Diez Planetas

The characters in Ten Planets inhabit an unimaginable future that invites us to doubt the tools with which we calibrate our closest world: an earthling exiled in an unlikely corner of the galaxy makes a discovery that forces him to rethink his categories of species; a house rebels against the unhappiness mania of the family that lives in it; a tiny bacteria becomes conscious in a human colon due to the random effect of a lysergic drug; a cosmonaut unravels a clear map of the world through the almost imperceptible signs of a nose... Without losing an iota of his usual freshness or the rare precision to name the ambiguous, Yuri Herrera invites us to look "from the other side", where our grammars and units of measurement remain poor and we face a liberating consciousness of infinity. Ten Planets is a science fiction book, surprisingly unitary, but also a small collection of philosophical stories "illustrated" in the tradition that unites Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick with Jonathan Swift and Voltaire. And with Borges and Kafka. A subtle dialogue with the masters that returns the Latin American story to its pioneering place among the most innovative literature: where "legends create truth, no matter how liars they are." A book of maturity (at the same time as insolently youthful) that reinvents and extremes the obsessions of one of the most brilliant writers in the language.