Espora
The Newszine of Spanish Science Fiction and Fantasy

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Espora #4

Conventions and Exhibitions
Awards
Publications
Other Activities
Letters
Sources

CONVENTIONS AND EXHIBITIONS
 

19th HispaCon (Spanish National SF and Fantasy Convention). To take place in Zaragoza (Aragón) under the name Salduba 2001 between the 27th and the 30th September. Please note the new contact addresses and web site:
jochu@ctv.es
sagacomic@jazzfree.com
http://www.aefcf.es/salduba/

Cinema Programme "Peor Imposible" 2001 in Gijón (27th August to 1st September). Organized by Jesús Parrado and devoted to small budget Z-rated films, a subgenre that often displayed SF and fantasy subjects. It included panels and lectures by writer Pablo Herranz, writer Juan Miguel Aguilera and editor Julián Díez of Gigamesh fame.

The 2001 Summer Courses in the Universidad Menéndez Pelayo included a course on "Fantastic Literature and Other Expressions of the Impossible" (30th and 31st July), by writer José María Merino.
http://www.uimp.es

SF writers in the Noir Week of Gijón (Asturias, Northern Spain). Writers Ian Watson, George R.R. Martin and Robert Sheckley attended the Noir Week (6th-15th July), which also saw writers Angélica Gorodischer from Argentina, Mario Evangelisti from Italy and Spanish writers Juan Miguel Aguilera, Elia Barceló, Angel Torres Quesada and Rodolfo Martínez.

Tolkien Party in Santurce (Vizcaya, Basque Country). It took place between the 6th and the 8th July and was organized by the smial (local group) Bosque Negro of the Spanish Tokien Society (STE).
www.bosquenegro.org
josugp@arrakis.es

The 4th Cinema Festival in Málaga (3rd to 7th June) included the short films Fade (one of the best Spanish SF films ever made), 73 37 (a ghost story in bable, the regional tongue of Asturias, northern Spain) and La colección (a series of animated films on artificial life).
www.festcinemalaga.com

Fantastic Cinema Marathon in the 2nd Cinema Week of Vitoria (Alava, Basque Country). Organized by director Tinieblas González, it took place on the 11th May and included such classics as Dracula by Tod Browning and Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein by James Whale. Actor Paul Naschy (a.k.a. Jacinto Molina) introduced the evening.

Exhibition on Catalonian SF in Madrid. Between the 5th April and the 31st May in the Llibreria Blanquerna, the exhibition "1877-1977: A Hundred Years of SF and Fantasy Books in Catalan" displayed the works of the forerunners à la Verne, the Modernists and the authors who published during the Francoist dictatorship.

Lecture on SF: Literature of Prophecy? by Ignacio Armada from the Society of Authors. It took place in the course of the Third Meeting on Old and Secondhand Books in Majadahonda (Madrid) between the 23rd March and the 8th April.

3rd Conference on Comic in the Universidad de Alicante, Valencia (29th to 31st March). Organized by La Trama, Comic Association of Alicante, and devoted to furthering the dialogue between professionals and readers. It included panels on women and comic, the creative process in comic and comic and history, a series of informal chats with authors, films and exhibitions.
www.dreamers.com/unicomic

In March, the 4th Fantastic and Horror Cinema Week in Cáceres (Extremadura) paid an homage to film director Juan Piquer Simón, showing Supersonic Man or Slugs. The Semana also made an exhibition of Spanish SF comics from the 50s and the 60s.

The 9th International Fantastic Cinema Week in Málaga (from the 21st February) included the screening of Shadow of the Vampire among other films.
http://www.fantastico.uma.es/

5th SF Meeting in Mataró (26th to 28th January). It included an exhibition on 2001, lectures on 2001, lifeforms in 2001, science in 2001, artificial intelligence in 2001, films on alien contacts and a short story contest.

