The Spirit of Science Fiction: Writing to Someone Far Away
What do you do when a stranger seems to understand you better than anyone you know? A book can bring us into that peculiar intimacy. Someone who has never heard our name has found words for an experience we could barely explain; after reading, we want to continue a conversation that, from the writer’s side, has never begun.
Jan Schrella takes the next step. From a rooftop room in Mexico City, the seventeen-year-old Chilean writes to the science-fiction authors he admires. He tells them about his dreams, asks for help, proposes committees, and tries to interest them in the fate of Latin America. His roommate, the aspiring writer Remo Morán, has more immediate difficulties: earning money, meeting people, falling in love. In Roberto Bolaño’s The Spirit of Science Fiction, their two ways of reaching outward keep crossing. Remo brings the city into Jan’s room; Jan gives Remo images through which the city becomes strange again. The pleasure of this familiar Bolaño world lies in how much passes between its apparently separate lives.
This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.
Jan’s letters need an address
The opening letter, addressed to Alice Sheldon, begins with admiration and wanders into the story of a forgotten Chilean science-fiction writer. This man paid colleagues to buy his self-published novel. Remo’s mother was among them; years later, Remo remembers the purchasers’ names but cannot recover the book’s title. Jan offers several possible titles, all guesses, and promises that if he finds a copy he will send it to Sheldon.
Bolaño lets the ellipses carry the letter from one recollection to the next. Its writer keeps reaching for a fact that would complete the story, while the little company of buyers becomes more distinct than the book they bought. A celebrated author has acquired a prospective correspondent who wants to repay her with the work of someone almost completely forgotten. Across that difference in recognition, Jan imagines an exchange: her books have reached him; perhaps he can return something from his side of the world.
The uncertainty extends to the envelopes. In his second letter to Ursula K. Le Guin, Jan explains that he has gathered addresses from fanzines, publishers, and literary agencies. Some letters go to magazine editors in the hope that they will forward them. He doubts that many will arrive. The novel gives us his outgoing correspondence without supplying the replies, so each new salutation renews a hope whose previous attempt remains unresolved.
That repeated beginning matters more than any single declaration of loneliness. Jan can sound intimate, officious, pleading, outrageous; the next letter allows him to try another manner of being heard. To Le Guin he likens the correspondence to radio before the invention of the ansible, the device of instantaneous communication associated with her fiction. His practical problem already has a place in the books he loves. Unfortunately, their solution is unavailable at the post office.
Even this letter has a discarded predecessor. The first letter to Le Guin consists almost entirely of urgent questions about resistance and survival. The second admits that her books have, in some way, answered them already. We read both attempts, including the one Jan says he did not send. Bolaño makes the revision visible: an appeal to a distant authority becomes an account of where the young reader sleeps, washes, reads, and writes. To be understood, he starts supplying the circumstances of his life.
The traffic through the rooftop room
Remo’s narrative supplies circumstances Jan can leave out. Four pieces a month for a newspaper’s cultural supplement keep them alive for eight or nine days; less prestigious magazine work and money from their parents cover the rest. The calculation interrupts the romance of two young writers in Mexico with the question of how they eat. Jan’s vast correspondence depends on a household whose income Remo counts quite carefully.
It also depends on José Arco, the poet and motorcyclist Remo befriends at a literary workshop. Arco brings sandwiches, tequila, books, and postcards for Jan’s letters. With Remo, he steals the science fiction Jan requests, sometimes from specialist shops because the titles have not been translated into Spanish. The books arrive through errands, shoplifting, money, and friendship. Following those arrivals gives the room a social history that its occupant’s apparent seclusion would otherwise conceal.
The movement runs outward too. During a visit to a collector of little literary magazines, Remo launches into an account of American war games, their military scenarios and their enthusiasts. His information comes from Jan’s papers. The friend who has stayed upstairs has helped furnish the argument taking place across town. Bolaño’s alternation of letters and recollection allows us to follow this circulation without making either young man the complete representative of thought or action.
Their borrowed worlds also enter the sentences. Early on, Remo watches Arco riding his motorcycle and remarks that motorcycles have become common in poems, whereas poets on actual motorcycles remain unusual. Later, learning to ride himself, he sees an enormous shape approaching through the rain and imagines a monster or a petrified atomic explosion. It is the Basilica of Guadalupe. The motion of his frightened perception makes a familiar city landmark momentarily behave like something from Jan’s reading.
Remo credits the Virgin with keeping him from an accident. Arco claims the credit for himself and the mechanic who taught him. The exchange is funny because we have just felt how immense the ride was to its novice. His sense of destiny has an identifiable human contribution: two people explained the controls, and one rode beside him. Bolaño can let the experience swell toward the fantastic while keeping its practical conditions within reach.
What a book can support
Eventually the stolen paperbacks obstruct the room. Remo can scarcely get up in the night without stumbling over them. Jan rearranges the books into a bench that reminds Remo of a Chilean town square; the following day, the bench becomes a low table, complete with a flower standing in water on a John Varley book. They cover it with a cloth and eat there.
