Barbarians, telescreens, and jazz:

reactionary uchronias in Modern Spain, c. 1870-1960 1

1. Introduction

This article is a preliminary exploration of a large and relatively unknown sample of

reactionary uchronias works of fiction that imagine future revolutionary societies in
dystopian terms 2 published in Spain between the 1870s and the 1950s. Gregory Claeys
has found the origins of this distinctively modern literary subgenre which, as we will
see, overlaps with many other genres in what he calls the second dystopian turn of
the late nineteenth century, born as a reaction against the promises of science and
socialism. 3 However, French historians have described the emergence in France in the
mid-nineteenth century of an anti-utopian genre that anticipates the classic novels
written by Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell in the first half of the twentieth century. 4
mile Souvestres novel Le Monde tel quil sera (1846), the story of a young couples
time-travel to a mechanical and utilitarian Republic of United Interests set in the year
3000, stands as a likely forerunner of a genre that would flourish decades later as a
reaction to socialist utopias such as Edward Bellamys Looking Backward (1888).
Similarly, Matthew Beaumont has argued that British cacotopian literature was born
out the fear of contagion aroused by the Paris Commune of 1871 among the British
bourgeoisie. 5 In Spain, works of this kind also appeared in the 1870s, coinciding, as we
shall see, with the impact of the Commune and the First International in the country.
Anti-revolutionary uchronias are seldom mentioned in histories of utopian literature;
with few exceptions, historians have either neglected them or emphasized their poor
artistic quality. 6 Spanish specialists such as Jos-Carlos Mainer and Jos Luis Calvo
Carilla have also stressed the poor quality and vulgar didacticism of Spanish scientific
fantasy in the period under study. 7 Contrary to these views, I intend to argue that these
works not only provide a precious insight into the mentality of a large section of
Spanish society in the transition to modernity, but also illuminate the formative process
of the modern dystopia. Just as socialism (in a broad sense) was the main source of
utopian thought between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, antisocialism (in the same broad sense) was the foremost inspiration of the anti-utopian
imagination in the same period. 8 The case of Spain is interesting due to the abundance
and variety of such works, long after the turn of the century, and the evidence of cultural

transfer both into and less often from Spain. As Geraldine Lawless has pointed out,
Spanish authors did not merely imitate their European neighbors, they created
original works, visualizing the future in genuinely significant and innovative ways. 9
The analysis is based on a sample of some 40 works written between the 1870s and
the 1950s, but for the most part between the 1890s and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil
War in 1936. This chronology corresponds to the heyday of revolutionary ideologies
and hence to that of revolutionary utopian literature in Spain: anarchist uchronias such
as Ricardo Mellas Nueva utopa (New utopia, 1889) and Alfonso Martnez Rizos
1945: el advenimiento del comunismo libertario (The coming of libertarian
communism, 1932) envisioned future libertarian societies in all realms, from
agriculture to sex life. 10 But the rise of anti-utopianism also coincided with profound
changes in Spanish society: the spread of industrialization, urbanization and modernity,
and a Silver Age of culture marked by the spread of progressive ideas about class,
religion and gender. The uchronias studied here can only be understood in the context of
the passionate and often bitter debates raised by these transformations.

2. The politics of the future

Spanish uchronias invite the politico-ideological reading they often receive for
various reasons. The most obvious is their political subject matter: they focused on the
actors, movements and ideas that dominated the politics of their age, both in Spain and
abroad, and reflected albeit in a biased way the course of Spanish politics during this
long period. Some had real-life characters and adopted the form of a fictional if
satirical political chronicle. This is the case of the failed Republic imagined by Po
Baroja in 1903, whose ending emphasized the plausibility of the events described, and
also of the Republic imagined by Domingo Ciric and Jos Arrufat in their political
fantasy La Repblica espaola del ao 19 (The Spanish Republic of the year 19,
1911), whose protagonists were well-known contemporary left-wing leaders such as
Alejandro Lerroux, Pablo Iglesias and Benito Prez Galds. 11 In other texts, the
characters were fictitious but belonged to existing political movements; indeed, these
actors and the revolutionary menace they implied changed according to the actual
evolution of the Spanish workers movement. Both Baroja and Ciric-Arrufat drew on
the memory of the First Republic of 1873 that prevailed during the Bourbon Restoration
(1875-1923), that has been summarized as disorder, separatism, atheism, lack of
2