Talking with humanoid robots. A conference on this topic took place on the 24th January in the Science Museum of Barcelona, as part of the programme "2001, thirty three years later". It included interventions by Luc Steels (director of the Artificial Inteligence Laboratory in the Free University of Brussels), among other scientists.
http://www.fundacio.lacaixa.es
info.fundacio@lacaixa.es

AWARDS
 

Nominees to the Ignotus Awards (National SF and Fantasy Awards) voted by the members of the AEFCF and the AGASF (Galician SF Society). The most outstanding cathegories are:
Best Novel: Mano de galaxia, by Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo; La embajada, by E. Gallego and G. Sánchez; IA, by Daniel Mares; Bula Matari, by J.M. Pallarés and L. Arsenal; Nuxlum by José Antonio Suárez.
Best Novella: "Crisálida" by E. Gallego and G. Sánchez; "El orgullo de Dios" by Pedro Jorge; "Si pudieras ver Niágara" by Joaquín Revuelta; "Los funcionarios" and "Rax", both by Eduardo Vaquerizo.
Best Short Story: "Entre líneas", by José Antonio Cotrina, "La canica en la palmera" and "La sed de las panteras", both by Rafael Marín; "Las sombras peregrinas" by Ramón Muñoz; "Morir en tu bañera y otras lamentables casualidades" by Félix J. Palma
Best Magazine: Artifex, BEM, El Melocotón Mecánico, Gigamesh, Solaris.
Best Foreign Novel: Light of Other Days, by A. Clarcke and S. Baxter; Distress, by Greg Egan; Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson; Darwinia, by R. Wilson.
Best Foreign Short Story: "Gossamer", by Stephen Baxter; "A Separate War", by Joe Haldeman; "Enter a Soldier; Later, Enter Another", by Robert Silverberg; "Orphans Fron the Helix", Dan Simmons; "He We Wait" by Howard Waldrop.
Web Site (new cathegory): Bibliópolis (www.bibliopolis.org), El Archivo de Nessus (www.archivodenessus.com), Sitio de Ciencia-Ficción (www.ciencia-ficcion.com), TerMa (www.tertuliamadrid.org) and Términus-Trántor (www.ttrantor.org).
The winners will be announced during the HispaCon in Zaragoza at the end of September.

10th Pablo Rido Short Stoy Contest. A jury formed by Alberto Cairo, Iñaki Fariña, Alfredo Liébana, José Antonio López and Antonio Rivas awarded the prize on the 22nd June to Ramón Muñoz for his story "Los cazadores de nubes". Runner-ups were Carlos Martínez Córdoba with "Juzgado 11", Félix J. Palma with "Las lágrimas de Lorenzo", Óscar Daniel Salomón with "A contrapluma" and Eugenio Sánchez Arrate with "Crónica del Niño Sapo de Cascajar de los Montes". Eighty-eight short stories competed for the award, including quite a few from Latin America.

PUBLICATIONS
 

The Filmoteca Vasca, as a complement of a series of film screenings, edited an special issue of its magazine Nosferatu devoted to European SF, with articles about cinema and literature, Italian fantascienza, German, British, Spanish or East European SF, and moviemakers as Karel Zeman, Luc Besson or Peter Watkins. The 254-page issue includes a four-page abstract written in English.
cinema_cinema@donostia.org

Leading newspaper El Mundo has published several SF reviews in its web site Diario del Navegante.
http://www.elmundo.es/navegante/diario/libros/snowcrash.html

The publishing house Hastur announces a new magazine, El Norte, on SF, RPGs, comics and wargames. The first issue was due for December 2000 but has been delayed.

Artifex Ediciones published Contra el tiempo, a new novel by Juan Miguel Aguilera and Rafael Marín that opened a new collection, Artifex Estelar. A second book, Sombras en la eternidad by Angel Torres Quesada, is due for September.
http://pagina.de/artifex

The e-zine El Aleph continues with its mix of SF and mainstream.
http://www.aleph.imagoediciones.com/

Special issue on SF in the Primeras Noticias magazine (on pedagogy and young readers).
http://sauce.pntic.mec.es/~alglobal

Paranoia is the name of yet another new e-zine.
http://home2.worldonline.es/paranoia
pnoia@iespana.es

New compilation by Antonio Ribera. The Catalonian writer and ufologist has had his collection La meva àvia, la planta published by Pagès Editors. It includes eleven short stories written in the 50s and the 60s.

