derelict gantries at Cape Canaveral repose the abandoned motels, the empty swimming pools, the desolate launching grounds, the crashed space capsules, all the rusting remnants of a vanished technological civilization. A crime had been committed here, a violation of the evolutionary order embodied in man's attempt to conquer the tideways of space, to breach the boundaries of his own humanity. Over the years, beginning with ‘The Cage of Sand' in 1962, J. G. Ballard has probed the psychological implications of man's exploration of outer space, and during this period the author has written a series of mesmerizing stories set within the forsaken Space Center at Cape Canaveral, involving moribund astronauts encircling the Earth, and depicting a world in retreat from the ravages of time, All of the Cape Canaveral and related fiction is preserved in the present volume, which includes several of the most haunting images in contemporary literature, as Ballard's obsessed men and women stumble through the archetypes of a declining technological landscape. The collected Cape Canaveral stories establish indisputably what partisans of this author have recognized for many years: J. G. Ballard is one of the supreme visionary prophets of our age, possibly the most significant writer of speculative fiction since H. G. Wells. In his melding of science and surrealism to create a phantasmagorical milieu worthy of Max Ernst, Ballard is exploring the uneasy interface between technology and humanity, dramatizing the neuroses and paranoias of our age, presenting with hallucinogenic intensity the existential plight of modern man. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - J. G. BALLARD was born in 1930 of British parents in Shanghai, China, but has lived in England since the age of fifteen. In 1956 Ballard's first imaginative stories began to appear in conventional genre periodicals, but with publication of a series of disaster novels in the early 1960s, he emerged as the most powerful and original talent in British science fiction. Later, as high priest of the New Wave movement Ballard wrote a series of experimental ‘condensed novels,' collected in THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION (1970); more recently, the semiautobiographical EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1984). filmed by Steven Spielberg, has brought J. G. Ballard to a vast new audience. JEFFREY K. POTTER was born in 1956 at March Air Force Base in southern California and is largely self-taught though the artist-photographer acknowledges Clarence John Laughlin, Jerry N. Uelsmann, John Heartfield, and Man Ray as major creative influences, Potter has illustrated numerous hardcover and paperbound books as well as magazine covers for such disparate publications as Night Cry, American Politics, and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Like some mighty Dadaist demiurge, Potter is able to juxtapose images in quest of his own imaginative counterpart to reality, enabling us to perceive the world through his unique artistic vision.

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Solitude: A Novel of Catalonia by Victor Catala (pseudonym of Caterina Albert I Paradis). Columbia. 1992. Readers International. 0930523911. Included Is The Author's Foreword To The Fifth Edition. Translated from the Catalan by David H. Rosenthal. 224 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Beautiful, industrious, and intelligent Camilla is taken to an isolated hermitage in the Pyrenees by her lazy and insensitive husband, Matias. There she contends not only with her rapidly failing marriage but with her attraction to her young neighbor Arnau; her growing admiration and respect for the older shepherd named Gaieta; and the violent intentions of the bestial Anima. Through Gaieta's guidance, Camilla finds strength and a sense of self in the mountains.DESCRIPTION - Beautiful, industrious, and intelligent Camilla is taken to an isolated hermitage in the Pyrenees by her lazy and insensitive husband, Matias. There she contends not only with her rapidly failing marriage but with her attraction to her young neighbor Arnau; her growing admiration and respect for the older shepherd named Gaieta; and the violent intentions of the bestial Anima. Through Gaieta's guidance, Camilla finds strength and a sense of self in the mountains.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Caterina Albert i Paradís (L'Escala, Spain, 11 September 1869  -  27 January 1966), better known by her penname Víctor Català, was a Spanish writer in Catalan and Spanish who participated in the Modernisme movement and was the author of one of the signature works of the genre, Solitud (Solitude) (1905). Her literary skill was first recognized in 1898, when she received the Jocs Florals (floral games) prize; soon thereafter, she began using the pseudonym Victor Català, taking it from the protagonist of a novel she never finished. Despite her success as a dramatist and her forays into poetry, she is best known for her work in narrative literature, with the force of her style and the richness of her diction being especially noted. She died in her hometown of l'Escala, Catalonia, in 1966 and is interred in the Cementiri Vell de l'Escala.

