Hybrid Animals and Human Empire in Juan Miguel Aguilera and Javier Redal’s <i>Mundos en el abismo</i>

In the present article, I examine the importance of the hybrid zoologies of Juan Miguel Aguilera and Javier Redal’s Spanish sf Mundos en el abismo [Worlds in the Abyss] (1988). I argue that the novel’s space-operatic, terrestrial, and extraterrestrial animals may be read as fictive fusions of vertebrate, invertebrate, plant, and machine, beings instrumental to the novel’s examination of bioengineering and colonial power. In my analysis of the socioeconomic significance of Mundos en el abismo’s biological extrapolations, I make use of the animal question and its subqueries as presented by Joan Gordon in “Animal Studies” (2009).