It begins with a paradox.

In the global imagination, Brazil is often seen as the "land of the future." A futurity that never quite arrives, trapped in a loop of potential and paralysis. Yet beneath that cliché lies an overlooked reality: Brazil has spent over a century scripting its own speculative futures. Not the gleaming techno-utopias of Silicon Valley, but gritty, improvised visions—a speculative fiction born not in the lab, but in the street market, the favela, the jungle, the haunted past.

Brazilian science fiction has always been a genre of contradictions. It oscillates between mimicry of Western models and radical reinvention, between colonial trauma and postmodern playfulness. Today, it stands at a unique crossroads: hybrid, globalized, and increasingly impossible to ignore.

This is the story of how a peripheral genre in a peripheral nation became a cultural glitch in the system—a cyber-tropical mutation that rewired the DNA of sci-fi itself.

When the Future Was an Imported Product

Science fiction in Brazil began, as in many other places, by importing European templates. In 1875, Augusto Emílio Zaluar wrote O Doutor Benignus, a Jules Verne-inspired "scientific romance." But instead of bold time travel or interplanetary conquest, Zaluar’s protagonist stays put—watching the world through a device that projects distant images, without interfering.

This voyeuristic stance would become a pattern. Early Brazilian science fiction didn’t lead expeditions; it sat in salons, observing. Technology was a hobby of the elite, a tool for bourgeois self-improvement—not a vehicle for social transformation. The colonial hangover lingered: Europe colonized the stars, Brazil colonized its drawing rooms.

Even when Brazilian authors tackled global issues, they did so through a detached lens. In 1926, Monteiro Lobato published O Presidente Negro (The Black President), a speculative tale about the United States electing a Black leader in 2228. But instead of celebrating inclusion, Lobato’s dystopian narrative ends in racial genocide—an uncomfortable mirror of Brazil's own racist fears, wrapped in the language of futurism.

These early texts were less about expanding possibilities than reinforcing hierarchies. Science was a spectacle, not a social force.

The Pulp Years: Monsters, Amazons, and Satire

In the 1920s and ’30s, Brazilian science fiction shifted from salons to pulp magazines. The results were bizarre and fascinating.

Gastão Cruls’s A Amazônia Misteriosa (1925) reads like The Island of Dr. Moreau set in the Amazon. A European scientist performs grotesque experiments on human-animal hybrids, while the Brazilian protagonist—again—mostly observes. But this time, the story carries an anti-colonial critique: the Amazon isn’t just exotic terrain; it’s a contested space, a laboratory of colonial cruelty.

Menotti del Picchia’s A Filha do Inca (1930) stages a Brazilian military expedition that discovers a hidden techno-utopia in the jungle. But the "advanced" society is a sterile dystopia, obsessed with progress and space travel. The Brazilian soldiers ultimately reject it, opting for rural simplicity—a pastoral dream soon bulldozed by Brazil’s rapid urbanization.

Berilo Neves added misogynistic satire to the mix, penning pulp stories where machines replace women and gender roles invert grotesquely. His tales were wildly popular, despite their reactionary bent. They reflected a tension still unresolved today: technology as liberation versus technology as social regression.

The First Wave: From Passive Spectacle to Political Code

It wasn’t until the 1960s that Brazilian science fiction tried to take control of the narrative.

The GRD generation, named after editor Gumercindo Rocha Dorea, published the country’s first real sci-fi collections. Writers like André Carneiro, Levy Menezes, and Fausto Cunha crafted stories that borrowed from Bradbury’s lyricism and Wellsian extrapolation but began localizing the genre’s anxieties.

In Fausto Cunha’s As Noites Marcianas (1960), Mars is not just another planet—it’s a mirror reflecting Earth’s own absurdities. Domingos Carvalho da Silva’s Água de Nagasáqui (1965) channelled nuclear fears through the lens of postcolonial trauma.

Still, much of this first wave stopped short of fully "Brazilianizing" sci-fi. The genre remained tied to Anglo-American tropes, albeit transplanted to tropical soil.

The Dictatorship Years: Dystopia Becomes Protest

Then came Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). Speculative fiction became a smokescreen for dissent.