authority, utopia, coarseness, socialism. 12 Salvio Valents Del xodo al paraso

(From exodus to paradise, 1933), in contrast, fed on the archetype of the syndicalist
the amoral if skillful anarchist agitator, an enemy of society and capable of the worst
crimes that provoked an intense red scare in the years following the Russian
Revolution. 13 In the interwar period, all these images merged into that of the
communist, a worldwide conspirator that combined the features of the new barbarian
with Asian stereotypes. 14 Ramn Prez de Ayalas La revolucin sentimental (The
sentimental revolution, 1929), a re-edition of his Sentimental Club (1909), renamed the
democratic World State of the first version as the Universal Communist Republic. 15
Through these stereotypes borrowed from contemporary social discourse,
uchronias transmitted an explicit counter-revolutionary message. As the Spanish liberal
and conservative press had done since the 1840s, they emphasized the identification of
socialism, communism and anarchism, their utopian (chimerical) character and the
mortal threat they posed to Spanish society. 16 This standard imagery imported from
France had already been expressed in 1856 by Joan Ma y Flaquer, a liberal and
Catholic journalist, in his preface to the first Spanish edition of Alfred Sudres Histoire
du communisme (1848). 17 The authors description of socialists as new vandals,
bearers of a French idea, destroyer of the familiar and social bonds, contrary to the
eternal principles of religion and morality, reflects an imagery of revolution as an antisocial force, the exact opposite of all civilized values, that would persist with few
changes until the Civil War, just as his explanation of the social ills as a result of the
fall of the first man, a fault of our nature which could only be remedied by the
resignation of the poor and the charity of the wealthy.
In short, Spanish uchronias appear as literary expressions of the rhetoric of
reaction that, according to Albert Hirschman, has condemned projects for social
change, from the French Revolution to the present, on account of their perversity,
futility and jeopardy. 18 Indeed most of them criticized revolutionary ideas either for
their impossibility, or for the disastrous consequences that may follow from their
realization, or for both reasons. Anti-utopians agreed on interpreting revolutions as
bloody farces, moments of anarchy and terror where power simply changed hands
from the traditional elites to ambitious and hypocritical demagogues who were ready to
betray their ideals as soon as they got power. 19
These topoi were most often associated with the defense of the status quo
private property, social hierarchies and traditional moral values, even if in Spain, as
3

elsewhere, reaction was a broad, plural and often contradictory field. 20 The anti-utopian
camp was composed for the most part of conservative authors, such as the ex-prime
minister Juan Bravo Murillo, Ricardo Len and Agustn de Fox, but it also included
liberals such as Nilo Mara Fabra and Ramn Prez de Ayala and even moderate
Republicans such as the ex prime minister Emilio Castelar, the author of the preface of
the second edition of Fabras El problema social (The social problem, 1892). 21 The
protagonist of Lens Bajo el yugo de los brbaros (Under the yoke of barbarians,
1932) praised such fathers of Spanish traditionalism as Juan Donoso Corts, Marcelino
Menndez Pelayo and Jaime Balmes and stood for the deep, Catholic and perennial
Spain. 22 Fabra, instead, endorsed a liberal and progressive utopia as the key to the
regeneration of Spain: in a short story published in 1885 he defended individual
freedom and the entrepreneurial spirit, inexhaustible sources of wealth and progress. 23
Other texts advocated a middle way between capitalism and socialism, along the lines
of Catholic social doctrine since Leo XIIIs encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). In
Carmen San Sebastins pastoral utopia Tiempos nuevos (New Times, 1933), a
patriarchal family of landholders dissuaded peasants from revolution through welfare
measures such as a School of Agriculture, an agricultural lending bank and a Chair of
Love and Ethics, and established a new communism sanctified by religion. 24
With few exceptions, however, Spanish anti-utopians agreed on blaming
revolutionary ideas on the larger changes brought by modernity. Along with political
radicalism, they condemned materialism, utilitarianism, science, technology and
industry as opposed to human nature, in line with British and French anti-utopias (and
many utopias) since the late nineteenth century. 25 In the words of Manuel Prez
Ledesma, they expressed a moral or cultural fear and considered workers as a threat
for the established moral and social rules, and not only nor mainly for political
structures. 26 Revolutions attacked the foundations of society and civilization, property
and the family, and hence resulted in moral corruption. Cacotopian societies were
pantheist, such as that of Ayalas Sentimental Club, or completely irreligious, such as
that of Luis Antn del Olmets La verdad en la ilusin (Truth in illusion, 1913),
where sexual relations were completely rationalized and reproduction controlled
through eugenic techniques. 27 In Miguel ngel Calvo Rosellos short story Un pas
extrao (A strange country, 1919), the State of the Free Country eliminated weak
and handicapped people and both the family and love had been abandoned. 28
Revolution and modern popular culture became synonymous in Pascual Santacruzs Los
4

desengaos de un comunista (A communists disillusions, 1925), where young

barbarians danced to the deafening tune of a jazz-band, the music of the savages of
modern civilization. 29 The protagonist of Lens Bajo el yugo de los brbaros also
condemned jazz, free love, nudism, eugenics, euthanasia, sterilization, abortion, social
sciences, physical education, coeducation and, more generally, the corruption of
workers by those decadent and infertile metropolis, hostile to God, enemies of
Nature in which today civilization rots and dissolves in barbaric materialism. 30
Another typical target of this literature was the subversion of traditional gender
roles, a subject of intense social controversy in interwar Spain. 31 The idea of a
matriarchal society was indeed the central topic of the best Spanish fantastic novels of
the interwar period: Vicente Blasco Ibezs El paraso de las mujeres (The paradise
of women, 1922), Luis Araquistins El archipilago maravilloso (The wonderful
archipelago, 1923) and Salvador de Madariagas La jirafa sagrada (The sacred
giraffe, 1925). All three were written in the British satirical tradition, while drawing on
topoi already used by Aristophanes, and, even if they did not condemn feminism as
such the three authors were progressive Republicans, they do invite an anti-utopian
reading. In Blascos novel, written for Hollywood and translated into six languages, the
women of Lilliput had seized power after a great revolution and established a feminist
United States of Happiness, reducing men to serfdom as members of an inferior
caste. 32 The topic plays a less prominent but nonetheless important role in some
reactionary uchronias. The decadent Eloi society of Carlos Mendizbals Elois y
Morlocks (Elois and Morlocks, 1909) was strictly matriarchal, and the social mobility
of men depended on their sexual prowess in cities of pleasure. 33 In Lens
Proletarian Iberian Republic, as well as in Valents Ardiaka, men had become
effeminate and women adopted a masculine and uninhibited sexual behavior. 34 As has
been observed with regard to Toms Borrs modernist short novel El poder del
pensamiento (The power of thought, 1928), in Spanish interwar literature liberated
women were often the archetypal threat to traditional moral values. 35
Thus, the controversy against revolution often ended up in a wholesale attack on
modernity itself. This is evident in Prez de Ayalas Sentimental Club (1909), where a
group of dissenters agreed to overthrow a mechanical and collectivist society under the
banner of a sentimental revolution; and in Miguel de Unamunos short story
Mecanpolis (Mechanopolis, 1913), which was explicitly inspired by Samuel
Butlers Erewhon (1872) and described the anguish of the protagonist upon his arrival
5

