Three Messages and a Warning

Eduardo Jiménez Mayo & Chris. N. Brown, editors  - published January 2012

January 2012 · 9781931520317 / 9781931520379 $16 · 240pp · trade paper/ebook
August 2019 · Out of Print.

Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic
Introduction by Bruce Sterling

This huge anthology of more than thirty all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Stereotypes of Mexican identity are explored and transcended by the thoroughly cosmopolitan consciousnesses underlying these works. It is a landmark of contemporary North American fiction that deserves a wide readership.

“A landmark collection of the Mexican fantastic.”
—World Literature Today

“An ebullient collection of south-of-the-border speculative writing that leaves little doubt that if the 1960’s British New Wave magazine New Worlds were to find a new home it would be in old Mexico.”
—San Antonio Current

“They range in tone from delirious to grim, and exhibit various attitudes toward the marvelous intrusions into the mundane which they recount: embarrassed and regretful, slyly ambiguous, reluctantly accepting, prosaic. They occupy the memory stubbornly, insisting on their own eccentric logics, powered by the writers’ dark or shining visions, steered via authorial voices that can be disarmingly direct, cuttingly ornate, or deceptively quiet.”
—Seattle Times

“What each of the stories share with the other is the overwhelming feeling that there is a much, much bigger story out there, beyond the ability of the narrator or the characters to comprehend, and that story is tinged not just with wonder and tragedy, but with outright menace, toward the narrator, toward society, toward the reader.”
—New Haven Review

“In case you couldn’t guess, I could talk with you for hours about these and others, like Pepe Rojo’s whimsical The President without Organs, Claudia Guillen’s The Drop–vintage The Twilight Zone without the dated staleness; Lilianna V. Blum’s Pink Lemonade, a novel eco-terrorist guy-gal tale;
or Bruno Estañol’s The Infamous Juan Manuel that gives a unique take on the Devil compact story, again, with a surprise ending.
“For any latino/chicano looking to enter the world of spec writing in norteamerica, I’d suggest you first enjoy this collection, study and think about it; then go for it. Our mexicano vecinos have much to teach us, whatever our specific ethnicity.”
—Rudy, La Bloga

“Billing itself as the first of its kind, Three Messages and a Warning consists of 34 Mexican fantasy short stories, half of which were written by women and most by unknowns.  The collection crosses the fantasy spectrum from ghosts and the supernatural to a heavy dose of the apocalypse giving the reader a taste that goes beyond the political and historical flavors found so often in contemporary Mexican fiction.
“The quality of the writing (and translating) is generally high and the stories are consistent in length, averaging 5-6 pages, although some barely go beyond a single page and one actually consists of a brief five stanza poem.  For those but the most avid readers of fantasy fiction, some stories will linger more than others.  The most memorable stories included Augustín Cadena’s Murillo Park, Yussle Dardón’s A Pile of Bland Desserts, Leo Mendoza’s The Pin and the hilarious Joyce Carol Oates-ian The President Without Organs, by Pepe Rojo.”
—Reforma: The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking

“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 of understanding the function of fantasy in present day literature.”
—Literal: Latin American Voices / La Prensa, San Antonio

“By turns creepy, self-consciously literary, and engagingly inventive, these 34 stories selected by translator-scholar Jiménez Mayo and writer-critic Brown offer some excellent and ghastly surprises. . . . These are punchy, ghoulish selections by south-of-the-border writers unafraid of the dark.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Encompassing a definition of fantasy that includes the extraterrestrial, the supernatural, the macabre, and the spectral, these stories are set in unusual locales and deal with bizarre characters. All are very short (some just two pages), and most offer a surprise twist at the end, though occasionally the only reaction these endings may elicit from the reader is “Huh?” The universal scope of the themes transcends the Mexican provenance; for example, one detects an apocalyptic influence in Liliana V. Blum’s “Pink Lemonade,” and Argentine Julio Cortázar’s “Bestiary” influences Bernardo Fernández’s “Lions.” Most of the volume’s 34 authors, half of whom are women, are relatively unknown to American readers, and for many of them, publication in this anthology represents their first exposure to an English-reading audience. The translations, several of which were done by the editors, convey the individuality, if not idiosyncrasies, of these tales. VERDICT This collection will appeal mostly to fans of fantasy and sf and, to a lesser degree, those interested in contemporary Mexican literature.”
—Library Journal

