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After closing the Santiago Quiñones trilogy, the Chilean writer and actor, Boris Quercia, publishes his fourth crime novel ‘Electrocante’, this time with a science fiction story set in a dystopian world that could be set in any Latin American metropolis. Natalio, a class 5 policeman, one of the most despised in that world, must solve a case in the underworld of that imaginary city.
Quiñones was a fan of the classic science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury since he was a child.
“I really liked mixing what I had been doing, which is the police, with these dystopian elements of a somewhat failed future and that scares us a bit too. Science fiction comes to try to clear the fog a bit and show how the future”, tells us in Escala en París, Quercia, who has been touring the European geography for several months in halls and meetings of police novels.
The protagonist of this fourth novel by Boris Quercia is Natalio, who carries a fracture: “Every hero or rather anti-hero of crime novels carries an internal wound that has no cure, but despite that he manages to continue living.” The policeman has to solve a very complicated case and for this he has the help of his robot, an ‘Electrocante’, which has certain anomalies, some flaws that will play an important role in the plot.
“We all have certain anomalies and in life we meet those who have the same anomalies and we understand each other. In the novel, the anomaly of the robot is that it makes him enter some thoughts that lead him to something similar to consciousness, realizing that, for example, one is alive. I was recently reading that consciousness has to do with a quantum mechanism and we are on the verge of a great revolution for humanity that is quantum computing. In the novel I try to make a robot that achieves consciousness”, explains the novelist.
‘Electrocante’ is part of the cyberpunk tradition like the film Matrix (1999). There are many references, for example, to the Matrix, with characters connected to a parallel world, or references to Blade Runner (1982) inspired by the book ‘Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ by Philippe K Dick, with robots, social classes and revolts.
“Dick’s novel is clearly a net police in a dystopian world, where there may be something new in my book is that I try to put my Latin American reality. What I do is look at my country, put a dot when I was little and put a dot now, that I am already fifty-something, and I extend that line into the future and I think what this city would be like in the future, I hope it has certain Latin American overtones ”, analyzes Boris Quercia.
Ray Bradbury in 1995 said this in an interview with the Brown Daily Herald: “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it is the history of ideas, the history of our civilization giving birth to itself. Science fiction is central to everything we’ve done.”
“Tremendous phrase”, acknowledges the Chilean. “I believe that genres such as science fiction or police, at least in Latin America, do not have that character, they are rather a very small section in bookstores. But yes, this type of book can help relieve the anguish of the reader who finishes the book, closes it and says: Ah, it was just a book. Science fiction books prepare us for future fears and make us stronger, ”he tells us in the interview.
There is something of the Metaverse in this dystopian world of Quercia’s novel, which announces a world that is already practically here, that is imminent with the tools of virtual reality. “One of the things that makes me sad about dying is not seeing how humanity is going to continue advancing and the things that are going to be invented,” she laments.
‘Electrocante’ was published by Penguin Random House and its French version ‘Les rêves qui nous restent’ (The dreams we have left) by Asphalte publishing house.
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