On October 30, 1937, at the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, a bucktoothed writer named Donald Wollheim—who would later become the twentieth century’s foremost editor of science fiction and fantasy, publishing both Edgar Rice Burroughs and William S. Burroughs—stood up in front of a roomful of fans and announced, “The Science Fiction Age is over.” Reading a manifesto written by his friend John Michel (who stuttered too badly to read it himself), Wollheim went on to dismiss as mere escapism all the stories about rocket ships and ray guns and bug-eyed Venusian monsters that filled the pages of Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and other pulp magazines. The world was in crisis, Wollheim pointed out. The Republicans were fighting for their lives in Spain, fascism was ascendant in Italy and Germany, and it was time for science fiction to do something about it. “Therefore,” Wollheim concluded,



be it moved that this, the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention, shall resolve that science fiction should by nature stand for all forces working for a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life.

The resolution was voted down, twelve to eight. But the idea Wollheim had introduced into the genre’s microcosm—that science fiction might serve the ends of present-day politics—outlasted the prewar idealism that inspired it. Well into the 1950s, you could still find American writers who believed science fiction might be the path to a better world. Their belief resulted in brilliant and bitterly cynical novels like Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, a send-up of the advertising industry, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which entertained the comforting dream that human history itself might one day be an exact science. Asimov wasn’t a Communist, but he certainly knew the party’s doctrine: He had belonged for years to the Futurian Society, Wollheim and Michel’s rabidly political group of aspiring science fiction writers, many of whom were also members of the Young Communist League.

Like American cars of the 1950s, Foundation’s stately future feels dated now; but like the cars, it found an enduring afterlife in postrevolutionary Cuba. Fidel Castro’s socialist island state was a utopia, at least in aspiration: Everyone who lived there was meant to be “working for a more Utopian existence,” as Wollheim had put it. Even as science fiction writers in the United States moved on, to inner space and cyberspace and apocalypse, their Cuban counterparts continued to dream of saner lives and better worlds. In new translations of their novels, two preeminent Cuban writers—Agustín de Rojas and his protégé, José Miguel Sánchez, who writes under the pen name Yoss—imagine radical futures for their homeland. Their visions raise an interesting question: If you already live in a utopia, what does a better world look like?

The first science-fictional event that took place in Cuba was probably the arrival, in October 1492, of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, bringing with them an alien civilization that possessed advanced technology, an incomprehensible language, and its own economic and scientific interests. The island’s inhabitants long felt that a better world would be one free from Spanish influence: The first Cuban science fiction novel, published in 1920, was about a group of freedom fighters who win the island’s independence by diverting the Gulf Stream, bringing about catastrophic droughts in Spain.

After the 1959 revolution, Cuban writers experienced a period of imaginative euphoria in which anything seemed possible: To cite just one example, Oscar Hurtado, the so-called “father of Cuban science fiction,” took bits of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, mixed them with Caribbean magic realism, and wrote La Ciudad Muerta de Korad (The Dead City of Korad), a Martian chronicle in verse. But after 1968, when Castro moved firmly into the Soviet camp, such imaginative play was denounced as “counterrevolutionary poison.” Escapism was no longer an option.