“Langorous, edgy, sumptuously beautiful by turns, Three Messages expands our understanding of contemporary Mexican literary production, collapsing high-low boundaries and pre-established ideas about national identity.”
—Debra Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Spanish Literature, Cornell University

Watch videos from the conference “Creativity and the Brain” which featured five authors from the anthology: Amélie Olaiz, Donají Olmedo, Bruno Estañol, Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, and Horacio Sentíes Madrid.

“When one talks to Mexican science fiction writers, the subject of ‘Mexican national content’ commonly comes up. Mexican science fiction writers all know what that is, or they claim to know, anyway. They commonly proclaim that their work needs more national flavor.
“This book has got that. Plenty. The interesting part is that this ‘Mexican national content’ bears so little resemblance to content that most Americans would consider ‘Mexican.'”
—from the introduction by Bruce Sterling

Table of Contents (not final order)

Lucía Abdó, Second-Hand Pachuca
Maria Isabel Aguirre, Today, You Walk Along a Narrow Path
Ana Gloria Álvarez Pedrajo, The Mediator
Liliana V. Blum, Pink Lemonade
Agustín Cadena, Murillo Park
Ana Clavel, Warning and Three Messages in the Same Parcel
Yussel Dardón, A Pile of Bland Deserts
Óscar de la Borbolla, Wittgenstein’s Umbrellas
Beatriz Escalante, Luck Has Its Limits
Bruno Estañol, The Infamous Juan Manuel
Iliana Estañol, In Waiting
Claudia Guillén, The Drop
Mónica Lavín, Trompe l’œil
Eduardo Mendoza, The Pin
Queta Navagómez, Rebellious
Amélie Olaiz, Amalgam
Donají Olmedo, The Stone
Edmée Pardo, 1965
Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, The Last Witness to Creation
Carmen Rioja, The Náhual Offering
René Roquet, Returning to Night
Guillermo Samperio, Mister Strogoff
Alberto Chimal, Variation on a Theme of Coleridge [listen on PodCastle]
Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Photophobia
Pepe Rojo, The President without Organs
Esther M. Garcia, Mannequin
Bernardo Fernández, Lions
Horacio Sentíes Madrid, The Transformist
Karen Chacek, The Hour of the Fireflies
Hernán Lara Zavala, Hunting Iguanas
Gerardo Sifuentes, Future Perfect
Amparo Dávila, The Guest
Gabriela Damián Miravete, Nereid Future
José Luis Zárate, Wolves

About the Authors

María Isabel Aguirre was born in Mexico City. She holds a B.A. in Spanish literature and reports that she mostly writes poetry but occasionally also writes fiction.

Liliana V. Blum (Mexico, 19xx) is not one of those women who refuse to reveal their date of birth; she just likes coincidences. So that she was born the same year that Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was published, is a great one. She is a ginger gal who suffered through her Mexican childhood of pinch-the-redhead-in-the-arm-for-luck. Now she only suffers the sun. She was born in Durango (famous for its scorpions, revolutionaries and narcos) and currently lives in Tampico, Tamaulipas (famous for its crabs and narco-related violence). Despite the eight-legged creatures, the daily bread of bullets and mutilated bodies, and being the mother of a boy, a girl, a beagle and a guinea pig, she has managed to write five short-story collections; one of them, The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (Host Publications, 2007) was translated into English. Her work has been published in literary magazines in the US, Mexico, England, and Poland. One of her books will be reprinted for a reading-campaign in Mexico City, to give away for free in the subway. She is currently working on her first novel.

Agustín Cadena (Ixmiquilpan, 1963) is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a university professor of literature. He has published over twenty books in many literary genres and has collaborated on more than fifty publications in various countries. His work has been recognized with many awards. Some of his work has been anthologized in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, USA, Italy, and translated into English, Italian and Hungarian.

