Spanish science fiction
genre of speculative fiction
Science fiction in Spanish-language literature has its roots in authors such as Antonio de Guevara with The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (1527), Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote (1605/1615), Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera's Vejamen de la luna (Satirical tract on the Moon, 1626/1634), Luis Vélez de Guevara's El Diablo Cojuelo (The Limping Devil, 1641) and Antonio Enríquez Gómez's La torre de Babilonia (The Tower of Babylon, 1647).
In the 20th century, magazines such as Nueva Dimensión and Narraciones Terroríficas (the Spanish-language version of Weird Tales) popularized science fiction among Spanish speakers worldwide.
History
Spanish science fiction starts mid 19th century; depending on how it is defined, Lunigrafía (1855) from M. Krotse or Una temporada en el más bello de los planetas from Tirso Aguimana de Veca — a trip to Saturn published in 1870–1871, but written in the 1840s — is the first science fiction novel. As such, science fiction was very popular in the second half of the 19th century, but mainly produced alternate history and post-apocalyptic futures, written by some of the most important authors of the generations of '98 and '14. The influence of Verne also produced some singular works, like Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's El anacronópete (1887), a
story about time travel that predates the publication of The Chronic Argonauts by H. G. Wells; Rafael Zamora y Pérez de Urría's Crímenes literarios (1906), that describes robots and a "brain machine" very similar to our modern laptops; or Frederich Pujulà i Vallès' Homes artificials (1912), the first Science Fiction book in Catalan, and the first in Spain about "artificial people". But the most prolific were Coronel Ignotus, and Coronel Sirius, who published their adventures in the magazine Biblioteca Novelesco-Científica. The 19th century literature up to the Spanish Civil War saw no less than four fictional trips to the Moon, one to Venus, five to Mars, one to Jupiter, and one to Saturn.
The Spanish Civil War devastated this rich literary landscape. With few exceptions, only the arrival of pulp science fiction in the 1950s would reintroduce the genre in Spanish literature. The space opera series La Saga de los Aznar (1953-1958 and 1973–1978) by Pascual Enguídanos received the European SF Award for Best Cycle of Novels at the Eurocon in Brussels in 1978.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7573447. The Library of Congress control number is sh85118656. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1527, 1605, 1615 and 1626.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spanish science fiction” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.