Anticitera, artefacto dentado
Aura García-Junco

FICTION | 2018 | 112 pages

Like the parts of a complex machine, the stories of machines that can read the stars, of boiling vapors, of secret manuscripts, and of mad inventors are linked in Anticitera, artefacto dentado by Aura García-Junco in order to create a magical and mysterious atmosphere. Starting from the construction of an honest and conscious work of fiction—as is announced from the epigraph that opens the novel—the reader dives into an imaginative universe reminiscent of ancient legends and classical references.

The fragmented structure and the individual stories that make up a whole, therefore, function as a solar system, or, better yet, like the gears in a complex contraption. Like so, every chapter—although seemingly independent—is one more piece that revolves around a single story: that of an artifact that is able to predict the movement of stars and planets. Inspired by those marvelous objects invented in Ancient Greece, this story is also a clockwork mechanism.

To approach this novel, you don’t need to be an alchemist or a pioneer of new techniques and science, and you also don’t need to predict astronomical positions—however, you do need an open mind. Just like Archimedes imagined instruments that recreated the moment when “the sun and the moon dance to a perfect, mathematical score of proportions and voiceovers,” the ancestral elements are reinvented within these pages.

RIGHTS: spanish TIERRA ADENTRO

“Aura García-Junco creates an unusual novel where Pythagorean knowledge, the arcana of Renaissance Hermeticism, and some medieval legends transformed into great literature converge.”
— Roberto Pilego, Milenio
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