Festival & Game of the Worlds

In Game of the Worlds, in the far, far, future, where scarcity is a memory and every human problem has been solved, a middle-aged father has fallen behind the times. Bemused, and a little disturbed, he watches his children play Game of the Worlds, a Total Reality (TR) war game that involves the utter annihilation of countless alien civilizations--which are at least as real as the narrator's own. Would it not, he ponders, be better to make contact and engage in that outdated liberal ideal, cultural exchange? The children are emphatic: No! The stakes are too high. And they're not wrong... As he wrangles with his own tech issues and fumblingly manipulates his Discourse Corrector--which chillingly resembles ChatGPT--on awkward beachside dates with his virtual girlfriend, a chain of logic leads to (of all things!) the Idea of God... Epic and domestic, madcap and musing by turns, this prescient novel (written in 1985, and published in 2000 by Editorial El Broche, which was founded to publish this one single book and then dissolved) reads like a message in a bottle from an all-too-familiar yet bewitchingly strange future.

In Festival, the genius postmodern filmmaker Alec Steryx is the star guest of a film festival in an unnamed South American country, invited by his greatest admirer. But Steryx has brought a surprise: his nonagenarian mother. Everyone is baffled: Why? Steryx's mother hates movies, loathes travel, and does nothing but complain, despite insisting on attending every screening and reception. Half-blind and terminally cranky, Steryx's mother gums up the works, but larger problems are in store: wreaking havoc are an evil prominent critic and a horde of teenagers who love Steryx not for his art films but for the crass PlayStation games based on them. And then the unthinkable happens: Steryx's mother, who can barely walk, disappears. A delightfully baroque comedy of errors, Aira's Festival, is, all at once, a loving parody of artists and the institutions that support them, a serious meditation on postmodern art, and a propulsive, lyrical, mind-bending adventure in which the border between life and fiction is as porous as an old sponge.

Game of the Worlds could have easily been one of Steryx's films in Festival, drawing a fascinating through-line between these two gems--oddly twinned masterpieces by one of the greatest fabulists of any age: past, present, or 40,000 years in the future.