to a completely automatized and dehumanized society. 36 The predominant mood was a

stark refusal of modernity and mechanism and a longing for a pre-industrial, bucolic
and traditionalist counter-utopia. 37 The Nationalist-Catholic reaction of the 1930s was
based on nostalgia for the lost Empire: Leons protagonist recalled the golden centuries
in which God lived on this land; when the Spanish ships stirred in these seas, waving
the banners of the Cross, those of the kings of Castile and Aragon 38 However, this
fantasy coexisted with the dread, expressed by Agustn de Fox in 1935, of the waning
of an aristocratic and romantic epoch represented by the liberal, romantic and
individualist cicada, the deer, the swan, the butterfly with her low-cut nightgown, the
nightingale singing opera on a branch... 39 This sinister prophecy had been fulfilled
by 1952, when Fox compared capitalism and socialism as different paths to a
mechanical, collectivist and inhuman modernity. Cinema, radio, soccer, propaganda,
blocks of flats, public parks and American standardized clothes announced that The
State will soon be our God. We are already measured and weighted by it, with no
possible escape. 40
However, these expressions of romantic cultural despair were often intended as a
spur to action. The first Spanish cacotopias, like their British counterparts, had an
explicit propagandist goal, aimed either at warning the working classes against the
pernicious influence of revolutionary doctrines such as the anonymous pamphlet
Historia de Andresillo el comunismo visto por dentro (Story of Andresillo or
communism from within, 1872), that ended exhorting its reader to calm down your
spirit, upset by so much preaching and endear yourself with your good behavior to
those rich people that you so unjustly hate... 41; or at persuading the bourgeoisie of the
need for defense against the common class enemy (Bravo Murillos La Internacional
y las espaolas explicitly called on Spanish women to take an active part in the
crusade that had been launched on behalf of social order and against the ideas of the
Workers International. 42 The same intention may be found in later works such as the
Spanish translation of Richters Pictures of the Socialistic Future, edited by the liberal
politician Conde de San Bernardo and freely distributed in working-class centers in
1896. 43 Uchronias worked as a pre-emptive response to an eventual revolutionary
threat, a self-defeating yet wholly rational jeremiad.

44

In the same way as the

prophets of the Old Testament, their authors presented the picture of hell on Earth in
order to persuade sinners to mend their ways before it was too late. 45 The Nationalist
movement that destroyed the Second Republic in 1936-1939 was, among other things,
6

the political expression of the anti-utopians Kulturkampf against revolution and

modernity.

3. The poetics of social nightmares

Despite their political and moral intent, these texts were conceived as fiction, most
often as novels or short stories; Prez de Ayalas Sentimental Club and Foxs Otoo de
3006 (Autumn of 3006, 1954) were the only dramas. 46 Both Sentimental Club and its
remake La revolucin sentimental were first issued in cheap pulp fiction collections,
which in Spain enjoyed massive commercial success while maintaining a high average
quality. 47 Literary elaboration was often, as we have seen, a pretext for the presentation
of arguments in a didactic and propagandistic manner. However, as the genre developed
and the influence of foreign fantastic literature spread in Spain since the turn of the
century, authors started to produce complex and ingenious plots which effectively
conveyed their messages. The influence of H.G. Wellss scientific romances is
especially evident in the works of the British-educated Prez de Ayala and in Carlos
Mendizbals Elois y Morlocks (1909), a sequel to The Time Machine that reunited the
bourgeois Eloi and the proletarian Morlocks into a hybrid race, the Moreloi, who
restored social peace under the banner of religion. 48
As uchronias, the modern version of the utopia, these works belong to the futuristic
genre that in nineteenth century Spain produced original works such as Antonio Flores
Ayer, hoy y maana (Yesterday, today and tomorrow, 1863) and Enrique Gaspars El
anacronpete (The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey, 1887). 49 Most were set in
an uncertain future era but some gave specific dates, ranging from 1908 (Baroja) to
802.701 (Mendizbal, imitating Wells). The most common time-travel mechanism was
the dream (more often, the nightmare), a classic resource of uchronias that was used in
the works of Bravo Murillo, Fabra, Olmet and Len. 50 Dreams helped to enhance
suspense by beginning in medias res and creating a fantastic atmosphere: the
protagonist of Bajo el yugo de los brbaros travelled around a proletarian Spain on a
strange and crepuscular day that may be just as well at the dawn than at the dying
moments of the world. 51 A slight variation was the loss of consciousness due to an
accident, as in Calvo Rosells Un pas extrao, or to a Frankenstein-like scientific
experiment, as in Valents Del xodo al paraso, that began at the initial moment of a

