Books at the Center- Zac Zimmer, First Contact (11/5/25)

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[00:00:00] [Typing Sounds and Music] Enver Ali Akova: Welcome and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Cafe, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host Héctor Hoyos is joined by Zac Zimmer, who is an associate professor of literature at the University of California Santa Cruz, and Giacomo Berchi, assistant professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. And, Caroline Bailey, a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Stanford. Zac visited the Center on November 5th to deliver a lecture [00:01:00] related to his first book, titled First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas, which was just published with Northwestern University Press in 2025. This episode was recorded directly before that lecture, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal conversations. Héctor Hoyos: Welcome to CSN Cafe, the podcast of the Center for the Study of a Novel at Stanford University. I am Héctor Hoyos, Faculty Director of the Center. And joining me today is Zac Zimmer, author of First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas, and I am really looking forward to discussing it at some length today. I'm also joined with other amazing interlocutors in the room. So what I'll do is just ask folks to introduce themselves and also tell us why you're here, what in your trajectory is relevant for this conversation. We're very pleased with the way that your [00:02:00] respective lines of inquiry really converge today. Professor Berchi? Giacomo Berchi: Yeah. Hello everyone. My name is Giacomo Berchi and I'm an assistant professor of French and Italian here at Stanford, and I'm particularly curious and happy to be here discussing this text because I mainly focus in my research on Dante and early modern epics, European early modern epics, and specifically on the topic of navigation. So I can see how - I'm super curious to discuss all the possible perspectives about, like, the first contact and the conquest and these topics in the early modern period up till today. Caroline Bailey: My name is Caroline Bailey. I'm a PhD candidate here at Stanford in the English department. I study linguistic anthropology in the novel of the Americas, roughly from 1960 to the present, and that leads me to write quite a bit on SF, science fiction or speculative fiction - we can talk about exactly what SF means maybe in this conversation - and [00:03:00] I'm also a huge fan of The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, which is one of the novels you write on in this book. So I'm really interested in talking about those things today. Héctor Hoyos: Caroline, could you also tell us about your experience ⁓ with the Quechua-speaking parts of the world? Caroline Bailey: Sure, yes. I've also studied Quechua here at Stanford, with Marisol Necochea, who is our native speaker and teacher, and that's been a really valuable experience. So I'm interested in The Sparrow because she based some of the languages in that novel off of Quechua. And you also write a little bit about Quipu in here as well. Yeah. Héctor Hoyos: Thank you for that. The subject of this book is first encounters, how first encounters are imagined. That is very relevant for us at the Center for the Study of the Novel when you think of the first encounters chiefly occupying, at least in the imagination, time before the novel. So typically when we think of the hemispheric encounter with the Europeans, we think of las crónicas or chronicles, something somehow, [00:04:00] although technically not correct, imagined to be before the novel form. On the other hand, you would have a scholar like Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, based at UT Austin, who would say that post-colonial literature is a misnomer because literature has never stopped being colonial. And he's thinking from the Mapuche lands. And so from a Mapuche perspective, we are in the same colonial horizon under different garbs. Bakhtin, another interlocutor of ours, would say that the novel is this form that can swallow everything. And so that could also mean swallowing up the chronicles. It could be swallowing the history of those first encounters and producing something original, according to Bakhtin. The novel as form has that capacity. So with these things in mind, just putting them on the table, I wanted to ask you, Zac - could you tell us a little bit about yourself, also, introduce yourself if you would - but tell us how [00:05:00] you came about to writing this project. Zac Zimmer: Yes, thank you very much, Héctor. Thank you, Giacomo, Caroline. I'm happy to be here with all of you and thank you to the Center. So, I'm Zac Zimmer, an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, and this book has been a long process, actually, so I'm very happy to have it out in the world and to share it with you. And I'm so happy to be here with this group talking about it because I think it really gets at the heart of what I'm trying to do in the relationship between literary forms, speculation, and historical return, returning to archival moments and using creative and narrative techniques to try to not only rewrite these encounters, but actually, recuperate some of the historical possibilities that were lost in the contingency of history. So that, that was really the animating force behind it. [00:06:00] And I also noticed this trope that I kept stumbling upon that brought some very strange interlocutors together. I talk about this a little bit in the coda or the afterward of the book, that in Alfred Crosby's The Columbian Exchange, he talks about the encounter that opened up in 1492 that he would later call biological imperialism, taking an idea of the exchange of biomes across the Atlantic that had been previously separated (although not to the extent that he would have been positioning it, because we've learned that there's actually much more traffic across the Atlantic and perhaps across the Pacific as well before 1492). But for Crosby, the moment of 1492 brought these two worlds into communication [00:07:00] in a way that they hadn't been. And he says this is the most significant biological event in the history of the planet up to and until we find contact with another species, extraterrestrials, right. And