Literature Review
Nueva Dimensión
The first incarnation of Domingo Santos and Luis Vigil’s idea of a magazine exclusively devoted to science fiction was Anticipación [Anticipation] (1966). Its seven issues included twenty first stories translated from English, nine from French, one from Italian and two from Russian, but eight were Spanish. Its demise was caused by the infamous Law of Press and Printing, that same year. This law was planned as a mechanism for censorship imposed by Franco’s dictatorship, and forced all periodic publications (newspapers and magazines) to have a director with a degree in journalism, listed in an official registry. The director would be responsible for any infringement committed by the publication, so this person had veto powers on all the content of the newspaper or magazine. Anticipación was forced to hire such a director, but it was impossible to pay his salary with a very limited budget. This problem led to the closing of the publication after a year.
However, the experience gained by Santos and Vigil helped them to create in 1968, with Sebastián Martínez, Nueva Dimensión [New Dimension] (1968-1982), with the perspective of a professional-quality fanzine, learning from the lessons from and materials left over by Anticipación. Martínez was in charge of the administrative tasks required to create and manage an independent publishing company, named Dronte. The team contacted the Pomaire company to handle the distribution, and it was its owner who chose the distinctive squared format adopted by the magazine, the same as the Planète magazine by Bergier and Pauwels which had become very popular in South America. A different name was initially chosen, but that was already registered, so the final designation of the magazine became Nueva Dimensión, albeit at the risk of it being confused with a UFO or parapsychology publication, though that confusion might have benefited its sales. The new newstand magazine probably survived because of word of mouth, and a large number of dedicate subscribers. These fans wanted to receive the issues at home, instead of waiting to buy the magazine at the local stores, given the poor reliability of that distribution channel.
The magazine had a section with short stories and some short novels, mostly from English-speaking authors translated into Spanish, but also with some national writers, well known ones as well as new ones, being a key achievement of the publication to discover newcomers who found in this magazine and some fanzines the only media to become visible. A sample of important Spanish authors contributing to Nueva Dimension were Carlo Frabetti, Luis Gasca, José Luis Garci, Alfonso Álvarez Villar, Jaime Rosal del Castillo, Luis Eduardo Aute, Ludolfo Paramio, Vicente Aranda, Ángel Torres Quesada, Rafael Marín, Juan Miguel Aguilera, Javier Redal, Javier Negrete, Luis García Lecha, Ignacio Romeo, José Ignacio Velasco, Enrique Lázaro, Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo, Carlos Saiz Cidoncha, Manuel de Pedrolo… The magazine published some special issues, too, dedicated to a specific theme or author.
There were also sections with essays, comments and reviews of genre literature and films, printed in distinctive green pages. Thanks to these pages, the magazine became a vehicle for communication between the sparse fan community, giving them the opportunity to get to know each other without access to the current social networks. The magazine was the catalyst of the first Hispacon, with a call to registration in its fifth issue. The idea of an association was also born, although it would not take shape until the Asociación Española de Fantasía, Ciencia Ficción y Terror (AEFCFT) was officially founded in 1991. Agustín Jaureguízar was in charge of selecting the new writers, and was later responsible of the green information pages using the pseudonym Augusto Uribe.
As it had happened before with its predecessor, the magazine had problems with censorship because of the Press Law. In his issue of May 14th 1970, a short story titled in Euskera (Basque language) ‘Gu ta gutarrak’ [‘Us and Ours’], by Magdalena Mouján Otaño, told the adventure of a group of Basques travelling with a time machine to locate a paradoxical event. Despite being presented in advance for official administrative approval, a few days later the Public Order Court forced the recall of the entire issue. The prosecutor denounced that the story violated the national unity of Spain. After the seizure of the issue, the pages of this story were substituted by several cartoons strips by Johnny Hart, so it was possible to continue the distribution. The trial against Nueva Dimensión never happened, but the case brought ample criticism from international fandom. In the US, a support committee was created and some authors offered his work for token rates. A hundred issues later, in July-August 1979, and Nueva Dimensión again published the short story as a remembrance of the episode and as an apology to its author.
The magazine last for 148 issues, between 1968 and 1982, so the three founders managed to keep publishing for fifteen years, against all odds. It was finally the problems with the distribution channels which caused its demise, especially the bankruptcy of the Latin America distributors. In the year 2000 Hispacon, at Gijón, a well deserved homage was paid by publishing a symbolic issue 149 with the name of Sol 3, the original denomination intended for the magazine. Luis Vigil and Carlo Frabetti, the fourth Nueva Dimensión alma mater, gave two conferences at the 2013 Hispacon, held at Quart de Poblet, too, they are viewable at Vimeo and Youtube.
The importance of Nueva Dimensión lies in its role to push Spanish science fiction away from the adventure story approach of “dime novels”, towards a more critical and speculative perspective, and a more mature and literary style, although the adventure component never disappeared.
At the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, in addition to Domingo Santos, another important author is Ángel Torres Quesada. He started publishing in the series ‘Luchadores del Espacio’ [‘Space Fighters’] from the publisher Editora Valenciana with the novel Un mundo llamado Badoom [A World called Badoom] (1963). However, the most important part of his production in popular pocketbook science fiction was published by Editorial Bruguera, where he created the series ‘Saga del Orden Estelar’ [‘Saga of the Star Order’], the second most important science fiction series (it included 50 novels) in Spain, only behind ‘La Saga de los Aznar’ [‘Saga of the Aznar’] by Pascual Enguídanos. In this long saga, humanity has expanded across the cosmos, with different government organizations rising and falling along the ages. Torres Quesada wrote classic works of serious science fiction, too, like La trilogía de las islas [The Island Trilogy] (1988), El círculo de piedra [The Stone Circle] (1992) that garnered the UPC Award, Las grietas del tiempo [The Cracks of Time] (1998), Los sicarios de Dios [God’s Hitmen] (2001) and Sombras en la eternidad [Shadows in Eternity] (2001) that was the winner of the Semana Negra [Noir Week] of Gijón Award).