Karen Chacek (Mexico City, a Saturday in 1972) is an inhabitant of parallel worlds and a storyteller. She spent her childhood surrounded by comics, TV series and fables. As a teenager, she discovered novels, science fiction, music videos and film. Her fascination with the visual language drove her to study film. Today she’s a writer and a screenwriter. She has published the short story collection Parallel Days (2006) and the children’s books An Unexpected Pet (2007) and Nina Complot (2009). Her short fiction has also appeared in various anthologies of chronicle, horror, science fiction and children’s stories. She has also worked as a video post-producer and written for science, technology and travel magazines. In 2001 was invited to participate in the Mexico-Barcelona Sundance Institute workshop. She is passionate about her long walks in public parks, loves cloudy days, insects, cats, underground passages and dystopias.

Ana Clavel (Mexico City, 1961) is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
Finalist of International Alfaguara Prize 1999 for Los deseos y su sombra (English translation: Desire and Its Shadow, Aliform Publishing 2006). Her novel Cuerpo náufrago (Alfaguara 2005¸ English translation: Shipwrecked Body, Aliform Publishing 2008) became Cuerpo náufrago/ ready-made multimedia para bucear en la identidad y el deseo (performance, photo exhibition, installation, web site). Las Violetas son flores del deseo (Alfaguara 2007, French translation: Éditions Métailié 2009) won the Radio France International Short Novel Juan Rulfo Prize 2005 and was the origin of a multimedia project that included sex doll exhibition, instalation, performance and website. Her most recent novel is El dibujante de sombras (Alfaguara 2009), has a video.

Alberto Chimal (Toluca, 1970) is a writer and professor of creative writing. He is the author of the critically lauded novel Los esclavos (The Slaves) (2009) and sixteen short story collections, including Grey (Flock) (2006), Cinco aventuras de Horacio Kustos / Five Adventures of Horatio Kustos (2008), La ciudad imaginada y otras historias (The Imaginary City and Other Stories) (2009) and 83 novelas (83 Novels) (2011). He has also written a collection of essays, a translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Politian (Poliziano) (2010), two plays produced in the late 1990s, the anthology Viajes celestes (Celestial Journeys) (2006) and a comic: Horacio en las ciudades (Horatio in the Cities) (2004), illustrated by Ricardo “Micro” Garcia. Mexican critics have cited his work as departing from common themes in contemporary Mexican literature to a territory closer to European and Latin American fantastic literature, merging everyday life with the extraordinary and mythical.

Gabriela Damián Miraveta (Mexico City, 1979) is an author of fiction and children’s literature, including La tradición de Judas (The Tradition of Judas) (illustrated by Cecilia Varela) (2007), which won the 2007 FILIJ de Cuento Prize. She studied Sciences and Communication at the Universidad Intercontinental and received a Masters of Communication from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, as well as a diploma in fantastic literature from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. Her children’s stories have appeared in the cultural supplement Pingoletras of the Chiapas Herald, and she has worked as an instructor in creative writing for the Gifted Children Program of the government of Mexico City.

Yussel Dardón (Puebla, 1982) is author of Maquetas del Universo (Models of the Universe) and Fractatus Vitae. His first book of short stories was described as “shows the brightness of a serious and nuanced work.” He has published in national and international journals and was anthologized in the Spring 2010 number dedicated to “Obsession” from the Rio Grande Review, a bilingual publication of the University of Houston. He was selected as a Young Artists Fellow of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts for 2010-11.

Amparo Dávila (Pinos, Zacatecas, 1928) is a poet and short story writer. She has punlished the poetry collections Salmos bajo la luna (1950) and Meditación a la orilla del sueño y Perfil de soledades (1954). Her fiction works include Tiempo destrozado (1959), Música concreta (1964), and Árboles petrificados (1977) (winner of the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in the same year).

Bruno Estañol was born in a little port of the Gulf of Mexico, Frontera Tabasco, Mexico. He writes mainly short novels and stories as well as essays. He is a neurologist and professor of clinical neurophysiology at the National University of Mexico.

Iliana Estañol (Mexico City, 1978) began taking pictures at the age of 11 with an old Canon camera that her father gave her. At about the same age, she started writing poetry and short stories. It didn’t take long until she started making long photography series. Telling stories with still images became her passion. But the happiness didn‘t last, she soon realized that she wanted those images to move. She studied film direction and screenwriting in Cuba, Berlin and Zurich. Since 1999 she has written and directed several movies and has continued to write short stories. She has worked in Burkina Faso, Korea, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Brasil, Cuba and of course Mexico.