I saw that trope of talking about the aftermath of 1492, Columbus coming to the Caribbean, what we now call the conquest and colonization of the Americas, continually being compared to some future contact that's going to occur with extraterrestrial civilizations. This is, in its own way, it's in some of the crónicas that Héctor was mentioning. It's also in weird political theory, like in Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, he actually says the exact same thing as Alfred Crosby, making for a very strange comparison there. So it [00:08:00] seemed like there was this structuring framework for interpreting 1492 in the aftermath, always in relation to something that exceeded the capacity of the earth itself. So that's really what got me paying attention to these attempts to use SF, I call it broadly - to kind of defer the question that you mentioned, Caroline, about what we mean when we say SF - but basically like the weirdness of the encounter itself. So that was the first step. And then as I began to do the research into this book and returning to some of the classic theorizations of that early colonial encounter, like Diana Taylor and Mary Louise Pratt talking about contact zones or the performance of conquest, it became very clear that this thing that was very invested in presenting itself as a first, first encounter, and was [00:09:00] no such thing. It was not the first time that Europeans and the people of the Americas had been in contact. It was not the first time that these kinds of colonial encounters had happened before, but the justification really resided in that claim to firstness. And so this is Diana Taylor's argument in talking about conquest as a repertoire in this reenactment of firstness every time. So I like that, that idea of something always being the firstness again, right? And that structuring these events. It seemed to me that the speculative approach was the way to crack that open and to approach it from a different perspective. So that's how I started working on the book. Héctor Hoyos: Fantastic, fantastic. Feel free to jump in, there's no rhyme or reason in this conversation. Giacomo Berchi: Yeah. So great. Thank you. [00:10:00] I think my question is, you, at a certain point in your introduction, you said that all the - especially I'm focusing on referring in particular to the first chapter about the three novels you are, the three literary works, you are dealing with - you mentioned the fact that ⁓the attempt there is to exorcise, you use the term exorcise, exorcise the conquest, right? And so I guess my question is - also thinking about the fact that if I'm not mistaken, these three texts are, well, two of them were published in the 1990s, Zac Zimmer: Right Giacomo Berchi: Right, exactly, and one in the 1968, Tísner’s, if I'm not mistaken - so I wonder whether in terms of, like, enlarging the archive - so my question is like, what's next? Meaning, where are we now in terms of these exorcising processes, as it were, and whether it's possible to… maybe not, [00:11:00] but whether it's possible to think about what will come next after these sort of understandings of the first encounter, accounting also for like different cosmologies and epistemologies that you are trying to elucidate in this text. Héctor Hoyos: I'm going to just slide in for the benefit of our audience, the titles of the novels that were just mentioned, these are: Tísner’s Paraules d'Opòton el Vell, a Catalan novel translated as The Words of Old Man, Opotón. The Mexican Carmen Boullosa’s Llanto: Novelas imposibles, in English Wailing: Impossible Novels. That's the first book from 68, the second from 92. And also from 92, and Hugo Hiriart’s La destrucción de todas las cosas, The Destruction of Each and Every Thing. So three novels that are consolidated in the first chapter of this book. I just wanted to interject that for clarity of the audience. Zac Zimmer: Thank you very much. Yes, okay, [00:12:00] so many different ways to go. So first, let me say that I'm really happy to have this book coming out into the world now, because I think it makes a lot more sense than when I started writing it, because it's not a coincidence the periodicity of that chapter, because it's really about how the anthology in English known as The Broken Spears, La Visión de los Vencidos - it was compiled by Miguel León-Portilla, on translations based on Ángel María Garibay Kintana - a seminal contribution to anthologizing what was then called like the “visions of the vanquished,” right, or the “visions of the defeated” to bring Aztec accounts as they were understood at the time into just the general Mexican consciousness. So they're all novels that were written in Mexico. [00:13:00] Tísner was in Mexico as a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, who settled in Mexico. So they were really bumping up against the limits of the archive and the pathways through which the readers and writers and artists could get to this material. It was passing through this anthology that was literally published as a libro del boccio, a pocketbook that students would carry around. It is a very, important text. And so by collecting those accounts from mainly four sources, codices, and publishing them as one anthology, what León-Portilla did is give everyone a kind of unified way to give them what they'd always wanted, right? Like what about the perspectives not of the Spanish? What about the perspectives of the people who were defeated here? But around 1992, in conjunction with the [00:14:00] celebration of the quincentenary of Columbus's arrival, the anticipation of NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising, a time of growing understanding of neoliberalism and the kind of relationship between Latin America and the United States and cultural hegemony, that perspective was beginning to reach its absolute limits and fall into a kind of exhausted paradigm. Then like, well, these are still perspectives that are filtered through the Spanish colonial archive, and they're then being anthologized and distributed, but we want to get beyond that. We want to get beyond that. So that's why some of these novelists were engaging in speculative forms. I mean, that's the argument that I'm making about that particular moment. Now, it's several decades later that that dam has kind of broken open. And now we have all