Ten Planets
Stories
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A collection of fanciful, philosophical science fictions by “one of Mexico’s finest novelists” (Vulture).
The characters that populate Yuri Herrera’s surprising new story collection inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions and Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, these very short stories are an inspired extension of this significant writer’s work.
In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meager bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Yuri Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition.
In Ten Planets, Herrera’s consistent themes—the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms—are explored with evident brilliance and delight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Herrera (Signs Preceding the Ends of the World) spins a wondrous collection of science fiction and parables about the desire for intimacy and expression. The spare opener, "The Science of Extinction," features a man alone in an increasingly "rewilding" world. He's left with only memories of his family and a fading will to sustain himself, which he maintains by leaving a note on his windowsill, in case someone else might see it. In the Philip K. Dick–esque "The Obituarist," everyone is made invisible on the street by wearing "buffers," except for tradespeople such as the obituarist, who's illuminated by a glowing badge, and who stumbles into a strangely moving scene after making a routine house call. "Consolidation of Spirits" mashes up Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" with Beetlejuice, imagining what happens when a clerk named Bartleby, who's responsible for keeping track of the spirits of the dead, becomes a ghost himself. "The Last Ones," a standout, offers a vivid account of a man walking across the garbage-clogged Atlantic Ocean and holding onto a faint hope of companionship. In another highlight, "The Monster's Art," a bailiff removes art from a monster's cage while wishing he could make his own. The emotional heft, combined with Herrera's commitment to genre, yield satisfying results.