Bernardo Fernández (Mexico City, 1972), aka Bef, is a novelist, comic book artist and graphic designer. He has published the novels Tiempo de alacranes (Scorpions Season, 2005), Gel azul (Blue Gel, 2006), Ladrón de sueños (The Dream Thief, 2008) and Ojos de lagarto(Snake Eyes, 2009); the short story collections ¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! Ciudad interfase (¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! Interface City, 1998) and El llanto de los niños muertos (The Crying of the Dead Children, 2008); the children’s books Error de programación (Software Error, 1997), Cuento de hadas para conejos (Fairy Tales for Bunnies, 2007), Groar and Soy el robot (I Am the Robot, 2010); short comic book stories Pulpo cómics (Octopus Comics, 2004), Monorama (2007) and Monorama 2 (2009) and the graphic novels Perros Muertos (Dead Dogs, 2006), Espiral (Spiral, 2010) and La Calavera de Cristal (The Crystal Skull, 2011). Called by some one of the best young Mexican writers of our times, he has won several prizes, including the Mexican national novel prize Otra Vuelta de Tuerca, the Spanish Memorial Silverio Cañada prize for best first crime novel, and the Ignotus prize of the Spanish Association of Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror. His newest novel, Hielo Negro (Black Ice), a thriller about the narco culture, received the 2011 Grijalbo Novel Award, which the jury called “an authentic Mexican thriller that reflects the current problems of the country” immersed in a wave of violence linked to organized crime, achieving “a merger of the language of the graphic novel, film and literature that makes a work perfectly suited to the postmodern.” He is currently working on Uncle Bill, a graphic novel about the American writer William Burroughs and his time in Mexico.

Esther M. García (Cd. Juárez, 1987) is a writer, journalist and photographer. She holds a degree in Spanish Literature from the Autonomous University of Coahuila. She received the National Short Story Prize Criaturas de la noche in 2008, and published the poetry collection La Doncella Negra (La Regia Cartonera, 2010), and the short story collection Las Tijeras de Átropos (Colección Siglo XXI de escritores coahuilenses, UA de C, 2011). Other stories have been anthologized in Los Nuevos Románticos and México lindo y querido — Actual Reunion of Mexican poetry with cause. Her journalistic work has appeared in newspapers and magazines including Espacio 4, Palabra, Vanguardia, La i Saltillo, Día Siete, Plaza Ludens, Lóbulo temporal, palabrasmalditas.net and Pirocromo.

Claudia Guillén (Mexico City, 1963) is a writer of fiction and essays. She won the Young Creators scholarship from FONCA in the short story category and from the same institution the Abroad Residencies scholarship in Salzburg, Austria. Her short story “La cita” won the XXXV Latin-American Edmundo Valadés Short Story award. She writes for Revista de la Universidad de México and Diario Milenio. Her literary work has appeared in La insospechada María y otras mujeres (The Unexpected Mary and Other Womena) and Los otros (The Others), and the anthologies Un hombre a la medida (A Man to the Extent) (which she also edited), Con licencia para escribir (Licensed to Write), Cuentos Violentos (Violent Stories), Prohibido fumar (No Smoking), Atrapados en la escuela (Trapped in School) and Sólo cuento (Only Story). Some of her work has also been translated to English and French.

Mónica Lavín (Mexico City, 1955) has published seven short story books and seven novels. She won the 1997 Gilberto Owen National Award for her short story collection Ruby Tuesday no ha muerto (Ruby Tuesday is not Dead); the 2001 Narrativa de Colima for the best book of the year for Café cortado (Cut Coffee) and the 2010 Premio Iberoamericano de Novela Elena Poniatowska for her novel about Sor Juana, Yo, la peor (Me, The Worst, which has been reprinted several times). She is a professor at the Creative Writing Department at the Autonomous University of Mexico City; writes for the newspaper El Universal and recommends books on radio. Her short stories have been translated to English, French, Italian and are included in national and international anthologies. She lives in Mexico City and is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.