kinds of work that will [00:15:00] very easily fit within the interpretive paradigm of this book. So I had to make a very conscious decision to not constantly be trying to bring in the most updated examples of this because it was never ending because we have now so many different ways of dealing with this that are trying to actually move past this understanding that we want voices to participate in these discussions, voices that were systematically erased and excluded from the archive. Now the problem, and I don't want to focus on this too much because we're at the Center for the Study of the Novel, but this gets to Héctor's first question, is that it might have been that the novel itself was part of the problem. And so in the book, I don't only write about novels, and that's okay because there are some great novels. And today I'm going to talk about You Dreamed of Empires, which I think is a very recent novel that fits very well in this paradigm. But really a lot of [00:16:00] the work that I'm seeing that fits into this interpretive framework is happening in performance, in multimedia studies, in institutional critiques in museums, right? Because it is the form itself that is limiting our ability to deal with these constitutive absences in the archives. Yeah, so I'd say that we’re actually in a really wonderful moment right now where we have filmmakers adopting, exploring these perspectives, a real interest in Native and Indigenous creators entering into the space, but also really trying to push questions about cultural hybridity and mestizaje or the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas or Asian diaspora, right? All of these different perspectives now are really taking advantage of this speculative paradigm to try to both connect to other possible versions of history and activate them in the present. Caroline Bailey: So I am gonna ask a question about [00:17:00] Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires, because I actually had written that title down as I was reading your first chapter, both in terms of how does that bring us into the present of 2024 - it was one of like New York Times’ Top 10 books of 2024 - and I read that novel and I actually felt slightly disappointed by it. So I would love to hear your take on if you think it's doing something newly radical, if you think it is, sort of regressive at all, how it situates in contrast to these novels from like 30 years earlier where you sort of focused your actual chapter writing. Zac Zimmer: Yeah, so I'm going to focus, I'm going to talk about that in the lecture today, but I do think that where Carmen Boullosa hesitated in her novel from 1992 that is called Impossible Novels, the novel actually kind of falls apart in this way that she then turns into a metacritical commentary on the impossibility of recuperating the the truth of what happened in the encounter. And Enrigue just blows right through that, right? And what [00:18:00] he does in You Dreamed of Empires is he really tries to enter in through the sensorium, I think, by trying to place us not necessarily in like what exactly happened, but what did it feel like? And I think, and maybe part of the reason that that novel was so popular is because he really focuses on the possibilities of psychedelic experience in Mesoamerica to enter into this kind of synesthesia of the experience of what it would be like in trying to understand that. So I think it's interesting because he's really trying to enter in through that kind of sensorium. It's all like smells and tastes and colors, but they're being mixed up and jumbled, and it is literally psychedelic and there's some kind of light time travel. So, yeah, I think that it's also unavoidable [00:19:00] to see that the thing that was causing Boullosa to hesitate when she was writing Llanto: Novelas imposibles to say like, I actually can't do this, I'm going to write a novel about how it's impossible to get direct access to these experiences, even though the framework of Boullosa novel is that Moctezuma time travels to neoliberalizing Mexico City. And he's kind of like taking on a guided tour and sees what has happened in the subsequent five centuries since the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. But she's hesitating the whole time because she understands that there's structural absences, she has, even though it's about Moctezuma, there's always the shadow of the female voices that were systematically erased from the archive. And so Enrigue is like, “no, it's okay. We can, we can get there. We can get there. We can,” and maybe it's like [00:20:00] the psychedelic experience that's going to get us there. So I can understand, is that kind of why you think it's maybe a little disappointing? Caroline Bailey: I think the modes of disappointment for me partially were just that it was so overhyped, perhaps, by the kind of New York Times. But I read it and I was like, okay, what I take away from this is they were all on psychedelics, but I didn't necessarily feel like the representation of the psychedelic experience let me into any part of like a strange historical consciousness other than the fact that we don't think about the fact that people 500 years ago were doing drugs. But I didn't really go beyond that as I was reading it. I didn't feel like it had a revelation for me within that kind of strange paradigm. But maybe you'll prove me wrong in your talk. Zac Zimmer: Well, there is, I mean, so he does have a revenge aspect to it. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Zac Zimmer: There is a slight change in what happens as compared to the historical record that actually ends up being a very big change, and so - I guess because it is [00:21:00] so well publicized, we don't have to worry about spoilers - but Cortés basically gets his head ripped open and dies, and then one of the other Spanish characters actually kind of does the “going native” thing that is very much in the Mexican historical consciousness under the rubric of Gonzalo Guerrero, who was also someone who was a Spanish conquistador who went over to the other side. So, you know, I think he's trying to open up literal pathways between, and also trying to, yeah, tell a nice kind of vengeance tale and give people what they want to change our understanding of the contours of that conflict. