El Hacedor (the Maker): A Profile & Bibliography of Borges

"Time is the fabric I am made of. The world, unfortunately is real. I, unfortunately am Borges."-from the essay New Refutation of Time

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Jorge Luis Borges was a dream weaver, stringing together words that captured the mind in a never-ending maze of thought, consideration, and struggle. To read a story by Borges is to abandon the concepts of time, memory, self, and society that we cling to everyday, and to step into a winding labyrinth of intellectual games. He was one of those rare writers who defied categorization, and thus could easily slide from genre to genre. At times he wrote mystery, at others fantasy, and in at least some senses of the word science fiction. Borges wrote science fiction the way that H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe wrote science fiction, endlessly shifting through reality, psychology, societal problems, and dreams.

Borges was a science fiction writer in the sense that he constructed alternate realities for us. He created worlds that we can become lost in, but like any great magician, it was only a slight of hand trick, smoke, and mirrors. Hidden within the shadows, there always lies another message, something that is grounded very much in our waking reality. Woven into every venture he made from this plane, he skillfully placed a very pointed idea that pertains to the way we live our lives, and how the world moves and works that is around us.

In the example of his story "Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius," Borges uses a sci-fi convention by creating alternate worlds and metaphysical problems that slowly take over our day-to-day reality. In the meantime, he notes subtly that the whole history of those worlds was created by a group of scholars on our planet and a rich beneficiary racist, merely for fun. This makes these worlds merely an aspect of media (such as the created worlds of television and film, novels and games) that we view. Its dissemination into the public psyche as reality

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