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A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Chicago. 1970. University of Chicago Press. 0226978656. Translated from the Russian & Edited by Mirra Ginsburg. 322 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Yevgeny Zamyatin, leading Russian short story writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist, was one of the very few writers in post-revolutionary Russia to stand up openly to the regime and its suppression of creative freedom. Proclaimed an ‘enemy', his books banned in Russian to this day, he nevertheless exerted a profound influence on emerging Soviet literature as craftsman, teacher, and critic. This volume is the most comprehensive collection of his essays to appear in any language. ‘In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy,' Zamyatin lashed out at his critics. Hounded by Communist party-line writers, he continued to fight fearlessly and outspokenly for freedom of intellectual expression, experimentation in art, and against all pressures toward the stultifying conformity that turned Russian literature into a desert during the Stalin years. Always lucid, always witty, original, merciless to cant, and warmly generous, his essays are masterpieces of the writer's craft. This collection includes acute analyses of contemporary writers and artists, assessments of the situation in Soviet literature, statements of Zamyatin's own views on the craft of fiction, and prophetic insights into the outcome of the current clash between the writer and the state. Also included are two important documents - Zamyatin's famous ‘Letter of Resignation' from the Soviet Writers' Union and his extraordinary ‘Letter to Stalin.' His essays are as fresh and valid today as they were when written because the conflict between freedom and repression in those days was so fundamental, because it still persists in Russia and elsewhere, and because Zamyatin's thought always rose above the specifics of the moment.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (January 20 (Julian) / February 1 (Gregorian), 1884 - March 10, 1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents.

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The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel. New York. 2012. Penguin Books. 9780141196428. Introduction by John Sutherland.  352 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - The first great science fiction novel of the twentieth century-now available from Penguin Classics   Strange, macabre, and, fantastical, M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud is a landmark work that heralded the genre of apocalyptic fiction. It tells the grandly bleak story of Adam Jeffson-the first man to reach the North Pole and the last man left alive on earth. A sweet-smelling cloud of poisonous gas has devastated the world, and as Jeffson travels the stricken globe in search of human life, he slowly succumbs to madness, unleashing fire and destruction on his planet. A new introduction by literary scholar John Sutherland explores The Purple Cloud's apocalyptic themes and Shiel's colorful private life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Matthew Phipps Shiell (21 July 1865 – 17 February 1947), known as M. P. Shiel, was a British writer, remembered mainly for supernatural horror and scientific romances. His work was published as serials, novels, and as short stories. The Purple Cloud (1901, revised 1929) remains his most often reprinted novel. John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and wrote the introduction to Chekhov's The Shooting Party for Penguin Classics.

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Typescript of the Second Origin by Manuel de Pedrolo. Middletown. 2018. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819577429. Translated by Sara Martín. Foreword by Kim Stanley Robinson. 184 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Manuel de Pedrolo's widely acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel, which includes a foreword by Kim Stanley Robinson, tells the story of two children who survive the brutal destruction of Earth by alien explorers. The protagonists, Alba and Dídac, retreat to the forest, then journey to the rubble of Barcelona to rescue and preserve the remnants of human civilization in the city's bombed libraries and cultural institutions. in the absence of the rule of law and social norms, the children create a utopian world of two that honors knowledge and interracial love, to become a new Adam and Eve and try to bring about the world's second origin. A bestseller and required reading for secondary school students in Catalonia, Typescript of the Second Origin is indispensable to understand how a region of Spain whose language, culture, and institutions were targeted and punished by Francisco Franco. At the same time, Pedrolo's tale of survival reaches beyond national and cultural borders to offer contemporary international readers a timely warning about the threat of global ecological destruction.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MANUEL DE PEDROLO was born in L'Aranyo (Lleida), Eastern Catalonia, in 1918 and died in Barcelona in 1990. A prolific writer in all genres, Pedrolo experimented with new forms and content. He fought on the side of the Republican during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and was a critic of the repressive policies of Franco's regime (1939–1975), which included censorship of the Catalan language. Within the field of science fiction, Pedrolo's greatest contribution was without a doubt Typescript of the Second Origin. SARA MARTÍN is a senior lecturer in English literature and cultural studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. As a researcher she specializes in popular fiction, particularly gothic and science fiction, and in gender studies. This is her first literary translation into English. KIM STANLEY ROBinSON is an American writer of science fiction. He has published nineteen novels and numerous short stories but is best known for his Mars trilogy. Robinson has won many awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award.