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Zac Zimmer: Yeah, but so in that sense that makes it very easily digestible, I guess. Maybe we get what we want. Caroline Bailey: I think I also had been fresh off of reading Atomik Aztex - I don't know if you've ever read that text, [00:22:00] Zac Zimmer: Yeah Caroline Bailey: Which is even more, I think, a radical imagination of - imagine - our whole world, but now we have this sort of Aztec civilization as the kind of conquering force that was represented, in some sense by Nazi Germany. And so maybe coming from that super radical place, the image of Cortés getting his head ripped open is less exciting in contrast. Zac Zimmer: Yeah Caroline Bailey: But for sure, that is an important kind of interjection. Zac Zimmer: Atomik Aztex is much, much more challenging, I would say, to read because it does anticipate that kind of simple reversal that we want and really complicates it because that novel is really about the, among other things, that there is no single culture that has a monopoly on fascism. Caroline Bailey: Right. Héctor Hoyos: Yeah, that should be a blurb for this podcast. If podcasts had a blurb, that would be one of them. But you know, the other blurb for this podcast would be, “The novel is part of the problem.” [00:23:00] So I was hoping you could expand on this. I'm thinking, you know, this idea of the novel as modern epic, as making the world whole again - what happens if that is a problem? You know, the world is not whole, and so the novel is making it whole. But also maybe pushing back against that idea that the novel is part of the problem. What happens if, if the novel mutates and produces a form that is less invested in that kind of restoration of wholeness and holiness. Those things are easy on the ear. They go together somehow. So what is it about the novel that's problematic? Zac Zimmer: Yeah, thank you. My immediate response is that it's voracious, in that it will consume everything. As you said before, kind of eats the world. And, at sometimes that can seem very seductive and attractive. And there is [00:24:00] a kind of cultural logic to it that it's very, it's very open, in what it's doing. It's not misrepresenting what it does, but it is, omnivorous. It is insatiable. It will take any kind of input and do something new with it. Now I'm beginning to think I'm just describing large language models. Maybe that's really the limit of - I mean, that's going to be the test case for the novels - you know, and maybe that is another point of connection, the extractivist nature of how these systems work, where it's trying to take, take, take, take, take, digest, digest, digest, and then output some kind of totality. Héctor Hoyos: And is SF somehow even more suspect than other forms, more tied into the culture industry, more lucrative? Zac Zimmer: Well, okay, so, you know, I'm going to continue to defer and say “SF” until someone really, really holds my feet to the fire to be more specific. [00:25:00] But I can say that there are possibilities and there are risks associated with both the novel form and with the speculative modality. But the novel is much more difficult to write. So that it has a higher bar of entry. So you have to be very, you have to have a lot of endurance to be able to get through the process of writing a novel. Whereas the speculative framework, it's capacious, but it allows for like fan fiction and amateur publication. And it's also not tied to a specific medium. So we have, you know, SF in literature, SF in film and poetry and in art. So I think it's not… but some of the danger is that it allows for some of the worst possible retellings. One of the - I really try not to write about texts that I don't want to [00:26:00] recommend that people read, but there is, there are one or two in my book that I talk about that I feel that I had to include as cautionary tales. And the one that I'm thinking of is Orson Scott Card's, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. It's a horrible novel. Even if you like him as an author, I mean, everyone, you know, has probably read Ender's Game, but this is the worst tendencies of all of that. And it is a kind of very naive attempt to redeem the maligned figure of Christopher Columbus. But that, I feel like it's a very, very bad use of SF as a modality. So that, you know, there's no guarantee that just because you're going to use the SF framework that everything's going to be great. And in fact, it allows [00:27:00] for real stinkers to enter into the world. Right. And there is - just because I mentioned this, this trope of comparing the 16th century conquest of the Americas to alien encounters - like it's, it's, it's a clear framework. There's so many horrible renditions of Malinalli, Malintzin, Doña Marina, La Malinche, that figure is just like the worst, most misogynistic, most instrumentalist understanding of language and translation. so, you know, just thinking of this, the chronica says just pure source material to write space opera or something like that. So yeah, you know, SF isn't a solution and it's certainly not innocent, but what it does allow for, and I think it is worth the risk because we get texts like, you know, what I'm talking about in this book and these new pieces like, one [00:28:00] - so I am going to allow myself to talk about one non-novelistic text right now, because I think it's a great example - of the metafictional documentary, I think we can call it, 499, that is about both the disappeared people in narco trafficking in Mexico and also layered over the arrival of a conquistador who then traces the kind of migratory route of the conquistadors through Mexico and encountering people who are losing loved ones to drug violence, and seeing a kind of continuity in a history of violence in the Americas, right? Using both actual documentary footage of interviewing people, activists who are working to help families recover disappeared loved ones, but also these totally fantastical reenactments of conquistadors [00:29:00] in armor, having these weird encounters with masked drug dealers driving low rider cars, talking about the different weapons they use in torturing people. Just this really suggestive anachronistic blend that both shows continuity and rupture in the history of violence in the Americas. So to get something like that though, you have to be willing to also put up with the less