Manuel de Pedrolo wrote his first novel, Es vessa una sang fàcil [An Easy Blood is Spilled](1954) in Catalan (as are all his works), and that garnered the Joanot Martorell Award the same year. Later he also was a recipient of the Mercè Rodoreda Award for his short story ‘Crèdits humans’ [‘Human Credits’] (1957). Pedrolo practised different genres and literary forms, from short stories to theatre and his science fiction novel Mecanoscrit del segon origen [Typed Manuscript of the Second Origin],(1974) was also produced as a very successful TV series by TV3 network and has been translated to over twenty languages. The book tells the daily life of a couple of children who, being underwater, survive an alien attack which exterminates all the mammals on Earth. After growing up, they travel to the city, to find someone else alive. Pedrolo was also an important writer of noir novels, too, and for these he received the Honour Award of Catalan Literature in 1979.
Among the very few women writing science fiction in this period we can cite María Güera. She, in collaboration with her son, Arturo Mengotti, published a very interesting series of short stories from 1968 to 1971 in Nueva Dimensión magazine, being the first and maybe most important one ‘Herencia de Sueños’ [‘Heritage Dreams’] (1958).
The publisher Buru Lan de Ediciones, S. was founded in 1971 in San Sebastián. Between 1970 and 1977, it focused on theoretical essays on different subjects, especially comics, defending their status as a major art form. It was financed by Javier Aramburu and Manuel Salvat, and directed by Luis Gasca. It published the encyclopaedia El cine [The Cinema] (1973), with articles by Angel Fernández-Santos, José Luis Garci, Pere Gimferrer, José Luis Guarner, Román Gubern, Francisco Llinás, Terenci Moix, Ricardo Muñoz Suay, Miquel Porter Moix, César Santos Fontela or Manuel Villegas López, all of them very important writers, screenwriters, directors and producers.
In fact, the most successful Spanish science fiction TV production of the century came by one of these, José Luis Garci, who had written some science fiction stories, too, before becoming a famous TV and cinema director in the eighties. It was La cabina [The Phone Booth] (1972). Antonio Mercero, who had filmed three mid-length films for the national TV network, shot La cabina with a very good story written by Garci and himself, and the film became the most awarded science fiction production in the Spanish history, including an Emmy for the best TV film. In La cabina a common man is trapped inside a phone booth. In spite of the attempts to help him, he can’t be released. Things go to the next level when the same mysterious workers who installed the booth the previous night take the whole booth to carry the protagonist towards an unknown destination. During the trip the prisoner realises he is defenceless in the face of a sinister force driving him to an unexplained and atrocious destiny from which there seems to be no escape…
Historias para no dormir [Stories to Stay Awake] (1966-1982) was a Spanish horror genre TV series directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador for the national station Televisión Española. Being horror was notable as, unlike other countries, horrorwas almost unknown at this time in Spanish cinema and TV. The first season started with the episode ‘El cumpleaños’ [‘The Birthday’], an adaptation of a story by Fredric Brown, shot on 16 mm film, and was the first Spanish TV production to do so. For the next episodes original screenplays like ‘La alarma’ [‘The Alarm’] or ‘La bodega’ [‘The Cellar’] were alternated with adaptations of Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe stories like ‘La espera’ [‘The Waiting’], ‘El cohete’ [‘The Rocket’] or ‘El tonel’ [‘The Barrel’]. The second season in 1967-1968 had only eight episodes, and in later years the show’s schedule became irregular, with erratic showings until 1982.
6. New writers and initiatives
During most of the period since 1980, Nueva Dimensión’s maintained its dominating presence. In 1980, a new science fiction magazine was published: Kandama (1980-1984) edited by Miquel Barceló, but after a break in 1983, the eighth issue became the last one. Barceló has written short science fiction stories, but he is better known as an editor and promoter of the UPC Science Fiction Award.
Gigamesh magazine was founded in 1985. Devoted to speculative fiction, it covered the whole fantasy, science fiction and horror genre, and was initially edited by Alejo Cuervo. It continued in different formats, from fanzine to book, until 2007. Cuervo’s publishing company, Ediciones Gigamesh, also created the Stalker magazine (1998-2003) and Yellow Kid (2001-2003) that respectively focused on cinema and fantasy comics. From the first issue of Gigamesh, the Premio Gigamesh Award was presented based on the votes of readers much in the same way as the Locus Awards in the United States are managed. The last Gigamesh Award was presented in 2000.
At this time, some science fiction writers known for their work in the “dime novels” or introduced to the public in Nueva Dimensión and Kandama, started blooming as the quality of life in Spanish society increased and the freedom resulting from the end of Franco’s dictatorship spread. In addition to established writers like Domingo Santos and Ángel Torres Quesada, a new generation rose. These included:-
- Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo who has provided some short stories and novels considered Spanish science fiction classics, like La última lección sobre Cisneros[The Last Lesson About Cisneros] (1978), in which censorship is the norm in a Spain subdued by the unstoppable decline of planetary resources; and the novels Viaje a un planeta Wu Wei [Travel to a Wu Wei Planet] (1976), telling the exile of Sergio Amstrong, away from a technically advanced world, at a less developed planet with a better balance with nature; and El Señor de la Rueda [The Lord of the Wheel] (1986), which presents a Middle Age-like society and which was written with a memorable sense of humour.
- Carlos Saiz Cidoncha who has always written science fiction located in the far future, such as La caída del imperio galáctico [The fall of the Galactic Empire] (1978), and his works are full of a great sense of humour and references to famous genre stories so delighting connoisseurs as well as enriching the experience of new readers. He has also been one of the founders of contemporary Spanish science fiction fandom and has participated in the Círculo de Lectores de Anticipación [Circle of Anticipation Readers] and the AEFCF/AEFCFT publications.
- Rafael Marín Trechera started his career in the late 1970s writing for science fiction magazines such as Kandama and Nueva Dimensión as well as creating his own fanzine McClure. He then wrote his first short novel Nunca digas buenas noches a un extraño [Never Say Good Night to a Stranger] (1978), where he anticipated the cyberpunk movement, and Lágrimas de Luz [Tears of Light] (1984) which is considered as Spain’s first modern science fiction novel. Hamlet Evans wants to be a poet to expand the human empire but soon is disillusioned with it and decides to continue an outlaw artistic existence to defy the Corporation. In the 1990s, he wrote the graphic novel with Carlos Pacheco Iberia Inc (1996), drawn by Rafa Fonteriz and Jesús Yugo, about a team of Spanish superheroes, the novel Mundo de dioses [World of Gods] (1998) and later Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four (2000-2001). At the 2003 SF Eurocon in Turku, Finland, he co-won a Eurocon Award for the Best European Translator.
