There isn’t a great deal of information about Miguel Hidalgo online. However, his story, Homecoming will always have a special resonance for me, as it was the very first story I narrated and the first audio recording I had accepted by Librivox.
Homecoming is also the first story in Incredible Science Fiction: Amazing Tales from the ’50s and Beyond Volume One
Homecoming takes place in a bleak dystopian nightmare world after the end of World War III. This post-apocalyptic environment is brought to life evocatively by Hidalgo’s sparse prose:
“First there had been the red flashes that melted buildings into molten streams, and then the great triple-mushroom cloud filled with the poisonous gases that the wind swept away to other cities, where men had not died quickly and mercifully but had rotted away, leaving shreds of putrid flesh behind to mark the places where they had crawled.”
The shock at the end of the story is perhaps stronger now when filtered through our contemporary sensibilities. War robs a lot from us as human beings, including empathy, which goes some way to explaining the way the main character responds in the denouement of the story and is perfectly fitting with his narcissism, implicit through much of the text. It’s the very first story I recorded and was the first one I submitted to Librivox when I first started narrating.
Homecoming also taught be a valuable lesson about personal responsibility for quality control measures, as I uploaded to the wrong file to Audible by mistake, full of mistakes and repetitions. I remain hopeful that Amazon will one day upload the corrected files to Audible. Here’s the full Librivox version of the story:
