Paperback, 112 pages
English language
Published March 21, 2023 by Graywolf Press.
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 …
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.
Disappointingly uneven, though I appreciated the broader perspective that hadn’t been through the very narrow filter of the limited number of English language short fiction publishers.
I liked some of the stories, but some of the others just didn't really land with me. Maybe some of the concepts didn't really work for me or I wanted more out of them and there wasn't enough written. Overall it is a decent book though!
More alien than familiar, some inconsequentially weird or brief, a few were moving but also didn't rise to much.
