ABSTRACT
What if Sex Pistols musician Sid Vicious had been ordered to direct an episode of Sesame Street? What if Sid Vicious knew he was going to die young, not because of an overdose—like he did—but because his own body rebelled against him? What if Sid Vicious had not been born in England but in Colombia, and what if he were not a punk rocker but a writer? You would of course be right to say this is not Sid Vicious anymore. However, this exercise helps us bring together a constellation of distinct imaginaries—a punk way of seeing the world, children's television, a person knowing he would not live for long, and a country that is not identifiable as having a proper punk scene. Such a constellation will be needed to understand Rafael Chaparro's (1963–1995) novel Opio en las nubes (Opium in the Clouds, 1992) and what it says about the young reading community that has continuously grown around it in Colombia: a generation of people who have partially shared certain characteristics with the X Generation understood in a North American/British context, but who have also had to deal with a particular social and political reality that the “standard” Generation X did not share.