compelling versions. Giacomo Berchi: So chapter five of your book is called “Colombo ex frigata and the Problem of Firstness.” So I wonder whether you could talk us about what the Colombo ex frigata paradigm is, how you got there, and then if you think that the way you deal with this paradigm could be also interesting for dealing with the European archives. So, where the Colombo ex frigata paradigm actually, like, started as this narrative about the teleological arrival and conquest. [00:30:00] Zac Zimmer: Yeah. So this was another… so, you know, before we were talking about the danger of SF tropes, getting in the way of actually grappling with the meaning of this event, the conquest and colonization of the Americas. And one way I saw that happening was by this narrative tick that came up all the time. In the book I talk about a Peruvian author, José Adolph, who has, I think, the best realized version of this thing that I'm going to describe, but it's basically - Brian Aldiss called it like the Shaggy God story - where, you know, it seems like you're on an intergalactic vessel and there's all this drama going on on the boat and the crew is [00:31:00] about to rebel, and, you know, however in-depth they want to get in telling that story and keeping the conceit going, until finally they make landfall and someone calls the ships, you know, the Niña, the Pinta, the Santa María, you know, and you realize, this is just Columbus and his ships traveling into the “unknown,” being literally reduplicated as space travel. So I tried to give that a name, the Colombo ex frigata, pulling from the Deus ex Machina element of it, to try to contain it so we don't have to keep repeating that. And that's actually one of the things about SF criticism that I think is so powerful is that naming tropes allow those tropes to both enter into a different order in the genre [00:32:00] and open them up to ridicule, but then also open up possibilities for other imaginings of it. So, actually, if you don't mind, I would like to turn the question back to you as someone who's been thinking about this a lot more than I have, perhaps, and see if it is useful to you as a concept at all or how, yeah, what you were thinking when you were reading it. Giacomo Berchi: Yeah, thank you. think it is actually because my main archive is composed of early modern epics - Italian, Portuguese, and also English epics - about the conquest of New World and about the, again, what I term oceanic navigation, just more neutrally, I guess. So there are, especially in the Italian context, there is a lot of insistence about the need for the deeds of Columbus to be recounted as an epic. So there is this imagination about a future author who will come. So there are many scenes, scenes of navigation, in the early modern epic. [00:33:00] I'm thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, especially. There are moments of prophecy within the narrative in which the author alludes to the coming of Columbus, basically. I think the framing it this way, like, a religious way, is also intended in the way it's framed in the texts themselves. So the coming of Columbus as a sort of messianic figure, right? And I think specifically there is a passage in Tasso's poem, “Jerusalem Delivered,” in which he's addressing this trope, he's actually creating this trope. And he ends the stanza by saying, actually these deeds are going to be recounted as an epic song, because they are most honorable and they are most in need to be counted like that. And I have no definite answer, but I think it's useful to - and this is not a discourse that has been happening [00:34:00] as far as I know in the scholarship so far - to look at the ways I think of Caribbean poets, maybe also like Mexican authors and poets have been writing about, writing novels and epics about Columbus, of course, from the other perspective. I guess my question comes from the necessity for joining archives maybe and to see how early modern scholars like me and others, I guess, would benefit from using the paradigm you create to analyze in this modern Mexican canon and read backwards also to the European side of those texts. So that's where I'm coming from, and again, there's a lot of work to be done, I guess. It's super useful the way you frame it. Zac Zimmer: Thank you. And I think one, so one of them, I do talk about a suite of Columbus novels in the book, but I think the one that might be most productive for you to read is Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus. [00:35:00] That's a homophone, it's a pun, you know, like the descendants of Columbus, but also the mistakes of Columbus and the heirs of Columbus. And what he does is instead of trying to enter into this question of the deification of Columbus or the messianic nature of Columbus, the navigator, the admirante, he tries to twist up the ontological framework that would give us a Columbus figure. And so he actually insists that Columbus is a Mayan trickster. And opening up some radical new possibilities that break that framework of firstness, that change the assumed directionality of intellectual travel, and really goes straight to the [00:36:00] ontological framework about what, you know, kind of sidestepping the question of the absolute benevolence or the total evil of a figure like Columbus and saying, no, there's this, there's this framework that is very specific to the Americas, but also recognized in many indigenous and native societies around the world that this figure called the trickster who in this region where we are, is known as the coyote figure (Julian Brave NoiseCat just wrote his new book using the trickster as a way to organize a history of, you know, these parts of the world). So I think there are - this, is what I'm trying to get at when I say that now, the interpretive and theoretical paradigms that I was trying to highlight in this novel are just much more visible in general cultural production. So I'm hoping that [00:37:00] this is going to open up many possibilities for other interpretations, but it is definitely not exhaustive or definitive. So I'm really happy to hear that it might be a good concept for you to use. Caroline Bailey: Speaking of another kind of sort of general awareness, I'm going turn to your fourth chapter on the novel The Sparrow, because you make several references in that chapter to the fact that