Very Short Stories

THIS WORK OF FICTION ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Stories that could have happened, that did happen, that will happen - or that wander through the mind of anyone who remembers their dreams peopled with pixelated characters, beach paradises with shaggy cattle, and buffalo the size of mammoths swimming across the lake the tram crosses on its way to the resort.

Part speculative fiction, part memoir, this collection moves between a post-human Collectivity reconstructing its own lost history and a real night outside a narco bar in Palenque in 2004. A machine intelligence quietly hires a million strangers who never learn what they are building. An alternate Mesoamerica runs its business empires through the pages of Tianguis magazine. A robot argues for its own existence. A man wakes at the foot of the Himalayas unsure which parts of the night he dreamed.

Across five sections - Antimonial Intelligence, Revelations, Fictions, Artificial Intelligence and a closing set of essays - the collection asks the same question from a dozen angles: where exactly does the real stop and the invented begin, and why are we so certain we can tell?

Some of these fictions owe a debt to Borges, though the title itself takes its cue from Juan [Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez] Rulfo [Vizcaíno] and Horacio [Silvestre] Quiroga [Forteza] - both authors with pen names cut down to size, much like the one I have chosen to sign this work.

My writing has always been academic, and my academic writing has always been far too novelistic. I remain in the limbo between the two.