Yellow Cake

When radical science backfires, miners and researchers confront apocalypse in Tiago Melo’s pulpy, politically charged sci-fi fusing local myth, dark humour, working-class grit and radioactivity in Brazil’s Northeast. An irresistible genre hybrid grounded in regional truths.

Aedes aegypti has several unofficial English names, the most common being Dengue Mosquito and Yellow Fever Mosquito, which describe precisely what it is feared for. The most effective repellents are usually based on classic DEET. Yet in Picuí, deep in Brazil’s Northeast, scientists are working on a far more rebarbative method that involves uranium. When their experiments fail, it falls to a small group of scientists and miners to prevent nothing less than the End of Days.

Uranium is not the only radioactive mineral found in Picuí, but it is undoubtedly the one with the most enigmatic history, rumoured to be linked even to the Manhattan Project. Out of this soil, with all its local peculiarities, realities and myths, Tiago Melo shapes Yellow Cake, his second fiction feature, a fusion of pulp science fiction and close attention to folklife.

The mixture is irresistible. The malformed wander across a landscape in desuetude; Brazil’s working class faces the storm troopers of global capital. All of it is grounded in truths of the region, with the fantasy elements brought in to make these forces visible and, in a sense, easier to grasp.

– Vanja Kaludjercic

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