- Elia Barceló is the most prolific female Spanish SF author and is considered one of the most important female writers in Spanishphone science fiction, together with the Argentinian Angélica Gorodischer and Cuban Daína Chaviano. The three of them form the so called “female Trinity of science fiction in Spanish” [Rafael Marín Trechera dixit]. She started writing for Nueva Dimensión and has published novels, essays and more than twenty short stories in national and international magazines. She has won the UPC Award for her short novel El mundo de Yarek [Yarek’s World] (1993) where alien life specialist Lennart Yarek faces the most terrible sentence: twenty years of exile on an uninhabited planet, with only a computer company, memories and nightmares. She also received the Gabriel Award for her career. Other remarkable science fiction works from Barceló are the collections Sagrada [Sacred] (1989) and Futuros peligrosos [Dangerous Futures] (2008).
- Juan Miguel Aguilera is very popular for his Akasa-Puspa Saga, written with Javier Redal and set in a star cluster named Akasa-Puspa that is outside the Milky Way. As the distance among the stars in that universe is quite small, interstellar travelling is easy even for less advanced civilizations, be it using the Empire’s fast fusion ships or the slower Utsarpini or even the Brotherhood solar sails: these being these three factions in constant conflict. In addition, there is another method of transport and supply, the Chain System, as well as a space elevator (only way to initiate a trip to the stars), self-replicating machines and humans coexisting with the extremely aggressive angriffs, the enigmatic hivers, or the cofrades (strange nest creatures)… Aguilera has written many more books, including a zombie novel La Zona [The Zone] (2012) with Javier Negrete.
- Javier Redal has a degree in Biology and is the one of the best hard science fiction experts in Spain. He wrote the Akasa-Puspa Saga with Aguilera and won the Gabriel Award with him. Both began to write short stories about this universe for Nueva Dimensión, but he has published four novels, too, including Mundos en el abismo [Worlds into the Abyss] (1988).
- Jordi Sierra i Fabra is one of the most prolific science fiction authors in Spain and who also writes fantasy as well as juvenile fiction. He deals with themes like hοmοsexuality and drugs which, together with his preference for suspense and action instead of a purely literary style, makes him very popular among youngsters. He is the author of one of the most important science fiction sagas published in Spain: ‘El ciclo de las Tierras’ [The Earths’ Cycle’], four novels between 1983 and 2005. about a not-too-distant future where humans and machines have equal rights. Moreover, the machines that have saved humanity the Holocaust, are the engine of progress and social life. But the charge of murder of a machine by a man alters their coexistence and triggers the start of a pending revolution.
After Nueva Dimensión disappeared, only Gigamesh and some fanzines and small publications survived in the genre until the bimonthly BEM (short for Bug-Eyed Monster) was born in 1990. Devoted to science fiction and fantasy, the magazine was helmed by Pedro Jorge Romero, José Luis González, Joan Manel Ortiz and Ricard de la Casa. BEM’s 75 issues and two annual specials were a non-profit endeavour, filling a void in Spanish culture during the nineties with their regular 32-page issues.
The rise of home computers and the first word processors and editing software in the 1990s, allowed the creation and publication of content in a whole new way, without costly printing and distribution, by using electronic files in floppy disks and mail or hand-to-hand delivery. Several electronic fanzines were born before the popularization of the Internet. Because of the space limitation in the printed version of BEM, the magazine was supplemented with the e-fanzine Kermel BEM, which had five issues between 1992 and 1995. In this way it was possible to deliver content of a larger size, including multiple short stories, interviews, articles, reviews and, in the last issue, a complete short novel.
New authors appeared such as Javier Negrete,. whose very funny Estado crepuscular [Sunset State] (1992)won the Ignotus and Gigamesh awards. It is the story of womanizer and drinker David Milar, a man who involuntary embarked on an space adventure due to his sexual appetites.
Rodolfo Martínez’s first novel, La sonrisa del gato [The Smile of the Cat] (1995]) was a cyberpunk spy story. He followed this up with Tierra de nadie: Jormungand [Nobody’s Land: Jormungand] (1996) a fascinating six-part novel about a planetary jail.
Eduardo Vaquerizo is an author of elaborated language who has won many awards. His best known works are steampunk Danza de tinieblas [Dance of Darkness] (2005) and Memoria de tinieblas [Memory of Darkness (2013), which share the same universe, although their stories are unrelated . We can also mention La última noche de Hipatia [The Last Night of Hipatia] (2009), a time travel story. Although part of his works can be associated with pulp adventure and the hard science fiction subgenre, reflecting his training as aerospace engineer, most of his stories are closer to the form and style developed after the New Wave, with a surreal and dreamlike quality.
Another author representing well the beginning of the century is Félix J. Palma, best known for his Victorian trilogy that comprises of El mapa del tiempo [The Map of Time] (2008), El mapa del cielo [The Map of the Sky] (2012) and El mapa del caos [The Map of Chaos] (2014), which tell stories of time travelling to the Victorian period, these have been in the New York Times’ bestseller list. In addition, the author writes for the news media press as a columnist and literary critic.
Meanwhile, Emilio Bueso has surprised SF readers with Cenital (2012), an apocalyptic vision of a world without fossil fuels, wonderfully narrated and counting many positive reviews. He maintained, even improved, on this work with Esta noche arderá el cielo [The Sky will Burn Tonight] (2013). Originally influenced by “dirty realism”, Bueso has merited several awards and become one of the rising names in the new Spanish science fiction of the early 21st century.
Other outstanding authors and their main books include: Santiago Eximeno (cyberpunk Asura, 2004) ; Daniel Mares (anthology En mares extraños [Strange Seas, 2004]) ; ; Juan Jacinto Muñoz Rengel with his collection De mecánica y alquimia [About Mechanics and Alchemy] (2013); ; Ismael Martínez Biurrun with his futuristic thriller El escondite Grisha [The Grisha Hideout] (2011) and the apocalyptic Un minuto antes de la oscuridad [A Minute Before Darkness] (2014); and the well-known journalist Rosa Montero with cyberpunk Lágrimas en la lluvia [Tears in the Rain] (2011) and El peso del corazón [The Heart’s Weight] (2015).
