Down with Gargamel! The Science Fiction of Recent Insurrections

As fiction, as a work of the imagination, science fiction brings into consciousness objects, figures, and scenarios that do not yet exist. It builds whole, entire worlds that allow us to take distance from our own, worlds where we can start to conceive everything that seemed impossible only because the limitations of our world did not allow us to imagine them. Therein lies the force of science fiction and fiction in general: in its reverberations, its continued effects on the "real life" of both inner and material realities. My contribution to this special section traces the shape and impact of micropolitical tools of insurrection as imagined in Othoniel Rosa's Down with Gargamel! It does so by exploring the implicit and explicit links between the fictive spaces of the novel and the uprisings that have emerged in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Americas in the twenty-first century.