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Popular Culture Review
who are considered canonical, such as Miguel de Unamuno, Blasco Ibanez and
Azorin, have penned narrations that can be considered as science fiction and that
were well received at the time of their publications by both the critics and the
public. However, and in spite of promising beginnings, the growth of science
fiction in Spain was cut short by the rebellion of fascist general Franco in 1936,
which led to the civil war—as the hostilities began, the genre of science fiction
ended.
In 1939, Franco seized power and established a dictatorship that would
ruin Spain for the next four decades, not only economically and socially, but
culturally as well. What distinguished Franco’s dictatorship from its European
equivalents, such as Italian fascism or German National Socialism, was the
importance that his regime gave to the catholic religion, which was merged with
the concept of nationalism.3 Whereas contemporary European totalitarian
regimes usually gave organized religion a minimal role within their structures,
Franco’s ideology, expressed by the notion of “national-Catholicism,”4
emphasized the relationship between the state and the church to the point of
fusing both within one single interest. Logically, the visions expressed by
science fiction could not be to the liking of Franco’s regime, for a narrative
mode based upon the themes of scientific progress, human—and even non
human—communication and sometimes equality, and which implicitly rejects
any kind of nationalism presented many dangers for a totalitarian administration
with theocratic principles.
As a result, science fiction as a whole was demoted to the rank of the
lowest type of pulp fiction, as a suspicious genre with subversive tendencies and
no artistic merits of any kind. (Merelo, Ferreras). While Philip K. Dick was
writing The Man in the High Castle, what passed as science fiction in Spain
consisted almost exclusively of infantile adventures involving fearless heroes
and giant insects with laser guns. Only one subgenre of science fiction,
considered by some as quite different from the real thing, namely space opera,
was somewhat spared and relatively celebrated. Space opera had a definite
advantage upon dystopian science fiction: not only did it correspond to the
Manichean opposition adopted as a value system by the totalitarian government
of Franco, but it was also appreciated and consumed by both sides, that is by
“Las Dos Espanas,” or “The Two Spains,” the conservatives and the liberals,
which had been opposing each other since the eighteenth century. Space opera,
which is mainly about conquests and colonialism, battles and empires, flattered
the Manichean conception of the world and of society that the Spanish Catholic
Church as well as the state had adopted and enforced. From a generic point of
view, we could say that space opera functions at a very elementary, not to say
reptilian level, and thus provides some type of escapism for teenagers and young
adults, apparently without any type of critical implication; it is indeed much
closer to the universe of the Marvelous than to that of dystopian science fiction
and usually does not prompt any serious reflection regarding our social and
political reality.5