Agustín Jaureguízar has never published stories or other literary works. His influence in the genre comes from his editorial commissioning work for the Nueva Dimensión magazine, where he selected the stories of new writers and later took care of the green information pages under the name Augusto Uribe. He has contributed a lot to the study and popularisation of the genre, with many articles, some of them translated into English. As a researcher of proto-science fiction, and along almost forty years, he has popularized the works of writers like Enrique Gaspar, José de Elola or Nilo María Fabra. As an essay writer, he was won the Ignotus Award for the best article in 1998. AEFCF awarded him in 1991 with the Gabriel for his lifetime achievements.
The body promoting SF in Spain is the Asociación Española de Fantasía y Ciencia Ficción (AEFCF), [Spanish Association for Fantasy and Science Fiction], that in 2004 added the horror genre to its name becoming the AEFCFT. It is the organisation coordinating national activities in all these genres. It was born in 1991, after the Netherlands Worldcon in The Hague that prompted Spanish fandom to get together. Its first official ceremony was to give the Ignotus Award to Agustín Jaureguízar in the bookshop El Aventurero in Madrid. They are in charge of organising the annual Hispacon conference and the Ignotus and Gabriel Awards (the latter called the Live Achievement Award before 1994 as a special recognition for a whole professional career in the genre).
The AEFCFT also organizes, with other entities, a contest of unpublished short stories, the Domingo Santos Award, a great opportunity for new authors, and publishes books and e-books for members and general public, as the anthologies Visiones [Visions] and Fabricantes de sueños [Dream Makers].
The Ignotus Awards were founded in 1991, and granted annually to authors publishing in Spanish and foreign languages, somewhat equivalent to the Hugo Awards. The name is taken from the pseudonym used by the early twentieth century writer José de Elola. These awards are preselected and voted by the AEFCFT members and others who wish to register in the census.
The AEFCFT organizes the annual National Conference of Fantasy and Science Fiction called Hispacon, with an additional name chosen by that year’s local organising committee (e.g. Quartumcon in 2013, for its Quart de Poblet location). The location is chosen in advance at the association’s general assembly by voting among the candidate cities. Each candidacy is usually formed by a group of local fans who have some official support from the city, and take care of most of the event organization.
And so we can see that Spain has had a long tradition of Science Fiction work as any western European nature. In common with a number of other nations, its SF has been influenced by the politics of the day and social developments. It is currently well paced to continue this into the future.
Alejandro Mohorte Medina and José Nieto
Alejandro Mohorte Medina. Medina’s passions are history and literature. Since 2009, he has written articles and given lectures about literature, mainly with a historical perspective, and joined the literary group El Cuaderno Rojo [The Red Notebook] in 2013. He has collaborated with them in the anthologies Del Loco al Mundo [From the Madman to the World] (2014) and Sangre y Niebla [Blood and Fog] (2016).
José Nieto is a is a sci-fi fan of TV series and movies like Star Trek and Stargate. He was the graphic and layout designer of the Spanish sci-fi fanzine Hiperespacio [Hyperspace] (1995-1999). Later he was responsible of recording and editing a tenth of sci-fi lectures at the Spanish sci-fi meeting Hispacon 2013 – Quartumcon and building that event’s website.
The editors also wish to thank:-
Ángel Carralero is a longstanding Spanish SF fan who was responsible for co-ordinating the Spanish end of commissioning this article and who assisted with some of the translation.
Salvador Bayarri is a science fiction author and frequent presenter at HispaCon and other events. He provided additional translation.
Introduction. Domingo Santos, the pen-name of Pedro Domingo Mutiñó, has carried out a Herculean task in the development of Spanish sf, particularly as an editor (Barceló 291-92). He came to prominence in a difficult period of Spanish history; the second half of the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975). This was a time of profound social and economic changes that would shape the efforts of modern, democratic Spain to insert itself into a globalized world. Parallel to this shift, Spanish sf progressively abandoned the bolsilibros, or pulp paperbacks, and went on to enjoy a period of popularity that brought together the best national authors of the genre in what has come to be known as the Golden Decade.1
This Golden Decade spans from 1985 to the end of the millennium, when authors such as Rodolfo Martínez, Eduardo Vaquerizo, Elia Barceló, César Mallorquí, Juan Miguel Aguilera, and Rafael Marín began their careers.2 They all published short-fiction collections and novels that received good reviews in specialized magazines, and most of them have continued to publish at a steady pace. These authors show a predilection for very elaborate discourse with complex plots and characters developed in an intimate fashion. Above all, they show a great concern for language and literary quality that had been rare until this point and they favor a more demanding standard from fellow professionals when writing sf (Moreno 433). These are writers who belong to a democratic and globalized Spanish society with access to all types of information, one that has integrated technology into its everyday life.
How, then, was this stage reached from such a precarious starting point? Spanish sf matured between the pulp period and the Golden Decade due to the translation of relevant foreign sf novels and short stories, the publication of sf works in specialized series, the work of the magazine Nueva Dimensión [New Dimension, 1968-1983] in disseminating sf, the emergence of Spanish fandom, and the rise of new Spanish authors searching for their own voices under the influence of Anglo-American sf. A review of this period shows that in each of these realms the name Domingo Santos arises because he combines the roles of translator, magazine and collections editor, and writer. Santos is, therefore, a paramount figure in the process of narrative transculturation between a dominant Spanish literature and a peripheral genre one, a process that would culminate in the fusion of the Anglo-American sf tradition with Spanish culture and literary fashions. This is the achievement of the Golden Decade writers.
This period constituted a very specific literary phenomenon. Its happening was the result of the interaction of four nodes, which Mario J. Valdés refers to as geographical, temporal, institutional, and formal (70). This article will not proceed historically or through hierarchical analyses but will focus on the convergence of factors of heterogeneous influence, both synchronic and diachronic, through the main figure of Domingo Santos. The interaction of these nodes, through Santos’s diverse talents as translator, compiler, editor, and author, will help us to understand the complex maturation process of Spanish sf and how this culminates in its Golden Decade.
Santos as Translator and Anthologist. Over four decades, from 1966 until 2005, Domingo Santos translated more than eight hundred texts. Most of them were translated from English into Spanish, although he also translated the works of some authors from French (Jacques Sternberg) and Italian (Lino Aldani). In some of these translations he also collaborated with other professionals, including Luis Vigil and Sebastián Castro. Most of this activity gradually drew Santos closer to the publishing houses, particularly within the Nueva Dimensión sphere, which we will discuss later.
