The 42 sees the light

Lovers of fantasy genres have now their own festival, a new event that introduces Barcelona as one of UNESCO City of Literature. It’s the 42, organised by the Barcelona City Council through the Institut de Cultura (ICUB) and curated by writer and professor Ricard Ruiz Garzón. The goal of the event is to reclaim all the genres that share some characteristics of the non-realistic or non-mimetic narratives, which, for some years now, have been setting new trends that have influenced various creative disciplines, such as television series, videogames, cinema and illustration. As the organisation explains, the 21st century doesn’t have one unique reality, it has multiple, and we need new tools to tell them all.

The Fabra i Coats, Fabrica de Creació and the Biblioteca Ignasi Iglésias – Can Fabra will be the two main stages of the festival, which will take place between 3 to 7 November, and will include more than 70 activities and a couple of hundred protagonists, including writers and moderators. Amongst the participants, there will be Alexandra Bracken, Elia Barceló, Susanna Clarke, Carmen Maria Machado, Care Santos, César Mallorquí, Nicholas Eames, Anna Starobinets, Rosa Montero, Marc Pastor, Francesco Nepitello, Margarida Aritzeta, Stuart Turton, Joan Lluís-Lluís, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Maite Carranza, Albert Monteys, Manel Loureiro, Víctor García Tur, Giovanna Rivero, Salvador Macip and Laura Fernández. Also, the festival will be structured around a series of thematic axes. In this first edition, mythology, robots, posthumanism, feminism, terror, and the Barcelona of the future will be some of them. In addition, there will be another axis focused on the revival of the genre in Catalan and the classics, with tributes to Stanislaw Lem, Ana María Matute, Víctor Nubla and Domingo Santos, among others. And, as in many other festivals, there will also be awards: 42 will award the best books published in the previous year in the fantasy genres in nine categories and in Catalan and Spanish. The award ceremony will be on Saturday 6 November at 9 p.m. at the Fabra i Coats.

The organisers have said that the 42 aspires to raise more questions than answers and that it wants to open the debate about all the questions the fantastic genres put on the table. When it comes to the name chosen for the event, as some of the fans of this genre may have already guessed, it’s because 42 is the quintessential number of science fiction and all fantasy genres.

The festival will open on 3 November with the opening of the exhibition Robot dreams: 100 years of imagining artificial beings, where there will be 16 human-sized literary robots. And it will finish on the 7 with a recital organised by the ALEC and directed by Sebastià Portell, in which Josep Lluís Aguiló, Raquel Santana, Guim Valls and Lucia Pietrelli will participate. It will also count with the live illustrations of Marina Vidal, Àlex Santaló, Ricard Efa and Laia Baldevy, and live music by Pentina’t Lila i Sèrie Zeta. Between the opening and the closing, there will be five days of intense activities for the fans and curious, for the lovers of the fantastic genres, but also for new and future readers. You can check out all the details at 42’s official website.