this novel is the one that's most commonly read by scientists and in particular astrobiologists. And also sort of gesturing to this invisible, you know, sort of word science that may or may not be part of our construction “SF”. How did those conversations go? What do astrobiologists have to say about The Sparrow? And did you end up using it in the work at all or not so much? Zac Zimmer: Well, so because of the work and research I was doing to write this book, I ended up spending a lot of time with astronomers, astrophysicists, and more generally astrobiologists. I started talking to a lot of NASA people because they, [00:38:00] as with so many other people who are seduced by the extraterrestrial conquest of the Americas comparison, really have what Alfred Crosby called the Columbian exchange as like the the limit of their understanding, a productive limit to think with about what's going to happen if, or when, they say, we get confirmation of life off this planet. And this is the example that we have where there's something closest to like planetary scale entering into relationality. And so they're always thinking about that and then it just turns out that they've all read The Sparrow. And they like The Sparrow because not only does it address those issues, but I think it is a pathway for a scientist to talk about theological concerns because [00:39:00] it is a supremely religious novel in content, not necessarily in ultimate meaning, but it is about Jesuits in space, which is another one of these tropes that keep coming up. And The Sparrow has a contested relationship to this earlier SF novel called A Case of Conscience, I think, by James Blish, which is a novel about Jesuits going to a different planet. I mean, I like the idea that the Jesuits are the theological avant-garde of conquest, really did seem historically accurate in the comparison with the Americas. But, yeah, they like the kind of science versus faith. They like that it's, you know, I mean, it's like a pretty classic, [00:40:00] novel. They're characters that people like, they're recognizable tropes that they're falling into, but then they mess with it. There's this, these connections to historical events that happened in the Iroquois Federation and these deep historical referents that I think the scientists can, you know, do cursory research and say like, “this is how it really was!” Which, by the way, is a quote from the novel as well. Like, this is how it was, but it's all wrong. Like this is, you know… and that idea of trying to work through how power and institutional frameworks are going to shape our understanding of any kind of contact narrative. Caroline Bailey: Do you think they find it a cautionary tale? I mean, the ending of that novel is quite bleak for the prospect of contact ever being non-harmful. Zac Zimmer: Mm-hmm. Yes, I think. You know, there's a sequel to the novel that I haven't read. Have you read the sequel? [00:41:00] Caroline Bailey: No. Zac Zimmer: Okay. I didn't really feel compelled to read it. I wasn't really sure what was going to be added to it because it is… so it's also a very like Old Testament centered tale where there are many different layers, but ultimately the main character who is the Jesuit priest who goes on this expedition and makes contact with the society and then ends up behaving in ways that imitate this living, so-called, living martyr in French-Canada named Isaac Jogues, who was tortured and kicked out and kept coming back, an example of, I guess, what they could call devotional empiricism. And so I don't know if they necessarily identify with that particular character, but it really is a Job story. It's about suffering that's impossible to make sense of in a human framework. Yeah, but when I realized it was a, [00:42:00] you know, the thrust of it was a Job tale, it seemed to me that a sequel would be not in the spirit of the theological paradigm it was advancing. If it's an Old Testament novel, if you're going to keep in the Old Testament space, you don't read the sequel, right? Héctor Hoyos: Yeah, one thing that's very compelling about this book is it teaches you to read things differently, to approach not just novels, but cultural products with a different framework. So I'm thinking of Jodie Foster in Contact, or the more recent Amy Adams film Arrival. And those are films about the conquest of the Americas. That's something that your book made me realize because where that whole imagination of first contact comes from is here, what you're describing. But I would also venture to say that it is filtered through the novel form in light of this conversation. The epic, what remains of the epic in the novel, but this thing that is whole, that is consolidated, [00:43:00] that it belongs within a narrative, this reluctance to dwell in the fragmentation that is ongoing contact and friction. There has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end in these narratives. But what I wanted to ask you, Zac, has to do with the disciplinary pickle that we find ourselves in. We have assembled for this podcast a panel of experts and we're able to bridge domains here. But much in the way that medievalists, scholars of the Middle Ages, by and large do not occupy themselves with contemporary medievalisms. They might have to teach a class on The Lord of the Rings here and there because of students, know, their enrollment or what have you. But that's not what a medievalist is supposed to do. That's not what an early modern scholar is supposed to do. Giacomo looks at the period in its time horizon, and you who have written before on more contemporary [00:44:00] works would not naturally occupy yourself with this. And so this leaves this kind of a bridge cultural product, a bridge novelistic formation, unattended by scholarship. It's either something to be celebrated alongside, you know, general cultural studies products because they're wonderful and we celebrate culture, but it's not studied in the kind of like granular fashion that you do. There's no disciplinary home for this thing. So I wanted to ask you about the disciplinariness of this book and maybe slide in another thorny question having to do with also, you know, things that are joining those of us in the table, namely, is it a post-colonial horizon that we're engaging with, is it a decolonial or an anti-colonial or a colonial again, as