Science fiction has always been used to capture human horrors, hidden behind the mechanisms of fiction. There are many examples of this, perhaps the fifties, sixties and seventies had this kind of boom. In the 21st century, in turbulent and dark times, a genre has reemerged, never abandoned but whose return serves as an effective tool for writers, perhaps guiding its history out of humility or what history requires. Dystopias can be where nightmares take shape.
Published by Tenerife publisher Baile del sol, Miguel Ángel Zapata’s silence is not a novel to use, to swallow us up. Knowing the ins and outs of the art of storytelling, Zapata guides us through a work in which narrative, essay, reflection and chronicle are intertwined. The summary of the book can guide us in our reading: Narrated in the first person and constructed as a mixture of future fiction, trial and confessional, the work describes the birth and expansion of “La Hiedra”, a massive progressive state structure. almost unnoticed replacing the economic, political, social and cultural forms of a system eroded by too many crises. The indefinite prison or the utopian new world, hell or paradise, myth or steamy reality, “La Hiedra” is an elusive institution that grows out of the social fabric itself and encompasses citizens whose Certificates of Conformity show some flaws or reductions that affect their basic rights or privileges. . Zapata takes us to one of the fears that grips us, the absence of freedom. In the social situation we are in, we are afraid of what might happen to us, from the control of big companies. We believe that we are on the rope of freedom, and this is reflected very well in the book by Michelangelo. Closing a trilogy on the degeneration of culture, this work is perhaps a true history of what we went through in this pandemic and post-war world, at a time of a society doomed to extinction by human greed.
Miguel Ángel Zapata (Granada, 1974) develops his literary and teaching studies in Madrid. He has published short stories, short stories and novels covering all kinds of narratives. His short texts have received several awards and have been included in some of the genre’s most relevant anthologies in Spanish. A Homeric epic in the key to the contemporary grotesque, Candaya’s first novel, The Hands (2014), was a finalist at the Festival du Premier Roman de Chambéry-Savoie, and her most recently published book, Voices for a Dead Tympanum (2016), was widely appreciated by the Spanish cultural press. It received an excellent reception at its founding and was a finalist for the Andalusian Critics’ Award, given annually by the Andalusian Literary Writers and Critics Association. The Secret architecture of the Ruins (Baile del sol, Tenerife, 2018) and Silence will devour us (Baile del sol, Tenerife, 2021) close their trilogy and go on to receive the Andalusian Critics’ Award in 2022.
Silence will engulf us, a benevolent blow to the pit of the stomach. Ivy, which I believe is a recognizable villain in each of us, is a clear example of what is happening to us today. The corruption of culture and society was not created by anyone, it was us with our desire for power and disproportionate ego that drove us to the edge of the abyss. This creeper can be a lack of empathy, a lack of solidarity, selfishness. I believe this work is the perfect closure of the trilogy that began with Las Manos in 2014 and continued with The Hidden Architecture of the Ruins in 2018. They will become more and more real, but let’s not be pessimistic. Perhaps the answer lies in silence, I don’t think they deny it.