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Urzaiz, Eduardo. Eugenia: A Fictional Sketch of Future Customs. A Critical Edition. Ed. and Trans. Sarah A. Buck Kachaluba and Aaron Dziubinskyj. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. 284 pages. Soft Cover. ISBN 978-0299306847. $ 26.95.
Hailed as the first Latin American novel to deal with the issue of eugenics, Eduardo Urzaiz's Eugenia: esbozo novelesco de costumbres futuras (Eugenia: A Fictional Sketch of Future Customs), originally published in 1919, now appears for the first time in English, in a critical edition that frames the novel in its political, literary, and scientific context. The novel takes place in the year 2218 in the fictional city of Villautopia. The society of the twenty-third century presented in the novel enjoys the benefits of technological advances, and has contained or eliminated many of the problems of the past, such as poverty, exploitation, and crime. Technology and science have made life easier in this futuristic tale, but at the same time they have drastically modified the way citizens relate to each other. The concept of family no longer exists and has been replaced with the notion of a "group"-a collection of individuals who choose each other based on personal affinities rather than by familial links. Most importantly, however, reproduction in the novel is controlled by the government, through an Institute of Eugenics that selects prospective breeders based on their physical and mental qualities. The novel follows the life of Ernesto, a young man who receives a notification to become an Official Breeder of the Species "in recognition of [his] robustness, health, beauty, and other conditions" (7).
The publication of the novel in the form of a critical edition hints at two potential audiences. On the one hand, the book aims to attract science fiction scholars in general by inscribing Eugenia in the literary tradition of eugenic fictions such as J. B. S. Haldane's Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924), or Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World (1932). On the other, this edition will also appeal to researchers and cultural historians of eugenics, especially now that the eugenics movement is regarded as a global phenomenon (rather than a local effort by American, British, and German...