The first book in the new Albemuth amateur collection is now available. It's a compilation of the winners and runner-ups in the 2nd Short Story Contest El Melocotón Mecánico. Another three books were announced for February, May and August, but so far none has appeared.
melmek@hotmail.com

From screen to paper. The e-zine The Plague has spawned a paper sister fanzine, La Plaga, oddly enough sponsored by the electronic bookshop Dragonlibros. Two issues have been publised up till now.
http://www.dragonlibros.com/libros/99300.htm
http://theplague.ci-fi.com

Mainstream writer Ray Loriga announced that his new novel, Trífero, would deal with quantum physics. Loriga already borrowed from SF in his previous novel Tokio ya no nos quiere.

Catalonian writer Sebastià Roig has published in Destino his book El cogombre sideral, a screwball satire that uses SF themes.

The publishing house Sulaco announced a new SF magazine, Pulp!, to be bimonthly. Nevertheless, only two issues have appeared since the beginning of the year. But a fantasy novel by José Miguel Pallarés and León Arsenal has indeed been published by Sulaco.
http://www.sulacoed.com/sulaco.htm

Issue # 188 of Leer magazine devoted many pages to SF, with pieces by writer César Mayorquí and critic Julián Díez, among others.

A definitive anthology on Spanish short stories of the past two decades was announced by Minotauro to be published in June. Nevertheless, there's no sign of it yet. Anthologist Julián Díez has selected stories by Rafael Marín, Elia Barceló, César Mallorquí, Rodolfo Martínez, León Arsenal, Juan Miguel Aguilera, Juan Carlos Planells, Armando Boix, Daniel Mares and Ramón Muñoz.

Data Millenium, another amateur publishing house, spawned form preexisting fanzines Data and Nexus.
http://www.interbook.net/personal/garry98/milenium.htm
garry98@interbook.net

Gigamesh Ediciones announced a new magazine on comic-books, Yellow Kid, to be edited by writer Rafael Marín, but seemes to have been afflicted by the same delay virus as most Spanish SF publications in the first half of 2001.

New e-zine Starfox on fantastic cinema.

The Electronic Library of the AEFCF (devoted to the publication of long lost classic Spanish SF) was commented in El País, a leading newspaper, on the 16th March. Visits to the AEFCF web site soared.

New e-zine Elfos on SF and fantasy.
chema@gutierrez.as
http://www.elfos.es.org

New e-zine Pulsar on SF and fantasy.
http://juancarlos.keynockers.com/pulsar
http://www.geocities.com/eb3dgz

E-zine Qlipoth fights successfully against the delay virus and plain editorial lassitude and published issue # 2 in February.
http://qliphoth.dreamers.com

Silente, another Spanish amateur publishing house, announced an anthology on Cuban SF.

A new edition of the classic Visiones short story anthology, published by the AEFCF, to appear in September. Anthologist Luis G. Prado announced that it will be devoted to new writers.

New e-zine Medusa on SF, fantasy and genre fiction, published in the mighty Navegalia web site.
www.medusa.navegalia.com
revistamedusa@navegalia.com

Editor and SF guru Miquel Barceló has coordinated the publication of short SF stories in Ciberpaís monthly magazine (on computers and the Internet).