Santos’s expertise in English developed from his role as an editor, which forced him to establish close contacts with editors and writers from the United States such as Donald A. Wollheim. He thus began his career in this capacity translating stories by Anglo-American Golden Age writers such as Arthur C. Clarke. He eventually translated some of the most fundamental Anglo-American sf novels into Spanish: Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and all its sequels, Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (1959), Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) by Philip K. Dick.3 Among his translations, we also find classics such as Robert Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950) and Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X (1960), as well as later works such as Orson Scott Card’s A Planet Called Treason (1979) and Samuel R. Delany’s Triton (1976).
Santos’s remarkable activity as a translator constitutes an essential formal node within the process of Spanish sf’s maturation. It is a gate, predominantly unidirectional, that connects Anglo-American and Spanish sf. Through these translations, Santos provided the Spanish public with important foreign sf works in its own language. Translation constituted a first and determinant stage within the process of narrative transculturation since it gave Spanish readers access to sf from other nationalities; some of these readers would eventually form part of the Hispacón Generation of writers, who brought Spanish sf into full maturity from the 1990s onwards.
As well as his work as a translator, Domingo Santos also compiled several sf anthologies. Social and political restlessness over the uncertain future of humankind, two parameters that dominate his literary production (Behm 84), also determined his taste as an anthologist. This can be seen in Antología no euclidiana [Non-Euclidean Anthology, 1976], in which he included works such as Robert Silverberg’s “In Entropy’s Jaws” (1971) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973). Santos was determined to introduce a more pronounced socio-political perspective into the Spanish sf scene, one that would introduce anxieties that were highly popular on the international scene during those years, such as concerns about ecology.
Santos developed another ambition in his role as an anthologist: to promote the work of Spanish writers. He is indeed responsible for two of the most important anthologies in the history of Spanish sf. Primera antología de la ciencia ficción española [First Anthology of Spanish Science Fiction, 1966] is a perfect example. This compilation of eighteen stories provides a panorama of the genre’s first generation of Spanish sf authors beyond the bolsilibros realm. Some of them contributed just a few works to the field and others wrote sf only sporadically. But they can all be considered the main authors of this period: Santos himself, Juan G. Atienza, Alfonso Álvarez Villar, and Ángel Torres Quesada. In broad terms, almost all were sf pioneers who contributed to a highly heterogeneous and unique compilation of stories (Peregrina, El cuento español 244-45).
The second anthology is considered a cornerstone in the history of Spanish sf: Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción española [The Best of Spanish SF, 1982]. This book gives closure to an entire literary period by gathering together a selection of the best published stories of the 1970s. The anthology is, nevertheless, not exempt from controversy; some have criticized Santos for not including younger authors such as Rafael Marín or Juan Carlos Planells, who had already made their mark on the Spanish sf scene in the pages of Nueva Dimensión. This is why, as Julián Díez has observed, “the results are irregular, as it is to be expected in this type of book, though they are also very solid, considering that most of the authors selected were in no way related to the professional literary realm but were, like Santos himself, mere amateurs” (Las cien mejores 300).4
Santos as Editor. Following Mario J. Valdés’s approach, we must emphasize the role of publishing houses as a significant institutional and formal support for the burgeoning field of Spanish sf. Publication of sf in Spain has suffered from a “pendulating routine” (Saiz Cidoncha 504-07) throughout the years: successful series have been followed by market saturation and bargain bins. After several blooming periods, almost all the great series offered their stock at clearance prices at some point (see Moreno, Peregrina, and Bermúdez), giving many readers access to sf at a very low cost. The Spanish Golden Decade of sf in the 1990s is therefore partly explained by this publishing phenomenon, a key factor during the 1970s and 1980s.
The end of Francoism, the disappearance of censorship, and the opening of the market induced many publishers to issue new sf series.5 Some, led by passionate amateurs who knew American sf in depth, such as Santos himself, assumed the task of translating, with roughly one decade of delay, all the great titles that had shaped the genre during the 1970s. Thus, the great English-language novels written between 1965 and 1975, including early New Wave works, entered the Spanish market quite late, particularly because some of their themes—mainly those with sexual content—would have been forbidden by censorship. The case of the short story is just the opposite: many publishers took higher risks when publishing anthologies—Bruguera’s and Acervo’s are good examples—that gained considerable commercial success. Consequently, many short stories that had been awarded renowned prizes such as the Hugo reached the Spanish audience much earlier than the great novels by the same authors.
New and varied book series undoubtedly contributed to the maturing of Spanish sf because they provided readers with abundant new material that had been central to the development of American and British sf. Many of the Spanish Golden Decade writers were regular readers of such collections. The second phase of Nebulae, SuperFicción from Martínez Roca, and books from Acervo in the 1970s as well as the sf lines from the publishers Minotauro, Orbis, and Ultramar during the 1980s stand out among the sf books published during Spain’s transition to democracy. Significantly, out of these six publication venues Santos supervised or collaborated on four: Acervo, SuperFicción, Orbis, and Ultramar.
Nebulae was one of the most relevant series, particularly in its second phase under the direction of Francisco Porrúa. Along with the reissue of classics, he published contemporary authors such as George R.R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, Joe Haldeman, and John Varley and introduced many short- fiction collections to the Spanish market, including those by James Tiptree Jr., Robert Sheckley, R.A. Lafferty, Brian Aldiss, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The same process was repeated with Minotauro some years later, again under Porrúa’s management.6 He always showed great concern for both the work and the author, and he was always very careful in his selection criteria. Porrúa eventually covered a wide chronological range from the big names of 1950s sf, such as Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Olaf Stapledon, to more modern ones, such as J.G. Ballard and Le Guin in the 1970s and William Gibson in the 1980s.
After Porrúa’s Minotauro, Acervo’s influence is also worth mentioning. This publisher had already issued luxury, hard-cover short-story anthologies in the early 1970s that sold successfully, but in 1974 it decided to market a new series of novels “from New Wave classics to samples of the most revolting commercial fantasy, including new generation space-operas, indispensable titles and even weirdo French” (Díez, “Las colecciones de cf [VII]” 38). Santos’s collection in this series included many Hugo and Campbell award winners, as well as New Wave works.7 Representative titles include Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (1966), Herbert’s Dune (1965), John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron (1969), and Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head (1969).
