Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders is a haunting and lyrical novella that captures the disorientation of childhood under dictatorship, blurring the lines between dream and memory, the personal and the political. Fernández crafts a chorus of voices from a class of Chilean schoolchildren, all haunted by the faint silhouette of Estrella, a girl they once knew, a girl they all remember differently. Through these characters, we feel the quiet ache of not understanding a game until it’s too late—of living under dictatorship without the language to name it.

Told in the collective “we,” the novella reads like an incantation, looping through remembered prayers, shouted slogans, and ghostly Atari bleeps. Fernández’s prose is elliptical and atmospheric, lingering in the liminal spaces between dream and memory, childhood and history. The surreal slips easily into the real—because in a regime like Pinochet’s, who’s to say what’s imagined and what’s merely unspeakable?

Estrella becomes more myth than girl, more symbol than classmate: her braids flicker in dreams, her letters arrive and then don’t, and her police father's invisible presence casts long, bureaucratic shadows. The children sense something is wrong—two classmates suspended for resistance work, teachers refusing to name what they know—but they can’t quite grasp the shape of it. “We are the most important piece in a game, but we still don’t know what game it is,” they say, and I felt that line reverberate like a warning from history.

This is a book about what we forget to survive, what resurfaces to haunt us, and how history carves itself into the fabric of our collective memory. It’s short, yes, but Space Invaders lingers, reverberates—like the glow of an arcade screen in a dark room, like a memory you can’t trace but can’t quite let go of either. Fernández doesn’t offer answers—only the unsettling, necessary act of remembering.

📖 Read this if you love: fragmented, dreamlike narratives; collective memory as resistance; childhood as a lens for political trauma; translated political novellas.

🔑 Key Themes: Dictatorship and Erasure, Memory and Dream Logic, Political Violence and Innocence, Resistance through Storytelling.