great revolution and moved forward to the moment when the protagonist awoke after
sleeping for twenty years. 52
Topographies tended to be more conventional, most stories taking place in local
settings Spain, and most often Madrid, even if these were often presented as
representative of global processes. Del xodo al paraso took place in an unknown
industrial city (Drena) resembling Barcelona, stronghold of Spanish anarchosyndicalism in the early twentieth century. Inversely, the rural north served as a pastoral
utopia in San Sebastians Tiempos nuevos (1933), set in a delightful island resembling
an autonomous region lost on the confines of a powerful State. 53 The colony of
deported anarchists in Fabras La locura del anarquismo (1895) was set in the
Caroline Islands (a Spanish colony at the time), whereas Julio Bravos novel El tratado
de Heligoland (The treaty of Heligoland, 1924) took place in an imaginary desert
island in the North Sea. 54 Nicolas Tassins La catstrofe (The catastrophe, 1924) was
set in Paris, although the action affected the whole world. 55 The plot of Enrique Snchez
Rubios Los ltimos captulos de la historia (The last chapters of History, 1930) was
centered on biblical Palestine. 56 However, Spain played a leading role in most stories: it
was the capital of Catholic counter-revolution in Los ltimos captulos de la historia,
whereas in Bajo el yugo de los brbaros it symbolized along with Rome the eternal
values of the spirit. 57 Few authors dared to imagine completely abstract settings, as did
Prez de Ayala in Sentimental Club. 58
Most works in the sample fit into the dystopian form described by Tom
Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini, built around the construction of a narrative of the
hegemonic order and a counter-narrative of resistance that exemplifies the moral of the
story and captures the readers attention. 59 Revolutionary societies adopted two
different albeit related forms. Early cacotopian regimes were typically anarchic and
violent, ruling by coercion rather than by consent. After the turn of the century,
however, they became increasingly orderly, technocratic and totalitarian, controlling the
private life and the thoughts of its citizens. The Earth described in Sentimental Club was
ruled by an impersonal Directory that practiced constant propaganda and had erased
books, music and all memories of the past; citizens had numbers instead of names, they
all dressed in identical grey clothes and adored a Great fetish. 60 Similarly, La verdad
en la ilusin described a grey, uniform, pigeonholed crowd devoid of heart, of
passions, of sex. 61 The communist Ruling council of Un pas extrao monitored its
citizens through telephonoscopes and indoctrinated them as constantly as Oceanias
8

leaders in Orwells 1984. The gradual replacement of the barbarian with the totalitarian
paradigm reflects an evolution in the concept of revolution towards the Fordist World
State of Brave new world (1932).
Behind these changes in content descriptions of collectivist societies reflect
continuity in the use of some basic metaphors, such as the colour grey and an animal
imagery reminiscent of classic science-fiction. Len dehumanized his new barbarians
by comparing them to ants nests and swarms 62. Fox used the descriptions of the
life of termites made by Maurice Maeterlinck as a metaphor of collectivism and modern
civilization as a whole in various texts written between 1935 and 1958, and concluded:
The antennae were the only things that kept us from physically resembling insects.
Thanks to radio and TV, now we have got them. 63 His brother Jaime de Fox carried
the trope even further in his novel Marea verde (Green tide, 1951), by imagining the
discovery of a chlorophyll-like substance that allowed men to feed only on sunlight
the most complete of communisms and turned them into vegetables, deprived of
energy, will and passions. 64
Like British contemporary cacotopias and later science fiction, many texts
emphasize the protagonists estrangement in the face of revolution. 65 The female
protagonist of La Internacional y las espaolas described the triumph of the Workers
International in Madrid as a radical transformation of social reality: everything was
new, subject to new laws or new regulations, new uses and a new way of being. 66 The
revolutionary cities that appear in this and other uchronias correspond to the
contemporary image of Barcelona as a bourgeois dystopia a city besieged by an
army of proletarian barbarians. 67 As a realization of George Sorels myth of the
general strike, shops and churches were closed, trade interrupted, the overall rhythm of
life disjointed and paralysed. The metamorphosis of physical reality was stressed by the
erasing of history and a new temporality: the protagonist of Del xodo al paraso found
himself in a completely transformed city, divided in sectors with revolutionary names,
and where flags and posters exhibited the leaders of the revolution and proclaimed the
Year XIX of the Libertarian Revolution. 68 In Marea verde, the distribution of
chlorophyll to the people of Madrid resulted in the radical transformation of the city;
the protagonist and his fiance felt as if [they] had suddenly arrived to another planet.
69

Cacotopian societies were explored, and sometimes challenged, by a variety of

protagonists. The narrator was often a man of the people, a disenchanted worker like the
9