The transformation is wonderfully literal. Reading has filled their accommodation to the point where it must become furniture. The names that promised immense distances now have weight, thickness, and a place under the dinner. Yet the bench and the table produce different responses. Asked later whether he sat on the bench, Jan says he did not. He first reaches for fear, then corrects himself: the feeling was a deep sadness.
Bolaño postpones that admission until after the table has been built and used. Only then does the abandoned bench acquire its emotional weight. Its resemblance to a place in Chile suggests a homesickness Jan can approach through construction more easily than through confession. The table, by contrast, lets the friends eat together where they are. Moving the same volumes changes what their shared room can contain of the past and the present.
Angélica Torrente, a young poet who becomes close to Jan, objects to the arrangement. Books belong on shelves, ready to be read. Her objection is usefully inconvenient: to take one volume out of Jan’s structure may interfere with another use, and a dinner table is liable to acquire stains. Jan’s answer about tablecloths has the pride of someone whose invention is being judged by the wrong standards. The quarrel keeps the marvelous object awkward, domestic, and faintly ridiculous. Loving literature has produced a piece of furniture that another lover of literature considers an insult.
The bodily difficulties elsewhere in the book take longer to explain. Remo’s anxiety about sex initially belongs to the embarrassment and extravagant self-consciousness of falling in love. Much later, he tells Laura, the woman he loves, that he and Jan were beaten in Chile while searching for a friend. He fears that the injuries have made intercourse impossible. The delayed disclosure changes the weight of his earlier nervousness: a past assault has been present in scenes whose immediate language was flirtation.
Jan’s response to the same shared violence is different. His sexual relationship with Angélica develops while Remo is still frightened. Neither character remains safely inside the role suggested by his habits. The stay-at-home reader has experiences the adventurous narrator has missed; the narrator’s outward movement carries an inward obstruction. Their duality becomes most convincing where their lives cease to line up neatly.
A future with someone in it
In the final letter, Jan asks Philip José Farmer to help organize an anthology of sexual encounters between North and Latin Americans. The stories should have happy endings, with mixed crews aboard the spacecraft and pleasure connecting people whose countries are enemies or unequal partners. The elaborate proposal finally contracts into a personal announcement: Jan lost his virginity a week earlier.
Placed at the end of the appeal, that news changes the scale of everything preceding it. A recent experience has expanded into a program for international peace. The comedy preserves the disproportion, while the letter’s tenderness comes from Jan’s desire to make a private discovery available to strangers. Even his fallback is revealing: writers unwilling to contribute such stories could at least write to the White House against aggression. His imagined future keeps trying to find a usable action in the present.
Bolaño gives this hope uneven company. The separate interview sequence, in which a young prizewinner describes his work to a journalist, supplies the audience Jan’s letters lack. Yet questions wander, remarks misfire, and the celebration surrounding them grows oppressive. Having someone ask about your work offers little assurance that the exchange will make room for it. This strand can also feel stranded: its extended account of the Academy of the Potato interrupts the more compelling traffic between the rooftop and the streets. The book’s connecting images often persuade more strongly than its larger assembly.
Nor does the closing “Mexican Manifesto,” following Remo and Laura through the city’s bathhouses, make physical intimacy secure. Pleasure becomes difficult to distinguish from exhaustion, jealousy, danger, and other people’s needs. Steam repeatedly prevents Remo from seeing Laura. The girl he has surrounded with dazzling comparisons can move beyond his understanding within the same small room. Jan’s proposed anthology of happy endings remains a young writer’s wish beside these encounters.
There is ample reason to enjoy the novel’s return to poets, precarious rooms, improbable stories, and friends who talk until dawn. Its recurring pleasures gain an especially tangible form here: literature is something people fetch for one another, carry into arguments, stack under their meals, and address to someone whose answer they cannot ensure. The distance between a reader and a beloved writer stays open, but it fills with activity.
After finishing his letter to Le Guin, Jan asks Remo to put it in the mail. Remo agrees. The request joins the two forms Bolaño has been alternating: the letter seeking a distant reader and the friend’s account of the life from which it was written.
We cannot follow the envelope all the way to its recipient.
We can see the help it takes to get it out of the room.
Sources
Roberto Bolaño, El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción. Close readings refer to the Spanish text: the letters to Alice Sheldon, Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip José Farmer; Remo’s account of work, the book furniture, the motorcycle journey and his conversation with Laura; the interview sequence; and “Manifiesto mexicano.” English descriptions of these passages are paraphrases, not quotations from Natasha Wimmer’s translation.
English edition: The Spirit of Science Fiction, translated by Natasha Wimmer, Penguin, 2019. Spanish-language edition information.
“Ansible,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, updated March 30, 2015, for the device’s definition and association with Le Guin.
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