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Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore. New York. 1947. William Sloan. 358 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Ward Moore's classic novel "Greener Than You Think" posits a world with Bermuda grass running out of control -- choking out every other plant and destroying the food supply of animals and humanity alike. Originally published in 1947.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ward Moore (August 10, 1903 - January 28, 1978) was the working name of American writer Joseph Ward Moore. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ‘he contributed only infrequently to the field, [but] each of his books became something of a classic.' Moore began publishing with the novel Breathe the Air Again (1942), about the onset of the Great Depression. The story is told from multiple viewpoints, and Ward Moore himself appears briefly as a character in the novel. His most famous work is the alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee (1953). This novel, narrated by Hodge Backmaker, tells of a world in which the South won the American Civil War, leaving the North in ruins. Moore's other novels include Cloud By Day, in which a brush fire threatens a town in Topanga Canyon; Greener Than You Think, a novel about unstoppable Bermuda Grass; Joyleg (co-authored with Avram Davidson), which assumes the survival of the State of Franklin; and Caduceus Wild (co-authored with Robert Bradford), about a medarchy, a nation governed by physicians. Moore is also known for the two short stories (since collected) ‘Lot' (1953) and ‘Lot's Daughter' (1954) which arepostapocalyptic tales with parallels to the Bible. The film Panic in Year Zero! (1962) was (without giving credit) based on Lot andLot's Daughter. His short story ‘Adjustment', in which an ordinary man adjusts to a never-never land in which his wishes are fulfilled, and makes the environment adjust to him as well, has been reprinted several times.Moore was born in Madison, New Jersey, a western suburb of New York City. His parents were Jewish and had married in 1902, the previous year. His grandfather Joseph Solomon Moore (1821–1892) had been a successful German-born commission merchant and the statistician of the New York custom house, the author of several books on the tariff question and a friend of Carl Schurz. Five months after Ward Moore's birth, he moved with his parents to Montreal, where his mother's family lived. In 1913 they returned to New York. Moore's parents divorced and remarried around this time, and his father died in 1916. His mother's second husband and Moore's stepfather was the noted German jazz band leader Julian Fuhs. Moore attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York, where according to one widely repeated story he was expelled for antiwar activity during World War I; elsewhere he claimed that he dropped out of school in order to write. He later attended Columbia College. Moore claimed to have spent several years tramping around the United States as a hobo during the early 1920s. In the mid-1920s he managed a bookshop in Chicago, where he befriended one of the store's patrons, the young poet Kenneth Rexroth. Moore appears in Rexroth's memoir An Autobiographical Novel as the mad bohemian poet/bookseller/science fiction writer ‘Bard Major'. Rexroth claimed that ‘Major' had been on the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Milwaukee and was expelled for Trotskyist deviationism, but the factual basis for this tale, if any, is obscure. In 1929 Moore relocated to California, where he was to live for the rest of his life. Starting in 1937 he participated in the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, where his friend Rexroth was an administrator in the San Francisco office. His picaresque first novel Breathe the Air Again, was about the labor struggle in California during the 1920s. It had autobiographical elements and was widely and favorably reviewed. It was intended to be the first of a trilogy but the remaining volumes were never published. During the 1940s Moore wrote book reviews, articles and short stories for a number of magazines and newspapers, including Harper's Bazaar, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jewish Horizons, and The Nation. By 1942 Moore was married to his first wife, Lorna Lenzi. He had seven children. Starting in 1950 he was book review editor of Frontier, a West Coast political monthly similar in outlook to The Nation. In the early 1950s he began writing regularly for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was a friend of the magazine's California-based editors, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, and soon became a popular favorite with the magazine's readers. Though he was never terribly prolific, his science fiction stories penned during the 1950s were entertaining and well crafted and were well received. In the 1960s his literary output diminished, and his last two novels were completed with the help of collaborators. His 1953 speculative if-the-South-had-won-the-Civil-War novel Bring the Jubilee was brought back into print at the time of the Civil War centennial and found an appreciative new audience among Civil War buffs. In 1965 he remarried; his second wife was the science fiction writer Raylyn Moore (nee Crabbe; 1928–2005). The couple moved to Pacific Grove, California where he died in 1978.

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Prodigies: A Novel by Angelica Gorodischer. Easthampton. 2015. Small Beer Press. 9781618730992. Translated from the Spanish by Sue Burke. 166 pages. paperback. Cover art by Elisabeth Alba.  

DESCRIPTION - Prodigies explores the story of the poet Novalis's birthplace in the German town of Weissenfels after it is converted into a boarding house. Moving, subtle, and full of wit, irony, and dreams, this novel fills the house with the women who lived there throughout the nineteenth century, and across the flow of history constructs the secret drama of their destinies.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer (1928-2022) was born in Buenos Aires and lived in Rosario from 1936 on. She published many novels and short story collections including Kalpa Imperial, Mango Juice, and Trafalgar, as well as a memoir, History of My Mother. Her work has been translated into many languages and her translators include Ursula K. Le Guin and Alberto Manguel. With certain self-satisfaction she claimed to never have written plays or poems, not even at 16 when everybody writes poems, especially on unrequited love. She received two Fulbright awards as well as many literary awards around the world, including the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Awards and a 2014 Konex Special Mention Award.

