A excerpt of...

 

Future... the final frontier. The Land of Vera Cruz lamely accompanies the world’s progress, especially its largest conurbation, São Paulo of Orunmilá. However, no citizen ignores that the country – with its indolent rabble insoluble in rivers where indigenous people bathe and its local color dissolved by the color theory of the sugar trust – is blacklisted by Koumei conglomerate. The 21st century differs from the previous one for its extraordinary nanotechnological ability. The Couch Potato Club sectarians continue worshiping televisions, now called micro-HDTV. The cartoon heroes are very similar to those of ancient times – a golden era unattainable by the perseverance of Schliemann – with the exception of those being a little more complex, providing to the vidiotics an alleged pyrotechnic spectacle. 

An example of this was aired on channel 301 on last Thursday: the late Namor, Prince of Atlantis, hurls St. Elmo's fire towards a bivouac guarded by a character who calls himself “Jaspion of Hormuz”. This is a century conducive to the resumption of the Age of Enlightenment, because what attracts most people's attention is the positron dichroic. The housewives, today more fractious than the ancient knitter maenads, wash dirty clothes in the open, so that the gods can see a squabble in the front row. In one of the capital’s malls, a black man catwalks. The whitewashed walls highlight his classic clerk gait, an amanuensis in the employment of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. The white collar gives way to Damascus caftan. For him, the representations of the world can be analyzed in silico, as it is not absolutely necessary to travel to Nepal to know what a three-in-one is. The everyday club can be softened with mental entertainment sponsored by hypertexts abundant in morphinated morphemes. 

The black man tightens the girth of his step and the belly strap of his celiac plexus in passing through some vacant lots turned into quintas from Alentejo, due to the general poverty and market devaluation. The fences that protect the lots are far from what could be called a pre-established harmony. But the haste leads the walker to step on human excrement, the worst matter that kicks can be exposed. 

Snippet of my first published book. Piritas Siderais (Outer Space Pyrites) was critically acclaimed and, few years after, turned into a cult. Surprisingly (at least for me) the book was object of a couple of academic thesis and dissertations. A catchy briefing of the book can be found in Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future, by M Elizabeth Ginway: In Piritas Siderais (1994), the title of which refers to the gold-colored nuggets commonly known as "fool's gold", black American Berzelius Baldwin makes a pact with the devil to be immortal, with his soul to be places in the body of a Brazilian black who happens to be the twin brother of Zé Seixas, the protagonist of the story. However, when that twin dies in utero before the reincarnation can take place, the attempt fails. In order to keep his end of the bargain, the devil improvises a genetic chip which renders Baldwin's body immortal, but only if it is nurtured with a constant supply of gold, an abundant supply of which Baldwin has located on an as-yet-uncharted planet, ruled by an Afro-Brazilian deity. Baldwin believes that he can secretly obtain the gold from the planet by channeling. Maria, the priestess, claims that her chicken, Leda, has the power to provide part of this service by imitating the goose that laid the golden eggs. Zé and his friend Terêncio, who also happens to be an excellent medium, volunteer to go along with the plot. When the Afro-Brazilian god Oko magically appears, Terêncio, in an act of recalling Zeus's seduction of Leda the swan, channels Oko's powers so that the chicken is able to lay golden eggs. Of course, like the god's name, Oko (oco or hollow in Portuguese), the victory is hollow because Terêncio, after his orgiastic night with the chicken Leda, is famished and cannot resist roasting her in order to satisfy his hunger, thus completing this satiric fairy tale and justifying the title, Outer Space Pyrites.