Leo Mendoza was born in Oaxaca in 1958. He has published four short story collections. Leo has put together a few anthologies and his writing has been included and even translated in others. He has practiced many kinds of cultural journalism and years ago sold kitchen appliances. As a screenwriter he has written many TV programs and two movies: Teo’s Journey (2008) was based on his screenplay and Hidalgo/Molière, ultimately titled Hidalgo: The Untold Story (2009). Mendoza has won several awards such as the San Luis Potosí National Short Story prize and the Benemérito de América in Oaxaca. He won the National Culture and Arts Fund scholarship and in 2006 became a member of the National Creators System. In recent years he has mainly been working as a screenwriter, but somehow managed to write a collaborative novel about Pre-hispanic Mexico. Currently Mendoza’s main ambitions include reading, eating, watching movies, traveling and having sufficient time to write. In spite of his advancing age he is often astonished, although he now accepts the fact that he will never play center forward on his Atlante soccer team.

Mauricio Montiel Figueiras (Guadalajara, 1968) is a fiction writer, essayist, poet, and translator. He is the author of the short story collections Donde la piel es un tibio silencio (Where the Skin is a Silent Warmth, 1992), Páginas para una siesta húmeda (Pages for a Wet Siesta, 1992), Insomnios del otro lado (Insomnia on the Other Side, 1994), La penumbra inconveniente (Inconvenient Darkness, 2001), La piel insomne (The Sleepless Skin, 2002), and Los animales invisibles (The Invisible Animals, 2009), the poetry collections Mirando cómo arde la amarga ciudad (Watching the Bitter City Burn, 1994) and Oscuras palabras para escuchar a Satie (Dark Words for Listening to Satie, 1995), and the essay collection Terra Cognita (2007). He received the Edmundo Valadés Latin American Short Story Prize in 2000 and the Elías Nandino Poetry Prize in 1993. He has worked as editor and columnist for various journals and cultural supplements, including Letras Libres, Día Siete, and El Universal, and as Director of Publishing of the National Museum of Art in Mexico City. He was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and Culture and of the Rockefeller Foundation, fulfilling a residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in 2008.

Queta Navagómez was born in Bellavista, Nayarit, in western Mexico. She holds a Bachelor Degree in Physical Education, a Diploma in Script Writing and Literary Creation from the General Society of Mexican Writers, and a Seminary in Literary Creation from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She represented her country at track and field competitions at the Central American games. She has won several literary awards for her short fiction, poetry and literary novels (Marie Claire Magazine’s Writing Contest 1995, National Poetry Award “Ali Chumacero”, 2003-2004, National Novel Award “Jose Ruben Romero”, INBA. 2008). Her fiction stories, poetry and novels has been published in journals and anthologies in the U.S.A, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Chile and Peru. She lives in Mexico City, where she participates actively in regional and national cultural activities.

Amélie Olaiz (León) is a writer and professor at Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) and Universidad Intercontinental in Mexico City, where she has lived since childhood.

She studied Graphic Design at UIA, and holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Design and a Diploma in Creativity from the UIA. In 1996 she started studying Buddhist philosophy. Her literary works have appeared in Piedras de Luna (Moon Stones) (2005, republished in Spain in 2007) and Aquí está tu cielo (Here is your sky) (2007), and in the anthologies Ficticia’s Citizens (2003), Prohibido fumar (No Smoking) (2008), Infidelidades.con (Infidelities.with)(2008), Antología mínima del orgasmo (Minimal orgasm anthology) (2009), and Vampiros mundanos y transmundanos (Mundane and transmundane vampires) (2011). Her work has also appeared in the newspapers La Jornada, El Financiero, and Reforma, the journal Castálida, and in various Chilean textbooks. A participant in several writers workshops, and won three first places prizes in contests organized by the Ficiticia’s Matina workshop.

