Columbo ex frigata

• In Event: La Ciencia Ficción en América Latina: Pensar el Objeto

Abstract

I propose a typological exploration of a peculiar sub-genre of Latin American SF: what I call the Columbo ex frigata. The title plays with the Deus ex machina trope, but with a New World twist. José B. Adolph’s short story “Persistencia” is an excellent introduction to the form: navigators on what seems to be an impossibly foreign and futuristic spaceship persist through hardship only to arrive on unknown shores; upon disembarking, the reader realizes that the chief navigator has been Columbus all along, and the ship was one of the famed caravels that made landfall in the Caribbean in 1492.
I explore the many types of this trope using a hybrid framework that connects research on Latin American historiographical metafiction and more recent SF criticism. Columbo ex frigata, as a type, is compared with what Aldiss has memorably called the “Shaggy God Story”. Typology also has a further theological connotation: in Christianity, it is the exegesis of Old Testament characters in the light of New Testament revelations. That framework also operates in sixteenth-century attempts to explain the so-called New World in light of biblical and classical authority that, on the whole, had nothing to say about a continent called America. It is precisely this deep archival engagement with sixteenth-century tropes of “discovery”, navigation and science that distinguish Columbo ex frigata tales from the more tired stories that Aldiss ridicules. At their best, these tales create a discursive space for exploring epistemology, novelty and theology in the encounter of cosmovisions.

Author

• Zac Zimmer, University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz)