About Más Allá

Más Allá

Más Allá, in full Más Allá de la Ciencia y de la Fantasía, was a monthly Argentine magazine of science fiction and scientific popularisation published in Buenos Aires by Editorial Abril between June 1953 and June 1957. It produced 48 uninterrupted issues. It arose as a local franchise of the United States magazine Galaxy Science Fiction, founded only three years earlier, but it was far more than a copy of its American model: it was the first Argentine science-fiction magazine that sustained itself over time, the first science-fiction publication in Spanish of its kind, and the place where Argentine science-fiction fandom began in its readers' letters pages. It published translated work by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut alongside Argentine authors including Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Pablo Capanna, and a substantial programme of scientific articles written by Argentine scientists. It closed in June 1957, at the height of its success.

Editorial Abril and the Galaxy franchise

Editorial Abril, the Buenos Aires publishing house of César Civita, tested the Argentine public for science fiction first through its magazine Cinemisterio, which included comics and stories of the genre. The good reception of that experiment led to the decision to publish a dedicated magazine. Más Allá appeared in June 1953, presented as a “revista mensual de aventuras apasionantes en el mundo de la magia científica” — a monthly magazine of thrilling adventures in the world of scientific magic. It was produced as a local franchise of Galaxy Science Fiction, the American magazine founded in 1950 that had redefined United States science fiction toward sociological and satirical themes, and it drew its translated fiction fundamentally from Galaxy and from Astounding. But its editors gave it a structure of its own: slightly more than half of each issue was fiction, stories and novels, and almost all the rest was scientific popularisation — articles and notes on real science — a balance that distinguished it from a pure fiction digest and made it, simultaneously, Argentina's science-fiction magazine and one of its science magazines.

Forty-eight issues and twenty-five thousand readers

Más Allá published 48 monthly issues without interruption between June 1953 and June 1957. Reference works, including the Science Fiction Encyclopedia's entry on Argentina, confirm the run: 48 issues, 1953 to 1957, the first science-fiction publication with short stories by Argentine writers. Its circulation averaged, in its worst moments, some 25,000 copies, according to the figures cited in studies of the magazine, and it built a broad community of readers not only in Argentina but across the Spanish-speaking world. That readership was active, not passive: the magazine's readers' letters section became an institution, and the encyclopedia records that the country's first science-fiction fandom began in its letters from readers. Readers met each other through the magazine, argued about stories and science in its pages, and formed the network from which later Argentine science-fiction institutions — specialised publishers, clubs and conventions — would grow.

Translated fiction: Asimov, Bradbury, Dick and Vonnegut

The fiction of Más Allá introduced Argentine readers, in Spanish, to the central authors of post-war American science fiction at the moment of their maturity. Through its pages circulated the Isaac Asimov of the Foundation era, Ray Bradbury of The Martian Chronicles, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke and Richard Matheson, among many others. For a Spanish-speaking reader in 1954, there was no other regular source of this material: the great book collections in Spanish, notably Editorial Minotauro, founded by Francisco Porrúa in 1955, came after Más Allá and addressed a more literary reader, while the magazine reached a broader public monthly, at kiosk price. The selection mattered as much as the availability. Más Allá translated the more literary and idea-driven wing of American science fiction — Sturgeon's explorations of human difference, Bradbury's lyrical Martian stories, Vonnegut's satires — and in doing so it shaped the taste of the first Argentine science-fiction generation toward the genre as literature of ideas, a taste visible in the Argentine science fiction written ever since.

Argentine authors in its pages

From the beginning, Más Allá made room for Argentine writers, and that decision created Argentine science fiction as a commercial practice. Héctor Germán Oesterheld, later the creator of El Eternauta, published two stories in the magazine, one under the pseudonym H. Sánchez Puyol, and his exact editorial role remains debated by historians — versions cited in the scholarship range from his having directed the magazine for a period to his having written its small scientific vignettes and curiosities. Pablo Capanna, who became Argentina's leading theorist and historian of science fiction, was among the talents the magazine introduced. The astrophysicist Carlos Varsavsky published three scientifically based detective stories under the pseudonym Abel Asquini, in a series titled Los crímenes del L.I.O. Other local contributors named in studies of the magazine include Oscar Varsavsky, Juan Pedro Edmunds, Ignacio Covarrubias, Adolfo Pérez Zelaschi, Maximiliano Mariotti and Claudio Paz, with Argentine illustrators such as J. Eusevi and Hugo Csecs. The magazine published, across its run, one novel and dozens of short novels and stories by Argentine authors — a body of work without precedent in Spanish-language commercial publishing.