Carmen Rioja (Monterrey, 1975) is a Mexican writer and artist. She has participated in several literary workshops with writers like María Luisa Puga, Guillermo Samperio, Juan Villorio, Antonio Vilanova and Jorge Hernández among others. Rioja studied Hispanic Letters and has published the short story collection La Muerte Niña (El Hechicero Books.), which includes the story La Casa de Chayo (Chayo’s House) adapted into an IMCINE award winning short film by Guissepe Solano. Carmen has also published poetry in both magazines and periodicals; the poem Vuelo Aerostático sobre Teotihuacán (Air Balloon Flight over Teotihihuacán) is included in the anthology Corazón Prestado: El Mundo Precolombino en la Poesía de los Siglos XIX y XX (Borrowed Heart: The Pre-Columbian World in the Poetry of the 19th & 20th Centuries). Her work has also appeared in the newspaper El Corregidor of Querétaro, and she served as co-producer and host of the literary critique radio show Sancho Panza de Cabeza. Currently, she writes her blog Hojas al Rio (Leaves on the River). She is also a conservation artist specializing in colonial and archaeological collections, and works in cultural and art promotion. Her involvement in plastic arts includes several painting techniques and sculpture.

 

Pepe Rojo (Chilpancingo, 1968) has published four books and more than 200 short stories, essays, and articles dealing with fiction, media and contemporary culture, including the 2009 collection Interrupciones (Interruptions). He teaches in the Taller (e) Media program at the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC) in Tijuana. With Deyanira Torres and Bernardo Fernández, he co-founded Pellejo/Molleja, an indie publishing firm, where he edited Sub (sub-genre literature), Número X (media culture) and Pulpo Comics (a Mexican-sf comics anthology). With Torres, he co-produced and co-directed a series of interventions, “You Don’t Exist,” as well as the video installation series “Psicopanoramas”. He produced two interactive stories (Masq and Club Ciel) for Alteraction, and published two collections of Minibúks (Mexican SF and Counter-versions) at UABC, as well as the graphic intervention “Philosophical Dictionary of Tijuana”. In April and May 2011 he produced a series of sf-based interventions and lectures at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing, “You Can See the Future from Here,” with students from UABC, as well as U.S. science fiction writers including Bruce Sterling and Chris N. Brown. He lives in strange Tijuana with his strange Lacanian psychoanalyst wife Deyanira Torres and two strange kids (and by strange, he of course means “lovely in an endearing and unusual kind of way”).

 

Guillermo Samperio lives in Mexico City—where he was born in 1948. He has written more than twenty books including short stories, novels, essays, children’s literature, and poetry. His most recent books are: Cuentos Reunidos (Alfaguara, Mexico); Cómo se escribe un cuento 500 Tips para nuevos cuentistas del siglo XXI (Berenice, Spain); La guerra oculta, cuentos, (Lectorum, México). His work has been translated into multiple languages. He is director of the Despacho de Ingeniería Cultural, S.C., presidente de la Fundación Cultural Samperio, A.C., newspaper columnist and contributor to The Financial magazine Siempre!, Día Siete, La Jornada Semanal y Laberinto (Milenio), among others. His most recent books are Marcos, el enmascarado de estambre, (biografía no autorizada y novelada), (Editorial Lectorum, Mexico), and an anthology of short stories, prose poetry and a novel titled Maravillas malabares (Editorial Cátedra, Spain).

 

Dr. Horacio Sentíes Madrid was born in Mexico City in 1970. Dr. Senties is an Honorary Fellow in Internal Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and a Headache Fellow at the Headache Clinic in Houston, Texas. He has given 146 lectures and has published 117 articles, book chapters, and abstracts in medical books and journals, and is a member of the editorial committee of multiple medical journals. Dr. Sentíes is Neurology professor (Panamericana University and Superior Studies Technological Institute of Monterrey), Neurophysiology professor (postgraduate course, UNAM). He was the Secretary of the Mexican Academy of Neurology and is the coordinator of Adults Latinoamerican Commission of the International League Against Epilepsy and Vicepresident of Epilepsy Mexican Chapter. He has published cultural essays (e.g. “The Enigma of Synesthesia” in Letras Libres) and fiction. He is also a piano composer.

