Braulio Tavares was born in 1950 and has lived in Rio de Janeiro for almost two decades. He has been reading sf since he was nine, and his sf-related works of fiction have been published in both Brazil and Portugal: his collection A Espinha Dorsal da Memoria (The Backbone of Memory, 1989), was winner of the Premio Caminho de Ficcao Cientifica, in Lisbon. In 1992, he organized, with some friends, a bibliography of Brazilian fantastic literature, published by Brazil's National Library Foundation, under the title Fantastic, Fantasy and Science Fiction Literature Catalog. Itis the first survey of fantastic literature in Brazil. He has published a story inOn Spec, Canada (Fall 1994), and articles (mostly on Brazilian sf) in Shards of Babel (iolland), The New York Review of Science Fiction (USA), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (ed. Clute & Nicholls) and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (ed. Clute & Grant). Stories of the Will-Happen: Science Fiction in Brazil Braulio Tavares Perhaps the greatest achievements of Brazilian prose are in the field of the so- called realistic novel - whether in the psychological mode, as in the works of Clarice Lispector (1925-1977) and Machado de Assis (1839-1908), or in the social ‘one, as in Jorge Amado (1912- ) or Erico Verissimo (1905-1975). Even so, fantastic literature has a long tradition in Brazil, although it has not received the critical attention it deserves. Until recently, it never gathered itself in what we could call “movements” or “literary groups”; and there is only a small number of important writers who regularly explored the fantastic. Science fiction in Brazil has always aroused two opposite responses in the readers (whether common readers or critics). To some, it was too scientific or technological, too “American”, and thus had little to do with what they called “Brazilian reality”, largely assumed to be that of a colonised, Third-World country, where rural life prevailed; to others, it wasn't scientific enough, since itallowed much space to flights of fantasy and improbable situations, and could give the readers (especially the younger ones) a wrong idea about science. Proto-sf and Fantasy The first proto-sf work in Brazilian literature was a fewilleton written by Joaquim Felicio dos Santos (1828-1895) and published in the newspaper O ‘Jequitinhonha from 1868-1872, under the title Paginas da Historia do Brasil, Escritas no Ano de 2000 ("Pages of a History of Brazil, Written in the Year 2000”). It is a satirical work in which Brazilian Emperor Pedro Il is abducted to Foundation 77 (Autumn, 1999), 84-91 Copyright 8 2011 FroGues! LLC. Al ights verve. Copyright © Science Fickon Foordation.