Science popularisation and the Espaciotest

Almost half of Más Allá was not fiction at all. Its popularisation programme offered articles and notes of scientific dissemination written for the general reader, including contributions by recognised Argentine scientists such as Oscar Varsavsky, Mario Bunge and José Westerkamp, named in the Universidad Nacional de La Plata's recommendation of the magazine's digital collection. It ran a knowledge questionnaire on space called Espaciotest, and small features on scientific subjects and curiosities that kept the magazine's promise to stand “más allá” — beyond — both science and fantasy, as its full title declared. In the Argentina of the 1950s, a decade of atomic energy, early spaceflight and expanding technical education, that combination answered a real hunger: readers who came for the stories stayed for the science, and readers who came for the science encountered the stories. The magazine's double identity is why historians of Argentine science communication, as well as historians of its fiction, claim it as a founding publication.

The generation that read the future

The readers of Más Allá became a generation. A book-length investigation by Wanda Elfenbaum, Christian Vallini Lawson and Darío Lavia, titled Más Allá: La generación que leyó el futuro (“Más Allá: The generation that read the future”), reconstructed the world around the magazine through the testimony of its readers, recording which texts marked their futures. Pablo Capanna, in his interview for that project, described how the genre was at first viewed with suspicion and its readers judged eccentric, before general acceptance integrated science fiction into academic study, museums and galleries. The magazine's disappearance in 1957 came, as the anthology history Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana put it, at the moment of its greatest success — and its successors took up the relay. The Minotauro book collection, founded in 1955 while the magazine still appeared, carried its literary standard into book form, and the writers and readers formed by Más Allá sustained Argentine science fiction through the decades that followed.

Closure in 1957

Más Allá published its last issue in June 1957, completing exactly four years and 48 issues. The reliable sources consulted for this profile agree on the fact and date of the closure but do not establish a single documented cause, and this profile states that limit openly: the magazine ended at its peak, and later writers have treated its disappearance as a signal — an ending that marked the close of Argentine science fiction's first age — rather than as a failure of readership. Editorial Abril itself continued as a major publisher for decades afterwards, and science fiction in Argentina continued through books, principally Minotauro, rather than through another magazine of the same kind. No Argentine science-fiction magazine replaced Más Allá on the kiosks in its era, which is part of why its 48 issues acquired their mythical status among collectors and historians.

Place in Latin American science fiction

Historians of Latin American science fiction treat Más Allá as the hinge between a prehistory and a golden age. Before it, the region's science fiction consisted of isolated works — Horacio Quiroga's stories, Roberto Arlt's novels, and supremely Adolfo Bioy Casares's La invención de Morel of 1940, which Borges praised as a work of reasoned imagination. Más Allá, in the formulation of the Goorden and Van Vogt anthology history, finally revealed the local writers of science fiction at a commercial level, publishing a novel and dozens of novellas by Argentine authors. Together with the founding of Minotauro in 1955, it formed the space within which an Argentine science fiction could exist as a continuing practice rather than a series of exceptions. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia's summary is the most concise: Más Allá was the first science-fiction publication with short stories from Argentine writers, and the country's first fandom began in its letters pages.

Availability and legacy today

The complete collection of Más Allá has been preserved and made accessible by Argentine cultural institutions. The Archivo Histórico de Revistas Argentinas, AHIRA, holds the magazine, and the Universidad Nacional de La Plata's repository recommends its digitised issues to researchers, describing it as the first Argentine monthly magazine dedicated to science fiction and scientific dissemination and emphasising the quality of its popularisation. Collector and reader communities have also shared the complete run of 48 issues digitally, testifying to a readership that never entirely disappeared. For a world directory of magazines, Más Allá is an essential Argentine entry: a magazine that lasted only four years but created a genre's public, its first fandom and several of its authors, and that remains the founding document of science fiction in the Spanish language.