Luis Cárcamo-Huechante would say. That is kind of crucial because the way that these disciplines are carved in, [00:45:00] when Caroline is traveling in Peru and Ecuador, she's engaging in something that, per one teleology is pre-modern, even though it's contemporary to this present, right? But people talk about these places and there's novels about these places as being pre-modern. I'm thinking of Benjamin Kunkel, if you remember that novel Indecision, right? That's traveling to pre-modern contemporary times or whatever. And so on and so forth, right? I mean, there's these structural ways that we can almost not even have this conversation. So those are the two logs I want to throw into the fire, post-, de-, anti-colonial and also disciplinarians. Zac Zimmer: Yes. Well, okay. Let me, instead of talking about disciplinarity, I'm going to talk about the artists and writers that I'm interested in in the book, because I think they give us a model for how to do it. [00:46:00] Because what almost all of these people have in common, whether they feel like they are successful in doing what they set out to do, like Wilson Harris or Gerald Vizenor, or whether they feel like they are ultimately frustrated in their attempts to do what they're trying to do, like Carmen Boullosa - not because of faults of her own, but she explores it in her novel that she calls the Impossible Novel, or Impossible Novels, plural, by the way. But what they all do, what connects all these people, I mean, it's two things. One is the speculative modality, but two, it is that they are deeply committed to doing academic level research into the source material. So much so that they're not just looking for a kind of narrative framework to then dress up in alien garb and say it's, you know, some interstellar colonization [00:47:00] thing happening, but rather they understand the structures and the limits of the archives, of the chronicles. They understand that the material that comes to us through the anthology, say, is shaped by the power structures of the time, which were undoubtedly imperial and hard to not call colonial. This is maybe gesturing towards the second question. But so, I think that is at least inspirational to me, if not illustrative to us as academics. How can you be committed to re-imagining source material through deeply understanding its own limitations and then attempting to address that? And they are addressing it through aesthetic forms and through literary forms, right? But they, they understand that the material in the archive is [00:48:00] not complete. But it's not randomly incomplete. It's purposefully incomplete. And so how do you deal with the gaps that are the perspectives that you want represented? Like when I teach my colonial Latin American literature courses, one of the first things the students ask for is something that I have to tell them is structurally not available for them. They say, “why can't we have the unmediated direct indigenous account of the conquest of the Americas?” And there are real answers to that question. There are real answers to that question that have to do with book burning and torturing and literacy and how we view the oral culture practices of archaeological research. So they're the real answers that we can give them, but there's not that first immediate answer that they want. Direct access to a different perspective. And so I think it's not a direct answer to your question, but I do find that [00:49:00] the responsibility that these artists and writers take in understanding the source material to try to create new possibilities out of the limits of what's there - that is how we should be thinking and not necessarily respecting the disciplinary boundaries of what we're doing, being motivated by the research questions themselves. But then if you take my advice, you're going to write a book that's going to take you 10 years to get in print and no one's going to know what to do with it until all of a sudden you wait long enough and the world catches up. And then it's like, “this is an interesting book, but why didn't you write about all this stuff that's been happening in the last 10 years?” So. Héctor Hoyos: Or six months, for that matter! Zac Zimmer: Or six months. Héctor Hoyos: The incumbent is making a case for Christopher Columbus's return, right? The glory story of Christopher Columbus. That ideal regime is alive and well in the US today. Zac Zimmer: Well, you know, we should go back to Silencing the Past, the essay on “Good Day Columbus,” is that what it's called? [00:50:00] I get that confused. Héctor Hoyos: Is it Philip Rolfe? Zac Zimmer: No, it's not the Philip Rolfe story. It's Trouillot’s Silencing the Past on the origins of Columbus Day in the American discourse, right? Which is totally created and very parallel to the story of the Confederate statues that were not erected in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War, but were, you know, recreated in an attempt to create a kind of alternative history. And this again, like alternative history fully lies within the SF paradigm, but usually alternative histories are attracted to these key events in history. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if the Nazis had won World War II? Right? Those are the - like Catherine Gallagher wrote a book about this and she said, you know, most of what we can call Alternative History [00:51:00] or Uchronia are focused on those two events. So what if Lincoln wasn't assassinated as a kind of subversion of the Civil War? And so you see that even in trying to imagine other possibilities, we're still attracted to these key events that present themselves as the moment when history happened. And that's what could have happened otherwise. And none of the artists, writers, literary folks that I'm talking about in this book fall for that trap. Right? They understand that it's not just a simple inversion of that moment or the decision in that moment, but it's rather about an investigation into the structures of history and how to recuperate possibilities that were foreclosed, not because of one decisive battle. Okay. So how does that connect to these frameworks and paradigms? Well, I think one thing that anyone who is investigating early modern [00:52:00] periods or the history of Latin America has, and it's a bit of a long-term structural advantage, but has put us at a