Writers coded political critique into futuristic scenarios. Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s Não Verás País Nenhum (1981) portrayed a polluted, authoritarian São Paulo where citizens forget how to rebel. Paulo de Sousa Ramos’s O Outro Lado do Protocolo (1985) explored social control through the regulation of sexuality and aging—a veiled critique of state repression.

Science fiction wasn’t just a genre anymore. It was survival strategy.

The Cyber-Tropical Turn: Tupinipunk and the Cannibal Manifesto

By the late 1980s, a new generation of Brazilian writers wanted more than allegory. They wanted to hack sci-fi itself.

Ivan Carlos Regina’s Manifesto Antropofágico de Ficção Científica (1988) invoked Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto Antropófago—the founding text of Brazilian modernism that proposed cultural "cannibalism" as a strategy. Don’t imitate Europe or the U.S., it argued. Swallow their ideas, digest them, and spit them back out, reconfigured.

Brazilian sci-fi took this literally.

Enter tupinipunk: a low-tech, high-concept fusion of cyberpunk, magical realism, and street culture. Unlike American cyberpunk, where sleek implants and cyberspace ruled, tupinipunk focused on analog hacks, spiritual algorithms, and postcolonial glitches.

Fabio Fernandes and Jacques Barcia launched Post-Weird Thoughts, a blogspace in English, to insert Brazilian voices into global SF debates. Braulio Tavares’s Espinha Dorsal da Memória (1990) fused first-contact narratives with Afro-Brazilian metaphysics. Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro’s O Vampiro de Nova Holanda (1998) turned colonial Brazil into a gothic alternate history.

This was not your father’s sci-fi. This was samba in cyberspace, Candomblé on Mars.

Digital Fandom, Gaming, and Viral Expansion

The 2000s brought the genre fully online. Brazilian sci-fi exploded in blogs, e-zines, and forums. Fan communities built ecosystems outside traditional publishing.

Games became new narrative platforms. Taikodom, Brazil’s first Massive Social Game (MSG), invited players to terraform Mars while navigating postcolonial power dynamics. Lodi-Ribeiro wrote the backstory, blending hard science with social critique.

At conventions like FantastiCon, vampire lit and fantasy found common ground with sci-fi. Authors like André Vianco, Martha Argel, and Giulia Moon sold tens of thousands of books, reanimating Portuguese conquistadors as undead antiheroes.

The lines between genres blurred. Horror, fantasy, cyberpunk, and folklore became interoperable code.

The New Weird and the Post-Internet Wave

By the 2010s, Brazilian sci-fi joined the global New Weird movement. Think China Miéville with a samba beat.

Octavio Aragão’s A Mão Que Cria (2006) mashed zombies with time cops. Cristina Lasaitis’s Fábulas do Tempo e da Eternidade (2008) explored posthuman love and biohacked intimacy. Fabio Fernandes edited Terra Incognita, translating global weird fiction into Portuguese and exporting Brazilian weirdness abroad.

The post-internet generation went further, declaring in their 2005 Manifesto Antibrasilite:

“It is not necessary to make reference to Brazil in a fictional work for it to be Brazilian. We express our Brazilianness in style, in ideas—not in setting.”

This was a radical shift. Sci-fi was no longer about nation-states; it was about memes, networks, and digital identity.

Why It Matters: Science Fiction from the Periphery

Brazilian science fiction isn’t just entertainment. It’s a cultural hack of the global speculative pipeline.

In the North, science fiction often imagines the future as an extension of Silicon Valley: cleaner tech, smarter AI, better gadgets. In Brazil, the future is dirtier, messier, more contradictory. It involves spiritual machines, urban decay, Afro-Indigenous cosmologies, and political hauntings.

In a world increasingly dominated by digital colonialism—where Silicon Valley writes the code and the rest of the world consumes it—Brazilian sci-fi offers a counter-narrative. It asks: what happens when the periphery programs the future?

The Next Iteration

Today, Brazilian sci-fi stands at a crucial junction. Its writers are globally connected, digitally native, and increasingly uninterested in playing by Western genre rules. They publish via fanzines, Instagram, RPGs, podcasts, and hybrid platforms that blur literature, gaming, and activism.

They don’t ask for permission to enter the canon. They build their own.

In a sense, Brazilian science fiction was never really about predicting the future. It was always about rewriting the present—under different names, in different skins, through hacked interfaces.

And in that recursive loop of invention and subversion, Brazil might just be where the real future starts.