This list reflects Santos’s aspiration to reshape the taste of Spanish readers to carry the genre into maturity. With such aims and drawing on classics of New Wave sf, he tried to publicize those works that had remodelled sf stylistically and thematically in the 1970s (Latham 214-15), inviting Spanish readers to face new concerns (including sexuality). He also promoted some Spanish authors from these years, such as Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo (Casa and García Bilbao 378), whose novel Viaje a un planeta Wu-Wei [Journey to a Wu-Wei Planet, 1976] was included in Santos’s Acervo collection.
Santos’s contribution was more limited in the case of SuperFicción, also managed by Eduardo Salas, Eduardo Goligorsky, and Alejo Cuervo. SuperFicción survived for two main reasons: it was very inexpensive and it showed a very personal style. This series specialized in reediting classics, and presenting new authors and anthologies (Díez, “Las colecciones de cf (VI),” 41). The latter are probably the most significant type of publication in this series, including Lo mejor de Stanley Weinbaum [The Best of Stanley Weinbaum, 1977]. The promotion of Spanish authors was rare, with only one experimental novel included: Joan Trigo’s Desierto de niebla y cenizas [Desert of Fog and Ashes, 1978]. It is worth mentioning, however, that Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción española was published in the SuperFicción series.
Ultramar, directed by Emili Teixidor with counsel from Domingo Santos, Luis Vigil, and Juan Carlos Planells, is a clear example of longevity and publishing that offered good value for the money, marking an era in Spanish sf. The Ultramar books were characterized by their budget price and by the eclectic selection of works that ranged from new authors such as Octavia Butler to classics by Heinlein and Clarke. They also published highly regarded novels such as Delany’s Babel 17 (1966), Mundos en el abismo [Worlds in the Abyss, 1988] by Juan Miguel Aguilera and Javier Redal, and Rafael Marín’s collection Unicornios sin cabeza [Headless Unicorns, 1987].
Finally, the Colección de Ciencia Ficción series published by Orbis, that reached a hundred volumes, was conceived as a reprinting of different titles that had appeared in some of the already-mentioned series. Domingo Santos was in charge and he tried hard to select the most remarkable works from the collections with which he had been involved, such as Acervo or SuperFicción. This was an important effort to make some of the most prominent sf accessible to the public, from classics such as Isaac Asimov to more modern writers such as Roger Zelazny, including key anthologies such as Dangerous Visions (1967), edited by Harlan Ellison. Santos also made room in this Orbis series for some of the most outstanding Spanish authors of the time, including Rafael Marín and Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo. And he also reissued his own anthology Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción española.
Santos in Nueva Dimensión. Within Santos’s editorial activity, his work for Nueva Dimensión stands out. This publication is the longest running Spanish sf and fantasy magazine to date. Published between 1968 and 1983, it reached a total of 148 issues and 12 special issues and was also awarded two international prizes in 1972.8 The magazine was the result of the collaboration of three fans: Sebastián Martínez, Luis Vigil, and Santos. The last two had previous editorial experience with the magazine Anticipación [Anticipation] published by Ferma, which printed only seven issues, among which the last one, a diachronic vision of Spanish sf, is noteworthy. Anticipación failed due to its problems with censorship (the 1966 “Ley de Prensa e Imprenta” or “Press and Print Law”) and because of the ideological disagreements between the editors and the publishing house Ferma (Peregrina, El cuento español, 257-89).
For the new independent project of Nueva Dimensión, the aims previously outlined in Anticipación were maintained: a) to publish mainly short stories; b) to make unpublished material accessible to the Spanish readership; c) to strengthen the number of Spanish authors; d) to aim for an international scope; e) to publish articles and essays about the genre itself; and f) to include a news section informing the fans about new international sf and film as well as any related public events. There was also a correspondence section that fostered contact among the readers and fan communication, something commonly found in English-language sf magazines.
The number of stories published in Nueva Dimensión throughout its almost thirteen years is indeed impressive. Its long-lasting, popularizing task, together with the efforts of the publishers mentioned above that specialized in short- story collections, significantly improved the visibility of sf in Spain. Nueva Dimensión popularized many important sf authors and stories, even as the quality of the selections varied widely from issue to issue. Personal as well as socio-political circumstances surrounding the editors and the magazine itself influenced the publishing process, eventually leading Luis Vigil and Sebastián Martínez to abandon the project in 1978, leaving Santos as sole director. He then gave the magazine its greatest, and last, period of splendor.
As a rule, the magazine always showed a rather conservative streak in its concern to satisfy the varied tastes of the limited readership that kept it running. Therefore, it rarely took the risk of publishing more cutting-edge stories, unless they were accompanied by more traditional ones with linear and standardized narratives that suited popular taste. Its list of most frequently published authors demonstrates this trend: Asimov, Clarke, A.E. Van Vogt, Fred Hoyle, Eric Frank Russell, and Robert Sheckley. Exceptions might be noted in the cases of Ellison and Dick, two writers who were more innovative but nevertheless pleased Santos, Vigil, and Martínez.
This conservative tendency came not only from the public’s demands, but also from other political and economic complications. The political problems are a direct consequence of two historical developments fundamental in Spain during those years (Peregrina, El cuento español 305-06). The first is the widespread repression enforced by the Francoist regime; the second is the powerful control of the censors with whom the magazine often clashed. A stark example of this was the seizure of issue 14 of Nueva Dimensión because of the Basque-titled story “Gu ta Gutarrak” [We and Ours, 1970] by Argentinean author Magdalena Mouján Otaño.9 This parody of the origins of the Basque people, which the authorities found dangerously separatist, was eventually replaced by a Johnny Hart comic strip. Abusing the trust of the authors, the magazine often invoked censorship as an excuse to deprive them of their royalties. Some authors, including Ellison, sold their work at insignificant prices; others, like Silverberg, even gave it away.
Nueva Dimensión lingered on in this first period until shortly after Franco’s death in November 1975. In its second period, the magazine overlapped with the Spanish transition to democracy that finally allowed citizens to express themselves freely, bringing also a new freedom for the press. This allowed the editors of Nueva Dimensión to widen the range of themes—especially sexual and political—fulfilling their longstanding goal of breaking with the moral taboos imposed by the previous regime. A sign of this shift in the political situation was Santos’s decision finally to publish Mouján Otaño’s tale in 1979, thereby redressing the affront to the writer caused by the Francoist censors.
