Maielis is another writer who participates in both Grupo Ariete and Espacio Abierto. She is a lecturer at the University of Havana and specializes in the history of science fiction and cyberpunk in Latin America. When I was in Havana, she was completing a project, a book of stories about nerds, called Sobre los nerds y otras criaturas mitológicas (2017), which has now been published with a Spanish press.
Maielis, unlike most of the other participants in Espacio Abierto, is not a scientist although her primary interest is writing science fiction. As a reader of science fiction, from within in Cuba and abroad, she finds that the science fiction printed within the country is often ‘hard science fiction’, based around scientific developments, facts and theories. She tells me she is ‘very interested in the world of science, physics and speaking with people who have mastered that world’. Yet she feels there is a difference to being a reader and writer of the genre. She continues:
I feel a little unable to participate in certain subjects and I have to study then when I want to do science fiction. For instance, Juventud Técnica [a science fiction literary journal] favours the kind of stories for their prizes that are more of hard science fiction or scientific extrapolation. I cannot do any of that and had to investigate a lot at that time, once I started to see what my story was about… Structural breaks and hyperspace. The fourth dimension. I had to study, to investigate, and to ask people.
Maielis preferred ‘soft science fiction’, or science fiction stemming from the soft sciences,31 in
which the publishers of the genre, both magazines and editorial houses, were less interested. Even with the research she would put in to write a piece of hard science fiction, she often encountered other writers and readers in the talleres and on the editorial boards of literary magazines (digital and print), who were also scientists and were heavily critical of her work. She tells me that ‘the readers of science fiction are very active and very demanding. They catch your errors well. And when something is incorrect, you lose credibility… even for that which was very well narrated and for what can make you feel strongly about what the text provokes’. Maielis then decided to stick with writing something she felt comfortable with.
She found herself perpetually drawn, even ‘obsessed’ (obsesionada), with the character of the ‘nerd’. Having encountered the image of the nerd, in British and American television — ‘The Bing Bang Theory and IT Crowd’ she said — and fiction, there was something there that caught her interest and yet still felt distant. As she tells me, the character of the nerd is often times very relatable, while utilizing the ‘codes of science fiction’. Here was a subject within her genre of interest, but that would allow her to focus on the narrative techniques and character development that was her strengths, rather than the speculative scientific development.
While she came to be obsessed with the image of the nerd, those that she saw from outside of Cuba lacked something relatable to her. She found them ‘machisto’ (chauvinistic) and was
annoyed they were always playing video and computer games, something still quite foreign to most Cubans. That was not the character she hoped to write. Instead, she recognized among her friends a type of character that felt ‘lonely, isolated, and saw the world in a bit of a distorted way’. She saw characters that lacked easy ‘social skills’ and who took ‘a lot of practice to socialise and fit in’. She wanted to write a book in which the personality of these nerds, characters she related to, came through over the stories of action, adventure and scientific extrapolation.
31This had been dismissively referred to as ciencia ficcion rosada or pink science fiction by men in Espacio Abierto
meetings. This genre includes writers like Ursula K Le Guin, whose specialty is in world-building. Consider, for instance, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), of which the main character is a type of government-sponsored anthropological
researcher of the future who encounters an ambisexual species on another planet. The focus is not on the science of space travel or technological or biological engineering, but rather on the encounter of a species who acts under different socio- political rules and traditions.
The idea occurred to her when she was giving a presentation at Casa de las Americas on the writing of Junot Diaz, author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). What makes Diaz’s work different for Maielis is that he is not writing science fiction, but rather is writing about a reader of the genre, and more importantly a Caribbean reader. Oscar is a nerd out of place. She tells me:
Oscar Woa is the example of the nerd, but what makes him most interesting and most different to me is that he is a character that is supposed to embody the stereotypes of the Caribbean male, the Dominican descendant, and instead he is a chubby guy, lacking social skills, who spends his life reading Lord of the Rings.
