Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic

By Santiago Daydí-Tolson

Title: Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic

Edited by:  Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown. 

Introduction by Bruce Sterling. 

Pubisher House: Small Beer Press

Year: 2012

Anthologies are a good way of introducing to the public authors and trends which would be difficult to know about by reading books of individual writers. Anthologies of translated work are particularly useful for readers who otherwise will have little opportunity to sample the literary developments in a foreign language. By offering a selection of thirty four short stories of the fantastic written by contemporary Mexican authors, mostly unknown to American readers, Three Messages and a Warning serves well the purpose of a clearly defined anthology.

            The sample of short stories offered in this book is large enough to give voice to a representative number of Mexican writers who make of the fantastic an inspiration of their story telling. Related to a cosmopolitan trend in Latin American letters, the fantastic, with in some cases examples of science fiction, might seem unrelated to any form of national representation or concerns; but as Bruce Sterling observes at the outset of his introduction, aptly titled “Better Than a Mirror,” this anthology of Mexican writers has very much of a national flavor. The fantastic stories are undeniably Mexican, they clearly talk about Mexican characters and situations, they reflect the quirks and peculiarities of a culturally well defined and complex people.

            The issue of Mexican national flavor is brought up by the critic because of its significance for foreign readers, and particularly to Americans, who tends to have a quite clear, and probably over simplistic, understanding of what constitute Mexican culture. The modern fantastic, with its science fiction tendencies does not appear to be a component of the Mexican image. This anthology proves them wrong. 

            It is quite evident, though, in this selection, that the science fiction component of the fantastic does not have for these Mexican authors the attractiveness of spectacular technology or mind boggling scientific theories of the future characteristic of most science fiction, from Jules Verne to the present. Instead, the detailed nature of the fantastic is left aside in favor of a more suggestive allusion to the extraordinary. What seems to matter to this authors is the emotional, even intellectual experience of the uncanny. In that sense, the “Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic” are quite different from fantastic narratives written in English, across the border.

            Thus, to read these stories in translation is to experience a quite different way to tell about the fantastic; it is to experience the Mexican way to understand the function of fantasy in present day literature. The introduction points to the essence of this difference observing that “this book offers what science fiction offers to Mexicans: a fantastic laboratory for identity issues. What could be more Mexican than this concern for matters of identity.

            Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown should be congratulated in having conceived and edited this anthology. With it they brings attention to a literary phenomenon deserving discussion in comparative terms. The fact that each story has been translated by a different translator serves well the variety of stories, each one having a very different voice from the others. Originality and imagination are not lacking in this book of out of the common tales of Contemporary Mexico.