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The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey by Enrique Gaspar. Middletown. 2012. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819572936. Translated and introduced by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea L. Bell. Early Classics of Science Fiction. 52 illus. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2". 240 pages . paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - “…[The Time Ship] inaugurates one of science fiction’s most potent subgenres, and for this alone, it deserves to be remembered and honored. Moreover, the period illustrations by Francesc Soler are exceptionally charming. ”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post. Globe-trotting scientists pursue immortality and love in the world’s first time machine. H. G. Wells wasn’t the only nineteenth-century writer to dream of a time machine. The Spanish playwright Enrique Gaspar published El anacronópete—“He who flies against time”—eight years before Wells’s influential work appeared. The novel begins at the 1878 Paris Exposition, where Dr. Don Sindulfo unveils his new invention—which looks like a giant sailing vessel. Soon the doctor embarks on a voyage back in time, accompanied by a motley crew of French prostitutes and Spanish soldiers. The purpose of his expedition is to track down the imprisoned wife of a third-century Chinese emperor, believed to possess the secret to immortality. A classic tale of obsession, high adventure, and star-crossed love, The Time Ship includes intricately drawn illustrations from the original 1887 edition, and a critical introduction that argues persuasively for The Time Ship’s historical importance to science fiction and world literature. Reviews: “…a jolly romp with considerable humour and sly digs at both Spanish and French pretensions. ” —Nick Caistor, Times Literary Supplement. “As the first English Translation of this humorous and important work, this book belongs on the shelf along with more famous works of science fiction from the late 19th century, as a reminder of the contributions of less-known but still important Spanish writers to this genre. Recommended”—P. J. Kurtz, Choice. “This is a lovely little slice of genre history. …The Time Ship makes for an entertaining—and in places gleefully subversive—read. Thanks are due to Wesleyan University Press for supporting its publication, and to all involved for bringing it back to light for modern SF fans. ”—Nic Clarke, Strange Horizons. Endorsements: “What an amazing discovery! A time machine before H. G. Wells, and lively and witty romps through history before Doctor Who. Add Enrique Gaspar to the list of inventors of science fiction, and place him high. ”—Andy Sawyer, Science Fiction Foundation Collection, University of Liverpool Library. “Gaspar’s novel takes us back to science fiction’s infancy, when emotion and intelligence were enough to evoke a sense of wonder, creating pure adventure without needing to resort to rivers of blood or extreme violence. Reading it is a surprising experience as well because, though almost 125 years old, The Time Ship proves that many of the themes we think of as current were already a concern to our great-grandparents. ”—Daína Chaviano, author of The Island of Eternal Love. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Enrique Lucio Eugenio Gaspar y Rimbau (2 March 1842 in Madrid – 7 September 1902 in Oloron) was a Spanish diplomat and writer, who wrote many plays (zarzuelas), and one of the first novels involving time travel with a time machine, El anacronópete. Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau was born to parents who were well known actors. Upon the death of his father, Juan, he moved to Valencia with his mother and two siblings. He studied humanities and philosophy, though he never finished his studies, leaving to work in the commercial bank of the marqués of San Juan. He had already written his first zarzuela by the age of 13, and at 14 he was writer at the La Ilustración Valenciana. When he was 15 his mother put on a performance of his first comedy. He moved to Madrid when he was 21 to dedicate himself to writing. His peak years as a writer were 1868 to 1875, when he wrote operas for the consumption of the bourgeoisie rather than the aristocracy. During this time, he also wrote historical dramas, and he became a pioneer of social theatre in Spain. He had huge success for his comedies, but his real passion was social commentary, promoting the education of women and meaningful marriage. These plays were less successful because they were before their time. When he was 23, Gaspar y Rimbau married Enriqueta Batllés y Bertán de Lis, a beautiful aristocrat, to the displeasure of her parents. After the birth of their second child, he entered the diplomatic corps, at the age of 27. He spent time in Greece and France, then Madrid, and eventually served as consul in China, first in Macau, and then in Hong Kong. During this time, he continued to write and mount operas, in addition to writing for El Diario de Manila. Upon his return to Europe, he moved to Oloron, in the South of France, though his family lived in Barcelona, where he put on an opera in Catalan. Later, he lived in various locations in the south of France. His wife died in Marseille, where he was consul. In poor health himself, he retired to Oloron with his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren. He died there in 1902 at the age of 60.  YOLANDA MOLINA-GAVILÁN is a professor of Spanish at Eckerd College. ANDREA L. BELL is a professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Hamline University. Molina-Gavilán and Bell are the coeditors of Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain.

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