“Since I remember as a person, I remember writing. I don’t know how to live differently. Without writing fiction, I die. What I don’t know is how people live without writing fiction,” he repeats Rosa Monteroas a manifesto. If journalism has been its work facet, literature is its existential whole. The first is expendable; The second is your skin, your way of inhabiting the world. That is why years ago he decided to stop doing interviews and only maintains his opinion columns in the newspaper The country. So much that he threw the boxes with notes saved by his mother – among them, reports to Paul McCartney or Yasser Arafat-, but retain each of the notebooks where their fictions are born. He already donated much of those manuscripts to the National Library and, since he has no children, he plans to leave all that personal archive with the versions of his fist novels so that they are public access.
News: By showing the sketch of thoughts and the handwritten lyrics, it offers the bowels of its creative process. However, it takes care of intimacy very well because in the sway of fiction and the real, it always resists to clarify what of everything is autobiographical in its novels.
ROSA MONTERO: Ah, well, yes, of course. That is that exactly what is my relationship with what I see that it is reality. For me, reality is largely an imaginary world, an imaginary construction. I do not trust anything about reality. Memory is a story that we tell ourselves and that we are changing. So, maintaining uncertainty between what is real notarial and what is not real, is a way of expressing how I see reality.
News: It is presenting Difficult animals (Seix Barral), and has already said that he will be the last of his Bruna Husky series, the technohuman detective in invented in 2011. Are he living a duel?
Huntsman: Yes, a friend told me something that I loved because it has given me a little oxygen: “You can always write a storybook of the world of Bruna.” And yes, it gives me the possibility of returning, when I feel very longing for.
News: I heard it say that if after the 50 there are people who buy a house on the outskirts …
Huntsman: (Interrupt) Ah, yes, I built a world, the world of Bruna. Following the metaphors, it is as if I had been living there and now I moved, but I can return on vacation with the stories.
News: I made the game of asking the AI if Rosa Montero is right by saying that we can become ants of the superintelligence, as Bruna states. He replied that he was right to be alert, but that there are scientists doing the job of putting limits.
Huntsman: That is a lie and that is the bad. The bad thing is that there are no scientists putting limits. It is what I claim. Limits can be set. But we are in free fall, building an inhuman superintelligence, and when I say inhuman, it is not human and therefore we do not have or repay the idea of how it works and what things will do. The great neuroscientifics of the world have been asking for years to be included in the Human Rights Charter The neurodes. The manipulation capacity of artificial intelligence on the human being is infinite. They can make us pears and make us think, buy or vote what they want. It is already happening.
News: In his novel, there is a character that is the “president of the United States of the world.” Inevitable parallelism with Donald Trump.
Huntsman: But do you know that when I wrote this Trump was not yet?
News: You have to be careful with what is written, not only with what is thought.
Huntsman: Well, then I am going to tell you about it, but the point I wanted to make a book like all the previous ones of Bruna, a book on social prototypes.
News: These real personalities are very stereotyped.
Huntsman: Of course, yes, real prototypes. The retronational, because it is that, people who want to return to Europe to the old nations.
News: At the local level, we have Milei. What are you seeing of him?
Huntsman: Tremendous, it is part! They give me terror all, I have been seeing that it is as if the leaders of the world were in constant lsd, it is like a delirium. It is the delirium turned into reality. And you say: “They are drugged.”
News: As an interviewer, she met many world leaders. What has just described is a time climate?
Huntsman: Totally, it is the historical moment and many things converge. Now we are again in the Weimar Republic, and technological development worsens it. At that time there was also the same public delirium. They were people who seemed ridiculous and crazy and destroyed the world, such as Mussolini or Hitler. So, we are in the same and for something similar, in part: a kind of social agreement has been broken. After World War II, there was a moment of glory of humanity where the welfare state was invented. All that began to destroy itself with the ultraliberal policies of Thatcher and Reagan, but when it really broke it was with the 2008 crisis.
News: And what was the result?
Huntsman: That we left the crisis with the impoverishment of 25 % of the population, which also saw that those who had been the cause of the crisis had not only paid anything, but were better. That 25 % have also seen that their children will be worse, so they are convinced that democracy does not defend them, do not speak for them and do not take them into account. It does not seem to me that they are imbéciles who vote for Trump or Milei, it seems to me that they are very wrong. Because criticism of democracy is totally legitimate, but then they make an absolutely suicidal choice for all, choose anti -system people.
News: In that status quo That crosses, there are also the media. What is the role of journalism for democracy?
Huntsman: For a democracy to be strong, it needs a strong journalism. A journalism that influences and a varied journalism, headers that give voice to the various political visions of a society. And that the population can be informed through that. And we are shit there. Journalism has been in a crisis through the desert for 20 years. In 20 years, 90 % of the world’s newspapers have disappeared.
News: What is the impact of that?
Huntsman: It is a catastrophe not for the press, but for democracy. And it seems to me on the other hand and very scary that there is a deep crisis of journalism when there is a deep crisis of credibility and democratic legitimacy, because it is a binomial that goes together.
News: Even so, it maintains some hope. How do you do it?
Huntsman: Well, I am natural, I am very voluntary too, but it is natural. Although it is a very dark moment. I have hope in the ability to adapt and reinvention of the human being.
News: He says that science fiction allowed him to talk about the most existential issues in a different way.
Huntsman: It is that it gives you a formidable metaphorical tool to deepen the themes of here and now. And what I was going to tell you before is that a little scary thing that happened to me with my books of Bruna is that millions of things have been fulfilled. The last thing was the blackout of Spain and Portugal (happened at the end of April). In Hate timesthere is a total electric blackout in Spain and in Portugal. It is impressive.
News: Science fiction seems premonitory. Is the collective unconscious play?
Huntsman: Yes, I believe that writers are a bit sponges. In the novels that are contemporary also pass. You are a bit a medium. As the Peruvian writer Ramón Ribeyro said, a mature novel is the author’s metaphorical death. I wanted to say that you have to erase, cancel. The conscious self you have to erase it. I have spent all my life trying it and now I delete it from the host, perfectly. It’s hard because you don’t want to lose control first. But you have to let history go through you. The novels are written from the depths of the unconscious, from where dreams come out. It is a dream with open eyes. If you really get the conscious self and sink into the deepest of your unconscious, your unconscious is a collective unconscious. You are responding to your time, because within each of us, somehow, we are all. And that unconscious perceives what there is.
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