Since I just told you of the passing of Angel Arango, I thought I’d share my thoughts on first meeting him, and why it was a crime I hadn’t learned of him earlier.

The following originally appeared in the December 9, 2002 Science Fiction Weekly (issue #294), which merged with SCI FI Wire in 2009 and morphed into Blastr in 2010. (FYI—I’ve been editing sites for Syfy since—gulp!—2000.)

90 Miles and a Million Light-Years From Home

I just got back from a visit—a visit which a year ago I would have said was impossible—to Cuba. For citizens of the United States, such legal visits are not an easy thing to pull off. Travel under a General License is limited to six very narrow categories, and I was lucky enough to fall into one of them. So during the week of Thanksgiving, I—along with Locus publisher Charles N. Brown and Locus executive editor Jennifer A. Hall—went to Havana to research the current state of Cuban science fiction. We timed our trip to coincide with the conference Cubaficción 2002, so that we’d be able to meet with as many Cuban writers, artists, editors and fans as possible.

Modern science fiction started out as an American invention, but now that over three-quarters of a century has passed, it has developed a presence throughout the world. Listening to the international voices of SF can change the way we feel about all SF. Last year, for instance, I visited Chengdu, the capital city of the Szechuan province, to visit the headquarters of Science Fiction World magazine and discover how things are done in China. That experience was so enlightening that this year I decided to reach out to yet another foreign community of the fantastic to learn more about its unique flavor of SF. As it turns out, though Cuba is only 90 miles off our shores, compared to China it is a far more distant country.

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Angel Arango, one of the founding fathers of Cuban science fiction, died recently at age 86. We met in 2002, when I was lucky enough to attend Cubaficción in Havana. He’d been publishing science fiction since the ’60s, and seemed a piece of living history.

I took to him immediately, and looking back on it now, I suspect that, as he was the Jack Williamson of Cuba, my love for Jack bled over a bit into my feelings for Angel, which is what caused, I think, that instant connection. He’d seen a lot over his decades writing science fiction in that country, and I wanted to learn what his time had been like.

I’m not fully conversant with the details of his life—I’ll leave the telling of those to others—but I did want to note his passing, and to make sure you took a moment to think of him as well.

So I’d like to share what’s perhaps his most famous short story, “El planeta negro,” originally published in his 1966 collection of the same name. I’ve scanned the version below from the 1983 anthology Cuentros Cubanos de Ciencia Ficcion, a copy of which I picked up at a book stall during my time in Havana.
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