protagonist of Richters Sozialdemokratische Zukunftsbilder, whose change of mind

reflected the moral lesson of the text. Historia de Andresillo (1872) was narrated by a
poor, illiterate man from Estremadura, led by ignorance, irreligion and class hatred into
the Republican-socialist movement, but ultimately redeemed by a loving and pious wife
and the chaos brought about by a revolution in which everyone made demands and no
one wanted to give. 70 Similarly, in Fabras El problema social a series of letters
written by a socialist revolutionary to a friend described the degeneration of revolution
into anarchy and the narrators disillusionment with socialism. 71 The anarchist
protagonist in ngeles Vicentes Cuento absurdo (Absurd tale, 1908) likewise
changed his mind when he saw that the libertarian society he wanted to build on the
ruins of the destroyed bourgeois world was torn apart by conflicts among his followers,
concluding that selfishness, cruelty, anger, envy, hatred, bestial instincts, are fatally
innate in human nature. 72
This moral development was missing when the protagonist was an archetypal
bourgeois, such as the lady who tearfully regretted the loss of her properties and her
maid in La Internacional y las espaolas; or the self-satisfied Spanish rentier of La
verdad en la ilusin. Others chose Christian heroes, such as the young student Leucipo
in Los ltimos captulos de la historia, the ngel West of Marea verde or the Alfonso
de Cepeda of Bajo el yugo de los brbaros, a Castilian and Catholic gentleman
modelled on El Grecos Knight. 73 Resistance was often reminiscent of sacred history,
and dystopian rebels compared with Christian martyrs; a missionary in Bajo el yugo de
los brbaros told Cepeda: We return to the iron age of Christianity 74 Only a few
authors created modern dystopian rebels, everyman figures such as the Zeus of
Sentimental Club or the equally sentimental protagonist of Un pas extrao, who
challenged the Free country by falling in love with a young native (the lovers plan to
flee the country was thwarted by the communist leaders who, in a dramatic final scene
reminiscent of 1984, sentenced her to death and sent him back to his world). 75
With exceptions such as the aforementioned novel, uchronias usually had happy
endings. Most revolutions ended up in chaos, the reaction of the bourgeoisie and the
restoration of the old order, amidst the celebration of the people. 76 Other texts, such as
Sentimental Club and La Repblica espaola del ao 19 had an open ending,
although the sentimental revolution plotted by Zeus and his followers was in itself
optimistic, as was the rebellion promoted by Gustavo Vinar, the energetic protagonist of
Del xodo al paraso. The struggle between Satanic communism and Catholic reaction
10

recounted in Juan Jos Valverdes La bestia del apocalipsis (The Beast of

Apocalypse, 1935) ended up, predictably, in the coming of Jesus Christ and the Last
Judgment. 77 At the end of Marea verde the young protagonist travelled North to join the
resistance against green communism, a bunch of heroes who, unlike those of the
medieval Reconquista, fought only with moral conviction for the old spirit, love and
the lost norms. 78
Spanish reactionary uchronias appear thus as composite genre containing both
anti-utopian and dystopian elements. On a basic level, they were satires, parodically
inverting the traditional utopian model in order to emphasize its absurdity. 79 Olmets La
verdad en la ilusin even borrowed the structure of the utopia, a guided tour through an
ultra-scientific society in the twenty-fourth century. Julio Bravos El tratado de
Heligoland (1924) inverted the classic plot of a group of refined and idealistic men who
decided to settle on a desert island in the North Sea and created a Phalansterian
community aimed at promoting universal peace, but where greed came to the surface
and the experiment ended in disaster. 80 Even if most works were anti-utopian in both
form and message, some do share some of the features traditionally associated with
modern dystopias. Sentimental Club has been considered one of the clearest precedents
of the modern dystopian mode and may have been read and appreciated by Aldous
Huxley. 81 Its collectivist and mechanical society clearly resembles that of British protodystopias like Jerome K. Jeromes The New Utopia (1890) and E.M. Forsters The
Machine Stops (also published in 1909). 82 However, the tone of this burlesque
rigmarole was playful, maybe because the author did not wish to shock his readers
with a map of hell that did not correspond to their experience. 83 Sentimental Club, and
similar texts such as Calvo Rosellos Un pas extrao, illustrate the subtle line that
separates anti-utopias from dystopias.
Nevertheless, any attempt at drawing neat distinctions would ignore the constant
overlaps and hybridizations in this literature. 84 In Spain, as elsewhere, anti-utopias
developed in a common ground composed of religious, popular and scientific
traditions. 85 Historia de Andresillo was an obvious parable in the style of traditional
popular literature and the picaresque novel. In La verdad en la ilusin, anti-utopian
ideology was intertwined with fantastic descriptions of a twenty-fourth century global
society, where airplanes traveled across continents in half an hour, people fed
themselves on pills and had lost their teeth and their intestines, despite being intellectual
supermen, they emitted powerful electric rays and produced their own water. In Un
11

pas extrao (1919), men were undressed by machines and could see and talk to each
other thorough telephonoscopes that, like 1984s telescreens, allowed the State to
constantly supervise its citizens slightest actions and words. Tasins La catstrofe,
obviously inspired in Wells The War of the Worlds (1898), described the invasion of
the Earth by extra-terrestrial monsters (zootauros) and the victorious struggle of an
underground progressive French Republic against these creatures and domestic
subversion by separatist and anarchist movements. 86
Other anti-utopias explored the secularized apocalyptic genre previously
cultivated by notable Spanish authors such as Leopoldo Alas Clarn and Jos Martnez
Ruiz Azorn. 87 Two examples of apocalyptic literature with elements of science fiction
are Vicentes Cuento absurdo (1908), describing the destruction of humanity by the
anarchist scientist Guillermo Arides, and Blanco Belmontes El ocaso de la
humanidad (1918), that described the gradual killing of mankind by a machine called
anank (necessity or fate in ancient Greek). 88 Significantly, apocalyptic imagery
reached its zenith in the years leading up to the Civil War: Snchez Rubios Los ltimos
captulos de la historia, a long historico-philosophical and prophetic fantasy,
described a futuristic world of air trains, solar panels and Morse code radiograms and
the persecution of Christians by the great revolution which preceded an imprecise end
of humanity according to the prophecies of the Apocalypse. 89 Bajo el yugo de los
brbaros also contained explicitly apocalyptic scenes that prefigure those of Jos Mara
Pemns epic Poema de la bestia y el ngel (Poem of the Beast and the Angel,
1938). 90

