Ten Planets

November 14, 2022
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.

February 1, 2023
A miscellany of thematically linked stories about strangers in a strange land, life on Mars, and other curiosities. In this spare but inquisitive collection of stories, award-winning Mexican writer Herrera concerns himself more with human nature and morphologic alchemy than ray guns and bug-eyed monsters despite the science-fiction character of the stories. In the opening amuse-bouche, the apocalypse comes not from planetary annihilation but four simple words scribbled on a notecard: "Everyone is going away." Readers' suspension of disbelief is challenged next by "Whole Entero," in which a stomach bug achieving consciousness dies not from her host's fatal condition but from her own melancholy sadness; or equally by "The Objects" (one of two stories with identical names), which provides a portrait of an anthropomorphized rat who muses, "When you're a pestilent creature, the world is no longer pestilent." Similarly, "Living Muscle" imagines a planet made of the stuff of people, though the narrator's final declaration that "we have decided to send no more probes" might be more of a wink than an epiphany. The marginal whodunits "The Obituarist" and "The Cosmonaut" flirt surreally with noir, noses, and "fucking invisibility." In a related branch of the genre family tree, a ghost buster named Bartleby delights in the specters embodied in "Consolidation of Spirits." A flat Earth, dragons, and a world divided into "Ones" and "Others" serve as the medium for thoughts on the human need for both connectivity and conflict in a handful of stories: "Everybody knows that the Creator is not a mouth but the eye of a dragon, and that the world is but a blink, a blink, a blink set to happen: now." A high point is "The Earthling," in which a stranger in a strange land is united with another creature who recognizes him for exactly what he is. A conceptually heavy, emotionally empathetic accounting of the most alien of conditions.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.