The issue of gender and science recurs not only in Maielis’s description of what she liked about Oscar Woa, but also in her description of popularized images of those who like science fiction, nerds. Moreover, I witnessed on a number of occasions the casual reference to science fiction works that were not based on hard sciences as ciencia ficcion rosada or pink science fiction by men
scientists in Espacio Abierto. The connection between sexism in science is of course not limited to Cuba or the Caribbean (see Harraway 1989 or Harding 1991 for example), but contrary to the revolutionary belief that 1959 brought about gender equality, sexism is clearly alive in the commentary around ‘soft science fiction’ in the two groups I worked with. Maielis, who was only given access to a certain type of science fiction dependent on her knowledges (and reinforced through gendered references), then decided to write characters in order to create space in a genre and field that has been antagonistic to her type of interest and not representative of her presence. In moving away from hard science fiction and encountering a trope that she related to yet felt had been unrepresentative of her experiences, Maielis wanted to create a group of characters who were all nerds, but who are distinctly habanero set in Havana, while utilizing the images and ‘codes’ of science fiction and fantasy. Or as the publisher’s synopsis of the book reads: The stage, or the scenarios, in which most of these stories take place seem to belong to a strange world, an extravagant and foreign Havana; but that in the long run is as true and current as Havana's ‘"old cars and swaying women",32 even if it is told in the key of science fiction’ (González, 2017). When
32 This is a very stereotypical idea of Havana, which I can only assume was written in the book description in quotations marks both to speak to a common trope and to highlight the clichéd nature of the image to describe Havana.
she conceived of the project, her writing instructor at Centro Onelio Jorge Cardoso thought her characters were fantastic and they awarded her the school’s Scholarship for Creativity to continue working on it and perfecting it for a prize submission or publication.
Sitting across from me in the café, dressed in a black t-shirt, her curly hair and earrings animatedly bouncing as she speaks, I am not sure I see the stereotypical nerd of my imagination. But Maeilis would tell me that that is the point. Maeilis liked cyberpunk, robots, HP Lovecraft and JJ Abrams and believed these qualities, among others, made her a nerd. She was what was missing in the representations of the ‘nerd’: someone who did not correspond in dress and sociality to a type perpetuated by other forms of media. Maielis’s characters came from her interest in a certain genre and her style of writing, but also came from personal experience and a feeling of isolation from nerd-like characters of popular culture. The characters she created come from life, but also from her experience as a reader and what she thought was a representational absence. She was able to reconstitute a stereotypical character that she felt had not, until perhaps Oscar Wao, spoken to her and her situation in Cuba. She created with her novel a group of characters that she can be
‘obsessed’ with from a world that she relates to. Unlike Lena’s experience with the serial killer or Raúl’s ‘alter’ or ‘anti’ character, Maielis created characters in which she found representation and people she knew, including herself.
Conclusion
To return to the question I posed earlier, what sort of thing is a literary character? The people I worked with saw their characters as multifaceted. They are a utility of the story. Yet, they are also something more. They belong to the author, but quickly seem to extend beyond them, taking on a certain strained independence. They live out certain experiences shared by the author, yet also allow an author to live through them. In this chapter, while I have explained different ways in which writers see literary characters, I do not begin to engage with the interaction of characters and readers, who seem to have a range of different relationships with fictional characters.
The creation of characters by Lena and Raúl in some ways matches the social creation of people in Cuba – through nurture, care and shared experience – which they highlighted through
the invocation of kin. Yet Lena is careful to draw a line between ‘fictive’ kin and consanguineal kin. Raúl who speaks of his character, Pablo, as if he were watching him grow up and live a life, used a typical Cuban naming strategy of memorialising relationships in naming his son after his character. The characters seem to be individuals, yet their individual status is created by their constructed histories, experiences and presents, and based around external (to the character) social semiotic cues that make their ‘individualism’ communicable, relatable and comprehensible to a reader. Yet character can have independence without relatable individuality, dependent, in the case of the killer above, on genre because those ‘monsters’ and ‘killers’ of horror are created to be scarily unidentifiable and unlike the writer, the reader and the positive characters of the text. What seems to be something articulated by all the anecdotes of the writers was the sense of ownership and belonging over the characters, yet a sense that the characters, once written, would live on their own.