The Journey. Miguel Collazo

      For my son Abel

      ‌Introduction

      Half a Century of Journeying Inward: Miguel Collazo’s The Journey

      Some prologues are written by undiscovered writers about the works of the safely dead greats; all too often these are pretentious, pedantic, and aimed at harnessing the young writer’s fame to the shadows of the past. Others are written by recognized greats, aiming to convince the public to read some new work through the rhetoric of authority: if a successful, knowing writer recommends it, it must be worth a look.

      These lines, I hope, will qualify for a third category: a prologue written by an author who’s already made a bit of a name for himself and his work, and who wants to publicly recognize his debts to another author in terms of style, themes, and inspiration.

      Might as well begin at the beginning, then.

      With my first contact with Miguel Collazo and the world of his imagination.

      An encounter that took place precisely thanks to this, his second novel.

      I discovered The Journey at the age of thirteen, in January 1982. My mother brought me the novel—then in its second edition, published only months earlier—along with a couple of other Cuban books in what was already my favorite genre, science fiction. I was at Río Verde at the time, the farmer field school camp in the country town of Alquízar, well outside of my own hometown of Havana.

      Lots of kids claimed they enjoyed the freedom of a month and a half away from their parents, but the truth is, most city kids like me felt every hour spent in those rustic, field-surrounded cabins was a harsh punishment. As high school students preparing for university, we were forced to perform monotonous agricultural work in a farm field school for six weeks straight. At that time the Cuban education system assiduously followed the doctrine that studies had to be combined with manual labor.

      A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. Years ago the Cuban government finally began to think rationally and renounced that (laudable?) aim—probably because, working as young hired field hands (a figure of speech; they didn’t pay us one cent, of course) while having less than zero farming experience, we were better at producing economic losses and damaging the crops than generating any dubious benefits through our harvest labor and our collective but incompetent enthusiasm.

      But this isn’t the place to write the history of the social and economic mistakes of Fidel Castro and the Revolution. That story would take too many pages. The prologue shouldn’t be longer than the book it introduces, should it?

      So I’ll just try to relive the deep impression that a first read of The Journey produced on the teenager I was in 1982, torn between the nerdish intellectual delights of books and the more popular pleasures of sports, dancing, and girls.

      Sundays were visiting days at Río Verde. Most of my schoolmates looked forward only to stuffing themselves with home cooking and desserts their families brought, the delicacies they’d been dreaming about after an entire week of swill (or going hungry). I, for my own part—after filling my belly, of course—hardly noticed when my mother left our camp for Havana. I was already deep into reading the three books she had brought me. Kids are so self-centered, aren’t they?

      I remember it like it was yesterday: in addition to Collazo’s novel, she had brought me Expedición Unión Tierra (Earth union expedition) by Richard Clenton Leonard, and Juegos planetarios (Planetary games), a collection of Cuban science fiction stories compiled by Juan Carlos Reloba.

      I admit that I read Clenton Leonard’s novel first, misled by his Anglo name. Bad move. The book turned out to be an unbearable bit of rubbish, a space opera that violated all the laws of physics and astronomy with impunity. For example, it featured a tenth planet that had somehow been discovered between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. On the other hand, it was quite politically correct. Hypercorrect, even. Moscow was the capital of the Communist world of the future, and the wicked, slaving extraterrestrial giants were defeated in a matter of days by the popular revolution sparked when the heroic humans visited their enormous planet. No wonder it still holds the dubious honor of being the worst science fiction book ever published in Cuba.

      I think that was when I discovered how useful it can be to read the cover blurb and learn a little about a book’s author before you dive into the text itself. If I had known that Clenton Leonard, despite the distinctly Anglo sound of his name, wasn’t from the same country as Ray Bradbury, Frederick Pohl, and other idols of mine at the time (Isaac Asimov, too; strictly speaking, Asimov was born a Russian in Petrovichi, but he’d published all his books in the United States, so that didn’t count), but was rather a Cuban of Jamaican ancestry and a commentator on the Cuban National Television News, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to open the novel.

      Next, I read Juegos planetarios. Most of the stories in that collection, seen now in retrospect, frankly leave a lot to be desired from a literary and imaginative point of view. I observed as much at the time—though there were some stories that I did like quite a lot, such as “Dialoquio” (Dialoquium) by Lionel Lejardi, and most of all “Memorias de un traductor simultáneo” (Notes of a simultaneous translator) by Luis Alberto Soto Portuondo. Many years later I had the pleasure of including the latter in Crónicas del mañana (Chronicles of tomorrow), a historical anthology of the first fifty years of SF in Cuba.

      So I saved Collazo’s novel for last. And this time the cliché proved true: last but not least.

      From the very first pages of the novel, I realized it was something completely new, different from any SF I’d devoured up to then. Like many other young readers, I would guess, much of what fascinated me about the genre was the futuristic technoscientific gadgetry it offered up: the spaceships, the power weapons, the robots, and so on. Along with exotic settings on bizarre worlds, alien races, and astonishing flora and fauna.

      There was hardly any of that in The Journey. And please excuse me if what follows contains a spoiler or two.

      I quickly deduced that the story was set on a distant semidesert planet, Ambar, in the distant future, and that the main characters—humans, or at least very like humans—were not natives of that planet but had landed there by some means (probably technological) and had then seen their civilization deteriorate.

      Though a war in the planet’s past was never mentioned, the situation there could be fairly summed up by the title of an old film by Polish director Andrzej Wajda: Landscape After the Battle. There were no cities or farms, only disoriented people wandering about, on their own or in small and sometimes violent tribes. No books, no TV, no running water, no apparent technological advances of any sort.

      Right, a classic postapocalyptic story, I remember the conceited young man that I was at the time thinking, convinced by having already read a mountain of science fiction that recognizing the signposts was the same thing as understanding the thing itself. I also deduced that the inhabitants of Ambar had probably gone through a terrible war—nuclear, perhaps?—though the hypothesis of long, gradual cultural degeneration could not be entirely discarded either.

      In any case, Ambar wasn’t what it used to be. No doubt about that.

      Some early passages in the novel supported my conclusion. They described at least one ray gun that had belonged to a semi-mythical figure from the past, “Nur B’s weapon,” capable of causing great destruction with its energy shots and thus conferring tremendous power on those who kept it and handled it.

      On the other hand, there were also plenty of frankly bizarre and disconcerting elements, such as the three giant flowers. Or the fact that the men who lived on arid Ambar seemed perfectly capable of surviving naked, without hunting or farming or eating much of anything beyond whatever they casually came across. And, most notably, without seeming to really miss a technological civilization that they had only known as a set of vague legends.

      They also had their symbols, an inscrutable attribute that