Economic problems also made the editorial line of Nueva Dimensión more conservative. In Santos’s own words, Nueva Dimensión “was never a business nor was it ever meant to be one: it was the expression of the desires of a group of people—not only of the three in charge, but of an entire galaxy of collaborators—to publicize and spread sf in Spain” (“Nueva Dimensión,” 424-25). The magazine found itself in the red on several occasions, and it had to confront other difficulties: the ban on imports due to the different coups d’état in Latin America during the early 1970s that reduced their sales drastically; the scam perpetrated by the distributing company Disedit in 1977 that almost forced the magazine to file for bankruptcy; the transformation of the publishing market as a consequence of the 1973 Oil Crisis; the increase in the cost of paper; and the rise of royalty prices in the US during the 1970s.
Despite all this, Nueva Dimensión represented a real renewal of the sf scene in Spain. First, it offered the Spanish reader material that had never before been translated or published in that country. Nueva Dimensión became the integrating center of the mutual communication process that created a more vibrant Spanish sf fandom. It was the germ of the first Hispacón (the Spanish sf convention). And it published many of the stories written by veteran Spanish authors—Santos himself, the aforementioned Juan G. Atienza and Alfonso Álvarez Villar, and José Luis Garci—as well as younger authors such as Rafael Marín, Javier Redal, Juan Carlos Planells, and Elia Barceló (Peregrina, El cuento español 556).10
As Santos boasted, “Most of the Spanish authors that today have a name in Spanish sf—except for the newly arrived, of course—cut their teeth in the pages of Nueva Dimensión” (“Nueva Dimensión” 422). Nueva Dimensión was, therefore, the fundamental referent for both readers and writers in the 1980s and 1990s. Within the field of Spanish sf—where readers, authors, critics, gatherings, publications, and specialized editorials developed autonomously, lacking any connection to the general stream of literature—Nueva Dimensión was an institutional node of immense relevance.
Santos as Author. Santos is also a renowned author of Spanish sf, a task he combined with his intense editorial activity.11 He is a self-taught writer who started his career at the age of sixteen, producing novels for the different series of bolsilibros under diverse pennames, including Peter Danger. In these works, he used hackneyed themes from different genres, including the western, crime fiction, and especially sf, all of which enabled him to acquire a fluid and agile writing style. Allegedly, a publishing house once returned a manuscript to Santos complaining that its quality was too high for the standards of their type of publication.
Santos eventually matured as a man of letters into one of the most successful authors of the first generation and published his works in collections and relevant series of the time, including the Nebulae line. This period of his career is characterized by a very intense, prolific literary production, comprising a dozen novels and almost seventy short stories. Much of this work was published during the 1970s, because Santos, burdened by his various publishing and editorial responsibilities, later pushed writing into the background. Although he attempted to return to writing with commendable efforts such as Hacedor de mundos [World Maker, 1986], these ultimately proved that his literary production was becoming more and more sporadic. Despite this diminished production, Santos continues to write to this day, although less prolifically, as evidenced by his novel El día del dragón [The Day of the Dragon, 2008], his participation in the anthology Empaquetados [Packaged, 2014], and the three novelettes that make up Bajo soles alienígenas [Under Alien Suns, 2013].
In the words of Fernando Ángel Moreno, Domingo Santos took “a first step from sf into prospective [his preferred term over speculative] fiction at a time when popular series were still the reference” (Teoría, 415). While his novels give the impression of offering nothing but drawn-out plots, flat characters, a linear narrative, and scarce stylistic concern, it is in his short stories where the best of Santos is to be found and where his great knowledge of American literature can best be appreciated. For this reason, apart from some odd successes such as Gabriel (1962)—a currently outdated novel that deals with the humanization process undergone by a robot—we need to step back and marvel at his work as a short-story writer.12
Most of Santos’s short stories appeared during the 1970s and 1980s, either in compilations such as Meteoritos [Meteorites, 1965] and Burbuja [Bubble, 1965], in anthologies of various authors such as Primera antología de la ciencia ficción española [First Anthology of Spanish Science Fiction, 1967] and in Nueva Dimensión, which in 1970 devoted an entire issue to his work. In these tales, as Miquel Barceló explains, “Santos tends always to speak about humankind, its possible future—mostly pessimist and dark—and he does so by using a patriarchal and admonitory tone as a warning of the many absurdities that we are perpetrating as a species” (312). It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the most common reflections in his stories are framed by ecological and political anxieties.
It was precisely these two concerns that dominated Santos’s most famous collection of short stories, Futuro Imperfecto [Imperfect Future, 1981]. This is a volume composed of eight tales that had already appeared years before, between 1967 and 1980, in several publications, mainly in Nueva Dimensión. The texts here are preceded by a “Historian’s Prologue,” a fictional resource that aims to provide the stories with real value as historical documents, analyzed in the hypothetical future from which the historian writes. All the stories obey dystopian directives: they describe future societies that are worse than the author’s contemporary one (Sargent 9).13 In them, an ordinary individual placed in this catastrophic society and alienated by the system becomes a victim. From the circumstances that alter his ordinary life in this context, the character acquires a critical consciousness that, depending on the story, may result in mere acceptance (“Señor, su cuenta no existe” [Sir, Your Account Has Been Cancelled, 1980]), adaptation (“Smog,” 1973), or opposition with a bad ending (“Una fábula” [A Fable; 1981]).
These texts portray a negative vision of humanity in which the individual invariably ends up subdued by the social organism, making them “anti-utopias,” as Tom Moylan has defined them (148-50). As is the rule in these ill-fated dystopias, the contradictions encountered in present society not only prevent finding a solution in the future but also, when intensified, produce a catastrophe for all of humankind (Ferreras 120). This negativity constitutes a recurrent feature in the work of many sf writers of the Francoist period, who focused their efforts on portraying dehumanizing societies (Saiz Cidoncha 343). Spanish authors proved incapable of building an imaginary space to oppose the regime through writing. Consequently, the critical and subversive power of dystopia was eventually set aside in favor of the dominant discourses, both those imposed by the Francoist authorities and those promoted by the opposition in exile (Peregrina, “La ciencia ficción distópica,” 217-19).