Concluding remarks

On a general level, this preliminary study seems to confirm that literature is always
rooted in social attitudes and the debates of its age, and the need for a historical
approach to utopian literature as an arena of political, social and conceptual conflict. 91
Reactionary uchronias are particularly valuable sources to understand the attitudes and
emotions of a large section of Spanish society between the mid-nineteenth and the midtwentieth century, the core of Kosellecks Neuzeit: their sense of the acceleration of
history and their fear of the possibility of a radical revolution and, more broadly, of
modern times. 92 Its dystopian form proved especially successful as a means of
expression of ideologies and mentalities, and in particular of reaction: indeed, the
12

scarcity of progressive examples of the genre in the same period is remarkable. 93

Uchronias confirm Karl Mannheims observations on the resilience of conservatism in
the modern world, its ability to imagine a counter-utopia which serves as a means of
self-orientation and defense against progressive and revolutionary utopias. 94
Secondly, the study shows the remarkable spread of the dystopian form in the
Western world since the late nineteenth century and the need for further comparative
analyses that integrate the traditions of semi-peripheral countries into the general
and overwhelmingly Anglo-American narrative on the history of utopianism. 95
Spanish reactionary uchronias are in some ways typical examples of Western
speculative literature, but they have also peculiar features due to the Spanish Sonderweg
in the twentieth century. As we have seen, the rebellion they represented was directed
against collectivism and modernity as a whole, but religion played a much larger role
both in the plot and in the identity of protagonists. Besides, this literature flourished in
the first three decades of the twentieth century, when social instability was most intense,
and virtually stopped during the Civil War, to be replaced by a massive output of
testimonial accounts of the Red terror prevailing in Republican Spain. 96 Indeed the
memory of the Spanish conflict replaced uchronias in the dystopian imagination during
Francoism when Lens 1932 novel was re-edited with the subtitle Jornadas de la
Revolucin Espaola (Days of the Spanish Revolution) and, according to some
authors, remains very much alive in present day Spain. 97
The virtual disappearance of the dystopian subgenre after the 1950s can also be
interpreted as a result of its own success: in Spain, even more than elsewhere in the
West, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the triumph of social and
economic modernity, but also the decline of revolutionary and utopian thinking. Since
the demise of the Soviet Union, in particular, there is no need for the pre-emptive
prophecies that flourished when communism seemed like a plausible threat. Even if the
rise of the left-wing populist party Podemos and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism
have fueled some dystopian speculation in recent years, conservative-minded Spaniards
seem to be more comfortable with the current social trends than were their great
grandfathers with barbarians, telescreens and jazz. 98

13

NOTES
1

This work has been undertaken within the framework of HAR2012-32713 project as part of the National
R & D Plan in Spain. Preprint of the article published in Utopian Studies, Vol. 26, N. 2, 2015, pp. 383400: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.26.2.0383
2
The term is here used as a synonym for futuristic dystopias, and not in the original sense of alternate
history: see Paul Alkon, Origins of futuristic fiction (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2010), 115-57.
3
Gregory Claeys, The origins of dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell, in The Cambridge Companion to
Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 135-153.
4
Marc Angenot, The emergence of the anti-utopian genre in France: Souvestre, Giraudeau, Robida, et
al., Science Fiction Studies 2 (1985), 129-135.
5
Matthew Beaumont, Cacotopianism, The Paris Commune and Englands anti-communist imaginary,
1871-1900, ELH 2 (Summer 2006), 465-487.
6
Chad Walsh, From utopia to nightmare (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 75; Raymond Trousson,
Historia de la literatura utpica: viajes a pases inexistentes (Barcelona: Pennsula, 1995), 283-85.
7
Jos Carlos Mainer, Una parfrasis de H.G. Wells en 1909 y algunas notas sobre la fantasa cientfica
en Espaa, in La recepcin del texto literario, ed. Jean-Pierre Etienvre (Zaragoza: Universidad de
Zaragoza, 1988), 145-76; Jos Luis Calvo Carilla, El sueo sostenible. Estudios sobre la utopa literaria
en Espaa (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2008), 289.
8
Krishan Kumar, Utopia and anti-utopia in modern times (Oxford-New York: Blackwell, 1987), 49.
9
Geraldine Lawless, Unknown Futures: Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction in Spain, SFS 2 (July
2011), 253. The best synthesis in English is Mariano Martn Rodrguez, Science Fiction as Mainstream
Literature: The Spanish Scientific Romance and its Reception Before the 1936 Spanish Civil War,
Zanzal 1 (2011), accessed 12 February 2015, ISSN 2236-8191.
10
These and similar texts are collected in Utopas libertarias espaolas siglos XIX y XX, eds. Luis Gmez
Tovar and Javier Paniagua. (Madrid: Tuero, 1991), vol. II.
11
Po Baroja, La Repblica del ao 8 y la intervencin del ao 12, Alma espaola 7 (December 20,
1903); Domingo Ciric Ventall and Jos Arrufat Mestres, La Repblica espaola del ao 191:
fantasa poltica (Madrid, 1911).
12
Jos Mara Jover Zamora, Realidad y mito de la Primera Repblica (Madrid: Espasa, 1991), 91.
13
Fernando del Rey, El empresario, el sindicalista y el miedo, in Cultura y movilizacin en la Espaa
contempornea, eds. Rafael Cruz and Manuel Prez Ledesma (Madrid: Alianza, 1997), 235-72.
14
Rafael Cruz, Luzbel vuelve al mundo!: Las imgenes de la Rusia sovitica y la accin colectiva en
Espaa, in Cultura y movilizacin, 273-303.
15
Ramn Prez de Ayala, Sentimental Club (Madrid, 1909) and La revolucin sentimental (Madrid,
1929), 31.
16
Mara Antonia Fernndez, Socialismo and Comunismo, and Juan Francisco Fuentes, Utopa, in
Diccionario poltico y social del siglo XIX espaol, eds. Javier Fernndez Sebastin and Juan Francisco
Fuentes (Madrid Alianza, 2008), 653-658, 179-183 and 685-688.
17
Joan Ma y Flaquer, prologue to Alfredo Sudre, Historia del comunismo, o refutacin histrica de las
utopas socialistas, 2nd edition, (Barcelona, 1860), iii-xxii.
18
Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: perversity, futility, jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991), 6-7. The origins of this rhetoric in late eighteenth century Spain are described in
Javier Herrero, Los orgenes del pensamiento reaccionario espaol (Madrid: Alianza, 1988), 151-180.
19
Juan Bravo Murillo, La Internacional y las espaolas (1872), reprinted in Jos lvarez Junco, La
Comuna en Espaa (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1971), 233; Salvio Valent, Del xodo al paraso: ensayo de
comunismo libertario (Barcelona, 1933), 25.
20
Marc Angenot, Rhtorique de lanti-socialisme: essai d'historie discursive, 1830-1917 (Qubec: Les
Presses de lUniversit Laval, 2004), 67.
21
Emilio Castelar, El socialismo, in Nilo Mara Fabra, El problema social, 2nd edition (Madrid, 1892).
22
Ricardo Len, Bajo el yugo de los brbaros (Madrid, 1932), 56.
23
Nilo Mara Fabra, El triunfo de la igualdad (1885), in Relatos de ciencia-ficcin (Madrid: La
Biblioteca del Laberinto, 2006), 27-35; see also his Lo presente juzgado por lo porvenir. En el siglo XX
(1895), in Relatos de ciencia ficcin, 87-94.
24
Carmen San Sebastin, Tiempos nuevos (Madrid, 1933), 361-62.
25
Kumar, Utopia, 123-25.
26
Manuel Prez Ledesma, El miedo de los acomodados y la moral de los obreros, in Otras visiones de
Espaa, ed. Pilar Folguera (Madrid: Pablo Iglesias, 1993), 28.
27
Luis Antn del Olmet, La verdad en la ilusin, in Espejo de los humildes (Madrid, 1913), 179-180.