 

Gerardo Sifuentes (Tampico, 1974) is a journalist and author of short stories. He was co-founder of the pioneer Spanish-language cyberpunk zine Fractal. His work has been collected twice, in Perro de Luz (Light Dog) (1999) and Pilotos Infernales (Infernal Pilots) (2002) and appeared in various magazines and anthologies, earning the 1998 Kalpa Prize for best short story published in Mexico and the 2002 Vid International Fantasy and Science Fiction Award for the best short story collection. He is currently editorial coordinator of Muy Interesante (Very Interesting), a popular science and history magazine.

José Luis Zárate (Puebla, 1966) is one of the best known contemporary Mexican authors of science fiction, as well as having written works outside the genre. His best known novels include Xanto, noveluche libre (Santo, a wrestling novel) (1994), La ruta del hielo and sal (The Road of Ice and Salt) (1998) and Del cielo oscuro y del abismo (The Dark Sky and the Abyss) (2001), together forming the trilogy “The Phases of Myth” in which the popular culture figures Dracula, Superman, and the Mexican masked wrestler El Santo are seen from the perspective of residents of their fictional worlds. His other works include the novel Ventana 654 ¿Cuánto Falta para el Futuro? (Window 654: How Far to the Future?) (2004), the short story collections El viajero (The Traveler) (1987), Permanencia Voluntaria (Volunteer Retention) (1990), Magia (Magic) (1994), Las razas ocultas (The Hidden Races) (1999), Hyperia (1999), and Quitzä y otros sitios (Quitzä and Other Sites) (2002), and the essay collection En el principio fue el sangre (In the Beginning was the Blood) (2004). A founder of the Mexican Science Fiction Association, his works have won various national and international awards, including the 1984 Más Allá Prize, the 1992 Kalpa Prize, the 1998 MECyF Prize, and the 2000 UPC Science Fiction Prize.

Hernán Lara Zavala is a short story writer, novelist and essayist. Although he was born in Mexico City his family comes from Yucatan where many of his stories are set. He is the author of a novel, Península Península, which was awarded the Real Academia Española Award, and a number of short story collections. He lives in México City where he teaches at the University of Mexico.

About the Editors

Born in Boston and raised in San Antonio, Eduardo Jiménez Mayo holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in Hispanic literature and a doctoral degree in the humanities from a Catholic university in Madrid. He has taught undergraduate literature courses at the University of Texas in San Antonio and recently obtained a doctorate in jurisprudence from Cornell Law School. He has published translations of books by contemporary Mexican authors Bruno Estañol, Rafael Pérez Gay and José María Pérez Gay. In recent years, he has also published scholarly studies on the Spanish poet Antonio Machado and the Mexican fiction writer Bruno Estañol. Lately, he has conducted readings and lectures on the subject of literary translation at the invitation of Cornell University, New York University, The New School and the Juárez Autonomous University of Tabasco.

Chris N. Brown writes fiction and criticism from his home in Austin, Texas. His work has been variously described as “slick, post-Gibsonian, and funny as hell, like Neal Stephenson meets Hunter S. Thompson” (Cory Doctorow), “Borges in a pop culture blender” (Invisible Library), and “like a cross between Mark Leyner and William Gibson” (Boing Boing). He also contributes to the group blog No Fear of the Future.

Bruce Sterling is the author of eleven novels (including the bestselling The Difference Engine with William Gibson), six short story collections, and four nonfiction books. He also edited the genre-defining Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. He has written for Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Technology Review, and Wired. In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the European Graduate School and in 2005 he became “visionary in residence” at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He lives in Turin, Italy, and blogs at Wired‘s Beyond the Beyond.

Launch Events
January 26, 7PM, Book People, Austin, TX
Chris N. Brown, Bernardo Fernández and Pepe Rojo celebrate the publication of Three Messages with an event at one of Austin’s premiere indie bookstores.

January 28, 2PM, Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street, Houston, TX 77005
Join Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, Bruno Estañol, Horacio Sentíes Madrid, and Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez, for an afternoon celebration of the book at one of Houston’s pre-eminent indie bookstores.

January 26, 6 – 9PM, Creativity and the Brain Conference, Texas Diabetes Institute, 701 S. Zarzamora, San Antonio, TX  78207
Featuring editor Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and three contributors, Bruno Estañol, Horacio Sentíes Madrid, and Jesús Ramírez Bermúdez