One of Santos’s more recent tales, “Una fábula,” whose political content is blatant, is a good example of the development of this dystopian narrative. This story had previously appeared in issue 11 of Nueva Dimensión under the title “Un lugar llamado Tierra” [A Place Called Earth, 1969], although for its inclusion in Futuro Imperfecto Santos revised it slightly. Here the author apparently opts for a utopia; however, as the narration moves forward the reader begins to perceive that this future society is not as perfect as it originally seemed. As Yolanda Molina-Gavilán notes:
This new society condemns its inhabitants to the alienating and absurd work of a communist future that is based on consumerist pragmatism. The world problems that provoke its rise are three tendencies in present society that Santos exaggerates: overpopulation, progressive automatization, and the inefficiency of the ruling bodies to respond to such problems. The ideology displayed in this story is mainly “anti-progressive” for its depiction of an idyllic rural world and a “de-personalizing” and devastating urban one. (158)
Through the main character, the last outcast and an anachronistic symbol of a forgotten past, the author highlights what citizens have given up to gain stability and secure welfare: humankind is now reduced to automatism. The ending reflects this anti-utopian tendency: the marginal subject ends up becoming part of that future society and any possible dissidence will die with him. As Juan Ignacio Ferreras has noted, “[a]t this catastrophic level, what can the failure of a single individual matter? All of mankind fails” (126). The other great concern in the book is ecology. From this perspective, Santos presents the reader with the devastating consequences of human activity for the environment and suggests with it a parallel ethical reflection on the same issue in political terms, an example of what Patrick D. Murphy calls “ecological writing.”
Santos’s tales, therefore, function as warnings to reader so that these tragic visions do not become reality. A good example is “Smog.” This story depicts an average day in the life of an environmental department worker named Mr. Simon. The setting describes a world so polluted that people cannot survive outdoors without masks to purify the air. “Encima de las nubes” [Above the Clouds, 1973] combines both political and ecological themes. The main plotline narrates a meeting of the Baller company, which intends to launch the new fuel, “iztiol,” whose processing releases huge amounts of contaminating waste. Santos presents the environmental issue from the perspective of ruthless businessmen who only care about the company’s profit. The secondary plotline features Mr. Álvarez, a middle-class worker with the urge to excel socially. His career rise is accompanied by his rise to the platforms orbiting the stratosphere, where the powerful live above the polluted planet.
out for their stylistic and/or thematic modernity: “…Y si mañana hemos de morir” […And If We Must Die Tomorrow, 1969] and “Extraño” [Stranger, 1967]. “…Y si mañana” first appeared in Nueva Dimensión, but Santos made some changes to include it in Futuro Imperfecto, enhancing its sexual content (hetero- and homosexual licentiousness, orgies, onanism, etc.) and also adding drug use to the story. Santos was conscious of the social changes occurring at that time in Spain and aimed to update his texts so that they were closer to the new themes in mainstream sf (echoing Ballard’s Crash [1973], published in Spain by Minotauro in 1979). In “…Y Si Mañana” alienated youths are relegated by the system to some geographically isolated “Sessions” where they can indulge in a hedonistic search for pleasure—sex, drugs, and alcohol are the only means of escape from an oppressive reality (Peregrina, El cuento español 865). We are thus presented with young people who are trapped in a gray, meaningless world and who never really question the system: a very clear analogy to the Francoist period in Spain. The tale is also related to the Cold War and the constant menace of nuclear holocaust, at the same time explaining young people’s propensity to live in the present in a continual effort to carpe diem. Love and sex are nevertheless mixed with death in the story. Thanatos is eroticized: it can be seen in a poster that shows a couple making love with a mushroom cloud behind them. The only real way out for these youngsters is suicide, the tragic ending of the story.
The other short story that reflects Santos’s attempt to adapt himself to the new trends in sf is “Extraño,” a “rather obscure parable on the consequences of education” (Barceló 307). Inspired by Richard Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman” (1950), this tale narrates the story of a mutant child who reacts against the world with the same virulence it shows to him for being different. Reading about a child shamelessly depicted as deformed is shockingly unpleasant, but the style in which the story is told is novel. Two narrative voices alternate: one, a traditional heterodiegetic voice; the other, the singular homodiegetic voice of the monster, displaying his stream of consciousness with scarce punctuation. This attempt to adapt mainstream narrative techniques to sf, as other New Wave writers did—something not present in Matheson’s text—is one of the most innovative features in Futuro Imperfecto. As opposed to the experimental form in “…Y Si Mañana,” in “Extraño” Santos’s style reveals his origins in the bolsilibros background. Here he follows a traditional narrative mode with zero focalization and an exaggerated use of the free indirect style. Santos’s writing is quite fast-paced; ironically, given his task as editor, he is not particularly careful in his text editing, as can be seen in his noun and adjective repetition, triteness, abuse of comparative clauses, and multiple enumerations.
This traditionalism is also revealed in other features of his stories. Despite the political and environmental themes, the stories often reveal Santos’s conservative and sexist mentality. This is easily noted in the way he depicts female characters mostly doing housework and bearing children, as is the case for Mr. Simon’s wife in “Smog,” or completely subdued to the patriarchal system, such as Ana in “…Y si mañana hemos de morir.” In this sense, Santos proves ultimately to be incapable of comprehending the social changes taking place in Spain during the 1960s when he depicted family models that were closer to the 1950s. Although he tried to adapt to the new times, he could only partially succeed.
Conclusion. Domingo Santos in all his facets—as translator, anthologist, editor, director of Nueva Dimensión, and writer—successfully promoted sf among Spanish readers. Within the history of Spanish sf, the period ranging from the bolsilibro’s decadence in the late 1960s through the late Golden Decade of the 1990s cannot be understood without this singular figure. In the many years he dedicated to promoting the genre, Santos introduced themes that were completely new to the Spanish scene such as ecology and politics, even as his conservative ideology and traditional writing style were not so progressive. Although it was thanks to him that sf in Spain moved beyond the unprofessional and prefabricated formulae of the bolsilibros, his greatest accomplishment was inspiring the rise of the Hispacón Generation writers that made up the Golden Decade. These are the reasons why Domingo Santos is considered to be the dean of Spanish sf and the most important promoter of the best period for the genre in Spain.