14

28

Miguel ngel Calvo Rosell, Un pas extrao, Blanco y Negro, September 28, 1919, 22-33.
Pascual Santacruz, Los desengaos de un comunista (Madrid, 1929), 30-31.
30
Len, Brbaros, 138-39.
31
Nerea Aresti, Mdicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas (Bilbao: Universidad del Pas Vasco, 2001), 91113.
32
Vicente Blasco Ibez, El paraso de las mujeres (Valencia, 1922), 110-128.
33
Lzaro Clendbims [Carlos Mendizbal], Elois y Morlocks: novela de lo por venir (Barcelona, 1909), 2
vols.
34
Valent, xodo, 89-90.
35
Mechthild Albert, Vanguardistas de camisa azul: la trayectoria de los escritores Toms Borrs, Felipe
Ximnez de Sandoval, Samuel Ros y Antonio de Obregn entre 1925 y 1940 (Madrid: Visor, 2003), 309.
36
Miguel de Unamuno, Mecanpolis, Los Lunes de El Imparcial, August 11, 1913; English version
in Cosmos Latinos: an Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, eds. Andrea L. Bell
and Yolanda Molina-Gavilar (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 47-51.
37
Juan Cano Ballesta, Las estrategias de la imaginacin: utopas literarias y retrica poltica bajo el
franquismo (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1994), 45-53.
38
Len, Brbaros, 289-91.
39
Agustn de Fox, Profecas y smbolos de las termitas (1935), in Historias de ciencia ficcin: relatos,
teatro, artculos (Madrid: La Biblioteca del Laberinto, 2009), 207-208.
40
Fox, Las alas enterradas (1952), in Historias de ciencia-ficcin, 219-223.
41
Historia de Andresillo o el comunismo visto por dentro. Dedicado a las clases trabajadoras de
Extremadura (Madrid, 1872), 30-31.
42
Bravo Murillo, La Internacional y las espaolas, 238.
43
Manuel Maritegui y Vinyals (count of San Bernardo), preface to Eugen Richter, Adnde conduce el
socialismo (diario de un obrero) (Madrid, 1896), 9-10.
44
Lyman Tower Sargent Do dystopias matter?, in Dystopia(n) matters, ed. Fatima Vieira (Newcastle,
Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 10-13.
45
Len, Brbaros, 167-68, Erika Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East and West. Universe of Terror and
Trial (Qubec: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), 3-4.
46
Fox, Otoo de 3006. Drama del futuro, en prosa (1954), in Historias de ciencia ficcin, 151-206.
47
Martn Rodrguez, Science Fiction as Mainstream Literature
48
Mariano Martn Rodrguez, Los novecentistas en Londres y la aclimatacin del scientific romance en
Espaa, Revista de Filologa Romnica (2011), 211-239.
49
Antonio Flores, Ayer, hoy y maana (Madrid, 1863-1864); Enrique Gaspar, The time-ship: a
chrononautical journey (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2012) [translation of El
anacronpete (Barcelona, 1887)]. An overview of this literature, in Geraldine Lawless, Modernitys
metonyms: figuring time in Nineteenth Century Spanish stories (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
2011).
50
Alkon, Origins, 117.
51
Len, Brbaros, 133-134.
52
Carmelina Imbroscio, Utopie et rve / utopie et uchronie, in Histoire transnationale de lutopie
littraire et de lutopisme, eds. Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson (Paris: H. Champion, 2008), 824826.
53
San Sebastin, Tiempos nuevos, 67.
54
Julio Bravo, El tratado de Heligoland (Madrid, 1924), re-edited as Hombres: novela sinttica (Madrid,
1931).
55
N. Tassin, La catstrofe. Novela fantstica (Madrid, 1924); revised version of N. Tasin, Katastrofa:
fantastichesk roman (Berlin, 1922).
56
Enrique Snchez Rubio, Los ltimos captulos de la historia desde la revolucin bolchevique hasta el
fin del mundo con algunos episodios novelescos: fantasa filosfico-histrica y proftica (Barcelona,
1930), 2 vols.
57
Len, Brbaros, 56.
58
Prez de Ayala, Revolucin, 9.
59
Tom Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini, Dystopia and histories, in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and
the Dystopian Imagination, eds. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5.
60
Prez de Ayala, Revolucin, 10-11.
61
Olmet, Verdad, 166-67.
62
Len, Brbaros, 197-199.
63
Agustn de Fox, Las alas enterradas (1952), in Historias de ciencia-ficcin, 219-223.
29