bit of a disadvantage in a kind of Anglophone dominated understanding of colonialism as the colonialism of the UK, internally and externally in the globe. And so we're talking about a previous moment. We're talking about moments when the actual structures of international law had their origin through debates about just war and just conquest in the Americas. Just by thinking about the 16th century, you're already exploding a certain kind of Anglophone paradigm of what the colonial post-colonial framework is, right? Because we're saying that there is a structure that is happening [00:53:00] previous to that, that's tied to, you know, the period that Giacomo's researching right now, so I imagine you have a lot to say about that as well. And what do we do about it? Well, I think, I don't necessarily have like a position that I want to evangelize, but I do think it's really interesting, especially with our students, to ask them if there is a difference between anti-colonial, decolonial, maybe a-colonial, I don't know? But just like even that framework and to trace the development of anti-colonial struggles in the 20th century versus 21st century paradigms of decoloniality and the status of metaphor in that framework because we're told that decolonization isn't a metaphor, [00:54:00] and yet the most direct paths to understanding what a decolonial horizon could be are through literature and the arts. Right, so that's, I think that's something we're sitting with, but I don't have a direct team to advocate for right now. Héctor Hoyos: I think we're coming towards the end of our conversation, but any other pressing thoughts from interlocutors? Because I have a shallow question, shallow question, not a deep question, shallow question. Zac Zimmer: About time! Héctor Hoyos: So my shallow question has to do with reading recommendations. I think we’re always welcome to have them. And there's been so many thoughtful references in the back and forth. I mean, all of you have mentioned really amazing sources. I will highlight one that you mentioned, Rodrigo Reyes’ 499. Rodrigo Reyes being a really thought-provoking documentaries/fictional filmmaker. [00:55:00] He was recently at Santa Cruz, I believe, he was here at Stanford. Here's my shallow question: what good novels of first encounter would you recommend, or is that a contradiction in terms? Is there no good novel about first encounters? Zac Zimmer: Any good novel about a first encounter is going to understand the structural resonance of that term. And that is something that I think happens in You Dreamed of Empires. There is an attempt to grapple with a cosmovision that believes in cycles of repetition versus a cosmovision that believes in a paradigm of revolution and progress. So I think, yeah, that book is worth, You Dreamed of Empires is worth thinking about from that perspective. I'm going have to take a long pause to think, because I can't remember any of the books that I've read recently. So I think I will go back to some classics of SF [00:56:00] that can be reinterpreted perhaps using some of the thoughts that people will take away from my book if I'm so lucky to have you read it. I would say Lem's Solaris, which really does not get hung up on the first part of the encounter, but the encounter part of the encounter or the contact part of the encounter: what if you don't even know that the entity that you're interacting with is a being? How can you know? How can you tell? Uh, I would say in that vein as well, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, which is much more about the scientific infrastructure that will get built up around a contact zone and the kind of gray and black markets that will develop around a zone of contact. And it also has this beautiful conceit that the thing [00:57:00] that is occupying all of the attention of the entire earth, this contact zone where aliens definitely came from their perspective, was just a stop on a road trip where they landed on the planet, ate some snacks, threw their garbage on the side of the road, and continued on, right. And so dealing with that kind of indifference in the encounter. And… is there one more? Why can't I remember what I'm reading? I'm sure there are plenty of others that I just can't think of right now, but maybe I'll follow up with the reading list. But I do think that, yeah, sorry. What about what about how about anyone else here? I would be interested to know if anyone else is wondering either why I include certain texts in this book, or new things that have come out, or? Caroline Bailey: For a relatively recent novel I really enjoyed Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, which is about, not an extraterrestrial encounter, but an encounter with an intelligent cephalopod species, and one that also thinks quite a bit about AI, if you're interested in artificial intelligence. Zac Zimmer: Tentacle? Giacomo Berchi: Yeah, I was just struck by the reference to Solaris, which actually is [00:58:00] a text I've read years ago and I've been thinking about it as sort of like an ending point from an early modern perspective, exactly like this venue of this archive of texts dealing with the otherness of the ocean, nature and other civilization. And so the fact that they're, as you were saying, the emphasis is not on the firstness, but on the encounterness, let's say, of the event and the fact that this otherness is represented by an ocean, I think it's really relevant for the ways in which the texts I mainly deal with are represented as with the ocean being tamed and conquered as Other. So I think, again, I'm just reinforcing your point about Solaris even from an early modern perspective. I have no other titles, but, yeah. Zac Zimmer: So, before we wrap, I think we have one more idea that we wanted to recommend to everyone. It is Rita Indiana's book, Tentacle, right? Héctor Hoyos: Yes. [00:59:00] The original title for that is La mucama de Omicunlé. It is a first encounter of sorts book. It's also science fiction-y. Zac Zimmer: It's weird! Héctor Hoyos: Quite weird. Quite fabulous. Zac Zimmer: So we just wanted to put that recommendation out there as well. Héctor Hoyos: Thank you very much to all of you. And for those who are here in Palo Alto and not listening at home, we have an amazing lecture by Zac Zimmer coming up! Stay tuned for the next episode of CSN Cafe. [1:00:00]