Edmundo Paz Soldán and his Precursors: Borges, Dick, and the SF Canon

This article charts the ways in which Jorge Luis Borges has been deployed in the articulation of sf literary canons. It begins with an analysis of the Argentine writer’s own ambiguous relationship with science fiction, then turns to his adoption as an honored precursor by Stanislaw Lem and William Gibson. In particular, it focuses on Philip K. Dick’s career and, using ideas from Borges’s essay “Kafka and his Precursors,” examines the various methods by which Dick’s supporters have used Borges in their defense of the American novelist. The culminating aspect of this construction of a Borgesian sf canon is the work of Bolivian novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán, especially his 2003 novel Turing’s Delirium. In this novel, Paz Soldán constructs a web of intertextual references and allusions that set Borges and Dick on an even footing as co-precursors to a new Latin American literary tradition.