Luis Othoniel Rosa

Down with Gargamel! Luis Othoniel Rosa

Fiction. Latinx Studies. Translated by Noel Black. DOWN WITH GARGAMEL! is a futurist tale set in Puerto Rico, New York, and Colorado Springs that unfolds during the transition from peak oil production to a future that's formless, dangerous, and full of possibility. As global capitalism collapses under the weight of a worsening environmental crisis, we encounter the stories of six friends as they move through different forms of consciousness and across galaxies. Stories are presented as a narrative fractal in which the same occurrence is retold at different scales. Conversations abound: on black holes during a Puerto Rican blackout; inside the head of a schizophrenic professor; in an apartment in Brooklyn the very morning the world learns aliens have sent us a message; at a happy death home where three comrades and a cat care for twelve voluntarily dying bodies; and finally between intergalactic Smurfs and a nostalgic angel. Rosa's vision is at once absurd and terrifying, specific and idealistic, rooted in the paranoid tradition of J. L. Borges and Phillip K. Dick and inspired by a wide range of radical political movements.