The newspaper El País offered this summer a serialization of a science-fiction novel, El último trayecto de Horacio Dos, illustrated by Juan Giménez and written by Eduardo Mendoza, a prestigious Spanish writer who gained critical success with his historical novels La ciudad de los prodigios and La verdad sobre el caso Savolta. The author has a previous work in the SF field, the hugely successful Sin noticias de Gurb.
http://www.sdm.qc.ca/txtdoc/sf/adu/MENDOZAEDUARDO.html
http://www.eduardo-mendoza.com

New e-zine leviatán on Babylon 5 and Star Trek.
leviatan-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
juanjo_cabrejas@wanadoo.es

El devorador de sombras, by Gregorio Morales, is an anthology of horror tales published by Port Royal.
http://www.terra.es/personal2/gmv00000/english.htm

Arcano trece compiles in hardcover thirteen horror stories by cult writer Pilar Pedraza, the most acclaimed horror author in contemporary Spain. This book is the reference number 150 of the El Club Diógenes Collection (Valdemar), devoted to the gothic genre.
http://www.valdemar.com

OTHER ACTIVITIES
 

Spanish Lovecraft movie. Recently deceased actor Paco Rabal played a major role in Dagon, a horror film by the Catalonian producers Fantastic Factory and directed by Stuart Gordon, to be released early next year.
www.fantasticfactory.com

Stranded, a hard SF film co-produced by the US and Spain, casts María de Medeiros, Joaquim de Almeida and Vincent Gallo as the ill-fated crew of a mission to Mars gone catastrophically wrong. The script was written by Juan Miguel Aguilera. The film will be presented in the prestigious San Sebastian Film Festival in late September.
http://www.elmundo.es/navegante/especiales/2001/stranded/
http://dolorespictures.com

Cienciaficcion.net. A new search engine devoted specifically to Spanish SF.
www.cienciaficcion.net
webmaster@cienciaficcion.net

Paul Naschy (a.k.a Jacinto Molina), horror actor on and off-screen, was awarded the golden medal of the arts by the Spanish government.

The smial (local group) of the Spanish Tolkien Society of Imladris (Valladolid) has created a new web site on Tolkien.
http://pagina.de/imladris/

The Freak is a radio programme devoted to Spanish fantastic cinema that also publishes a bimonthly magazine.
jorge_pariente@tecnipublicaciones.com

Amando de Ossorio, born in 1918 in La Coruña (although there isn´t a consensus; some books date his birth in 1925), died on the 13th January 2001. He was one of the main directors of the Spanish horror boom in the 70s, specially for his quartet of films about the living dead templars which started with The Blind Dead (La noche del terror ciego, 1972). He also directed the sci-fi movie The Sea Serpent (Serpiente de mar, 1984), starring Ray Milland.

Fantastic Factory, a new production house of Barcelona which offers fantasy movies shoot in English and is managed by the producer Julio Fernández and the moviemaker Brian Yuzna, has released some of its films: in February, Faust: Love of the Damned (Faust: la venganza está en la sangre), directed by Yuzna, and in June Arachnid, directed by Jack Sholder.

Some recent Spanish horror movies are: the ghost story set in the Spanish civil war El espinazo del diablo, directed by Guillermo del Toro; School Killer, starring Paul Naschy and directed by Carlos Gil; and the psycho killer movie Tuno Negro, directed by Pedro L. Barbero y Vicente J. Martín.
www.elespinazodeldiablo.com
www.shoolkiller.wanadoo.es
www.tunonegro.com

Another awaited Spanish movie (good times indeed for Spanish fantasy cinema) is the ghostly The Others, shot in English, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Nicole Kidman.
www.us.imdb.com/Trailers?0230600 www.theothers.com

El bosque animado, a 3-D animation movie for kids, was released in Spain in August. This ambitious production in the funny animals tradition is inspired by the Wenceslao Fernández Flórez classic novel published in 1943. El bosque animado is located in a typical Atlantic forest of Galicia (northwestern Spain), with two moles and a sturdy old oak tree among other characters.
http://www.elbosqueanimado.com/2000/html/i_portal.htm

El juego lúgubre (La Cúpula), by Paco Roca, is a 68-page comic-book about a young man who travels from Madrid to Catalonia in order to work as secretary for Salvador Deseo, a surrealist painter. With resemblances from Salvador Dalí´s agitated life, and imagined as an horror story, Paco Roca has recognized Thomas Harris and Bram Stoker´s Dracula as its main influences.