15

64

Jaime de Fox, Marea verde (Madrid, 1951), 200-205.

Beaumont, Cacotopianism, 478.
66
Bravo Murillo, La Internacional, 233.
67
Chris Ealham, Class, culture and conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (London-New York: Routledge,
2005), 10-11.
68
Valent, xodo, 42-44.
69
Fox, Marea, 167, 199.
70
Historia de Andresillo, 19.
71
Nilo Mara Fabra, El problema social (Madrid, 1890).
72
ngeles Vicente, Cuento absurdo, in Los buitres (Madrid, 1908), 124.
73
Len, Brbaros, 33.
74
Len, Brbaros, 280-84.
75
Calvo Rosell, Un pas extrao, 31-33.
76
Fabra, El problema social, 69-74; Santacruz, Desengaos, 55.
77
Juan Jos Valverde, La bestia del apocalipsis (Andjar, 1935).
78
Fox, Marea, 205-206.
79
Gary Saul Morson, Anti-utopia as a parodic genre, in The Boundaries of Genre (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1988), 115-42; Christopher Ferns, Narrating utopia ideology: gender,
form in utopian literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 109-130.
80
Bravo, Tratado.
81
Martn Rodrguez, Science Fiction as Mainstream Literature; Agustn Coletes Blanco, La huella
anglonorteamericana en la novela de Prez de Ayala (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1987), 37.
82
Gorman Beauchamp, The proto-dystopia of Jerome K. Jerome, Extrapolation 24 (June 1983), 170181; Tom Moylan, Scraps of the untainted sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, Co:
Westview Press, 2000), 111-121.
83
Martn Rodrguez, Science Fiction.
84
Antonis Balasopoulos, Anti-utopia and dystopia: Re-thinking the generic field, Utopia Project
Archive (Athens: School of Fine Arts Publications, 2011), 66-67, accessed 12 February 2015.
85
Brian J. Dendle, A forgotten subgenre: the novela cientfica, Espaa contempornea, 2 (1995), 2132.
86
Tassin, La catstrofe.
87
Agustn Jaureguzar, Narraciones espaolas del fin del mundo, I, II and III, Arbor 747, 749 and 751
(2011), doi:10.3989/arbor.2011.749n3014, accessed 12 February 2015; W. Warren Wagar, Terminal
Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
88
Vicente, Cuento absurdo, 109-139; M.R. Blanco Belmonte, El ocaso de la humanidad, Blanco y
Negro, May 19, 1918, 9-11.
89
Snchez Rubio, Captulos.
90
Len, Brbaros, 238
91
Northrop Frye, Varieties of Literary Utopias, Daedalus 2 (Spring 1965), 323-347.
92
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), 263-270.
93
Two interesting variations on the dystopian/fantastic theme from a social revolutionary point of view
are Jos Mas, En la selvtica Bribonicia (Madrid, 1932) and Ramn J. Sender, La noche de las cien
cabezas: novela del tiempo de delirio (Madrid, 1934).
65

94

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, 2013 [1936]), 2067.

95

See Histoire transnationale de lutopie littraire et de lutopisme, Vita Fortunati and Raymond
Trousson eds.
96
Hugo Garca, War and culture in Nationalist Spain, 193639. Testimony and fiction in the literature
on the Red Terror, Journal of War and Culture Studies 2.3 (2009), 289-304.
97
Paloma Aguilar, Memory and amnesia: the role of the Sanish Civil War in the Transition to
Democracy, New York, 2002; Jess Izquierdo: Distopas cainitas: Guerra, locura y cambio social en
procesos de transicin, unpublished paper, 2014.
98
See Ibsen Martnez, No puede pasar aqu, El Pas, 9 December 2014, a fantasy on a Spanish
Venezuela ruled by Podemos; and John Carlin, Agosto de 2020, El Pas, August 10, 2015, a satire on a
coming populist alliance between a Spain ruled by Podemos, Greece under Syriza, Britain under
Jeremy Corbyn and Russia under Vladimir Putin against American presidents Donald Trumps decision
to invade Mexico.

16