My first short story, “San Cibernético”, will be appearing alongside 19 other stories in the anthology The Internet Is Where the Robots Live Now, which is already available for preorder from Paper Dog Books!
“San Cibernético” is about an orphan on a worldship who discovers a mummified cyborg while hiding from scientists in the Deep Belowdecks. Currently, “San Cibernético” is the only story I’ve written in that universe, but I have started a second story exploring other characters and another part of the same worldship.
I wrote the first draft of “San Cibernético” back in January 2015 while leading a group of nine friends around Argentina for a few weeks. Although I wrote the story by hand over just a few days, it had been a subconscious work in progress since ~2010 (or earlier, if you count my late 1990s interest in Peruvian mummies).
In the late 2000s/early 2010s, I read a National Geographic article about La Santa Muerte along the US-Mexico border (I think it was this one) and grew fascinated by the existence of Latin American cult saints, particularly when I realized there were far more than just La Santa Muerte. When I encountered shrines to Gauchito Gil in Buenos Aires in 2011, my interest grew.
That fascination combined with a separate interest in indigenous Andean burial practices, being startled witless by an Andean mummy in the Salta (life pro tip: don’t put your face up to a pane of dark glass in a museum before you turn the display light switch on), a National Geographic article about cult saints created by orphan children, and reading Santa Evita, and voila! “San Cibernético” was born!
If you’re interested in learning more about Latin American cult saints, I recommend Cultures of Devotion (which has an accompanying, interactive website, culturesofdevotion.com ). If you’ve got recommendations for me to read, let me know!
MOLO WRITES 