New mailing list about Spanish fandom: e-fandom@yahoogroups.com

LETTERS
 

Hi! I´m new in this forum and as a Spanish SF & Fantasy fan, it grieves me deeply that I can´t find any more messages in this forum of discussion.
Lately in Spain, specially as far as cinema is concerned I´ve been witnessing a turn towards the Fantastic, bordering on the Gothic. Love it or hate it, Amenábar´s Tesis recreates the atmosphere of a long lost or recycled genre in Anglo-Saxon Literature: the 18c Gothic Radcliffe, Monk and Maturin where such masters (all BTW recently published by Valdemar to whom we own the rescue of so many priceless texts). Tesis is a subversive critique of the Academia where the castle is substituted by University buildings, the "monk" is the professor; the female victims are horribly mutilated, the female body is regarded as an object both of pleasure and horror, sex lies at the core of the narrative, etc. I would like to know whether you colleagues of Espora have thought of Tesis as such.
Thanks, Irene, Barcelona.

Espora: Thanks for your message, Irene. As you know now, the Espora mailing list is a receive-only list created for the distribution of the newsletter, and not a forum of discussion. But we appreciate your contacting us and are happy to publish your letter, in the hope that some discussion will emerge.

Hi,
me and my partners are interested in releasing Pieces (Mil gritos tiene la noche, Juan Piquer Simón) in Germany and the Netherlands on video and DVD.
Maybe you have any source that gives information about the Spanish distributor or production company who owns the rights of these two movies. Any address, phone number or email would be a great help for us.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Best regards
Thomas Kerpen

Espora: We will be glad to get you in touch with the owners of the right's to the film. By this time you should have received a private message with the information. Don't hesitate to ask again if you should need to contact any other Spanish source, and we'll do our best to put you through.

Dear Sir/Madam,
I work for a childrens publisher in London, and I would like to find out what science fiction/fantasy books are popular within the teenage and young readers range? I would be most grateful for any kind of information as this would help me greatly in my job!
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
All the best,
Elisabeth Carlsson

Espora: In Spain, as all around the world, it's Harry Potter and the R.L. Stine-style series of scary stories for young readers that are calling the shots. But if you should look for specifically Spanish authors, Jordi Serra i Fabra is the national best-seller, followed by Joan Manuel Gisbert, Manuel de Pedrolo and, further down the sales list, Armando Boix and César Malloquí. All of then have been published by Edebé and SM.

A note about the article covering Spanish fantasy movies that appeared in Espora #3: Narciso Ibáñez Serrador wasn´t born in Argentina (he was born in neighbouring Uruguay); and we mentioned The diabolical Dr. Z (Miss Muerte, 1965) as a sequel of The Awful Dr. Orloff (Gritos en la noche, 1961), information that is maintained by some bibliography written in English, but it is not a direct sequel; in fact, in the Spanish version the Dr. Orloff is just mentioned. More info in http://www.cinefantastico.com/spanish.htm
Pablo Herranz

SOURCES AND OTHER INTERESTING LINKS ON SPANISH SF
 

http://www.aefcf.es
http://www.drimar.com/asturcon
http://www.cienciaficcion.org
http://193.144.76.38/agasf
http://www.arrakis.es/~jndro/terma.htm
http://usuarios.intercom.es/nacpb/frames.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/7461/
http://www.geocities.com/javromara/
http://www.ciencia-ficcion.com/
http://pagina.de/artifex
http://www.pjorge.com/nessus
http://www.bemmag.com/
http://www.izar.net/~aroz/
http://www.silente.net/
http://qoweb.usc.es/cf/jcc/GalCF.html
http://www.bibliopolis.org
http://www.ttrantor.org
http://dreamers.com/estrellanegra/

*The information in Espora is free for anyone to use, provided that the newszine is mentioned as the source.

* Espora is a newszine distributed by mailing list. To join the list, go to http://www.egroups.com/subscribe/espora. Comments and suggestions should be sent to espora@aefcf.es.

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