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The pandemic has put us in a place we did not expect, faced with an uncertainty that we had forgotten. And the confinement has given us what to think. Someone with the culture of Javier Sierra (Teruel, 1971) has given a lot of typing. is Not is the first pandemic nor will it be the last. Javier knows it well and put together myths, history and scientific literature. He felt the urgency to share that vision of the world with everyone, especially with young people. The result is “The message of Pandora” (the Planet), a novel of letters that read like a sigh and brings us travel -real and metaphorical- to stimulate our curiosity and to ask relevant questions, especially now.
A young man receives a letter that may change his life…
“we Were in phase 1, when I made the decision that my text would have to come urgently to the reader. And there is no text more urgent in all the narrative genres that the letter , because you are appealing”, he says. Arys, the girl to whom it is addressed this message from the possible future and the remote past, is “a metaphor of the society that, faced with a global threat manifests itself, has matured. We have noticed that death is just around the corner. Arys reaches the age of 18 years, enters into the adult world and receive a letter, warning him to”.
– How do thought track as well scientific theories so suggestive?
-I Rescue something that is science but it is out of the story dominant: panspermia. The idea that life, and with it the pathogens, coming out of the Earth and is inherent to the universe. That is the idea that the defending winners of the Nobel prize and was already in the Greek myths.
-gives back to the myth of Pandora, the first woman that brought misfortunes for their curiosity…
-The story dominant plays Pandora in key patriarchal and misogynistic, the first woman is sent to Earth with a box which was forbidden to open, and upon arrival opened it and it brought the misfortune on humanity. Seems a lot like the story of Eve in the Genesis. What if we interpret it as a metaphor for panspermia? Coming out of the story dominant I have found a new key of reading of classic myths and that is what I offer to the reader.
– have We forgotten how to read myths?
-Interpret the myths from the perspective of the narrator. A mind of five or six thousand years that needed to convey information to their descendants. If it becomes a story where there are emotions, savage images such as Saturn devouring his children, it is impossible to forget. So we wrote the stories essential of the species.
-Travel to the first pandemics of mankind, and match with the cave paintings. What is casual?
-Is one of the findings for this book, just when we started with agriculture and livestock, in the passage to the neolithic era, we begin to build images of gods that are half human half animals. The transmission of the virus is a process of human contact with animals. The human being saw that in the fusion of the human – animal had something powerful, the deities hybrid is produced when there was sufficient population to be infected.
-It shows that humanity was always in danger. The Idea that the more young people will find in his book…
-What I give to the reader is perspective, maybe what you should be doing the education system of the civilized world. We lose the taste for the humanities, the discussion. I think that we are threatened and where I can combat that is on my literature by returning to the reader the joy of discovering things.
– what Is a mask against the virus of the closed minds?
-The virus that concerns me most is not the Covid-19, but the virus of ignorance. Constantly attacks us, the last attack is what is happening with the statues. Behind the scenes there is an ignorance absolute about what is the history and these characters that built the world that we have today. This is a dangerous virus, which leads us to make wrong decisions. We talk about improving public health systems, but they also need the education, or the civilization will collapse because of the virus of ignorance.
-The books are out of fashion…
-The book makes you free, you can stop to think and even to answer. In the book there is a criticism of the dogma. We do not believe that are a thing of the middle ages. Still here, although not so much in religion. The great reservoir of dogmas is now the policy.
how would You like someone to respond to your letter?
– of Course!, but it would have to be by letter, an Arys, someone of this young generation that responded to the world with their plans for this world that they inherit. I wish I had someone that would respond.
– do Was inspired by other books, epistolary, or how he came up with the idea of the letter?
-No, I went to my own file. I keep them in boxes all the cards that I received in my childhood and adolescence. Then as you start to receive letters from bank and not the guards. My father was a postman and could be overcome with a “Sierra-Mail, and the postmark. I sent letters to the astronomical observatory of the Vatican, asking if they had any information about extraterrestrial life. I answered. I sent letters to president Felipe González, asking if some day they were going to release the secret files on UFOS. I answered. Nasa and told me to appoint me photographs and wonderful materials that when you get to 11 or 12 years of life-changing.
– And what lesson he drew that child?
-I Discovered that the question receives answers, and that is the essence of that you write a letter. The one that don’t ask you don’t receive anything. Writing is an intrinsic part of the process of learning, of knowledge.
