protagonist ‘Childhood of the world’ dengue fever child, mosquito child. The cyclical adventure of this human with the physiognomy of a giant insect forms the heart of the Argentine author’s new book. Michel Nieva (Buenos Aires, 1988)He was named one of the best young storytellers in Spanish by Granta magazine in 2021. It is an unclassifiable science fiction novel. ambitious, creative and sharp. Unique in the way it combines different cultural expressions; With his way of talking about violence, geography, and the body, and an explosive and overwhelming sense of humor, The Childhood of the World envisions a grim future where the world’s great evils come to an end. .past and present, those that spread like a virus. We are talking to Michel Nieva.
What was The World’s Childhood’s biggest challenge?
How to tell about big times, inhuman temporalities that the novel, especially the modern novel, never takes into account. The modern novel is often used to describe temporalities belonging to an individual or family, what happens to those belonging to a planet or a virus?
How did you do this?
As a minor genre, science fiction has the ability to swallow many cultural expressions such as video games or manga that major literature sees as vile. For example, the source of the novel is a speculative map of what the Earth will be like when the glaciers melt. There is also a video game set in the 19th century in the book.
It’s inspiring in how it incorporates the language of video games.
One of the major themes of the book is childhood, and I wanted to consider how a life stage that was a pure future could exist in a context where the future was thought to be ruined.
It is interesting how he intersects the body with technology, and how he approaches body terror.
I wanted to think about how the body accesses bodily pleasures or conditions in new ways through technologies. And I wanted to express this through fear of the body, because today the experience of the body mediated by technology is no longer realistic, it is virtual.
There is a clear desire in his book to disable the inherited aesthetic.
The ability to imagine the future is political, and it is no coincidence that nearly all the narratives we have about what the future will come from come from North America or major empires. It’s a bit political to imagine a different future than those from the north.
Although you cover many topics in ‘The Childhood of the World’, climate change is at the center.
I wanted to talk about climate change as a political phenomenon, the product of capitalist destruction of the environment, especially in the global south of the world. One of my favorite historians, Jason W. Moore, says that capitalism actually arose not in the factories in England, but in the conquest of America and, for example, in the mobilization of slavery from West Africa to the Americas and the extermination of the natives. This leads us to think of climate change as a colonial and capitalist story plundering the world.
Why does contemporary literature use science fiction to describe the present?
We live in a time where capitalism and corporations are increasingly taking their products from sci-fi imaginations and aestheticizing them. For example, Mark Zuckerberg takes the idea of the metaverse from William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels. Or Elon Musk, who reads Kim Stanley Robinson’s terraforming novels to think about the environments he wants to build on Mars. This puts anyone who writes science fiction responsible for participating in or taking a more critical position in this aestheticization of the capitalist good.