Review: Super Extra Grande

Super Extra Grande by Yoss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received an e-galley copy of this book from Edelweiss and Restless Books.

I was super extra excited to read this because Restless Books' last Yoss translation, "A Planet for Rent," was one of the best books I read last year. "Super Extra Grande" isn't quite up there, but it has different strengths. It doesn't have the emotional teeth as "Planet," instead showing off Yoss's comedy chops by dialing up the absurdity and dispensing with the colonialism allegory. Yoss knows how to build a functional, coherent SF world without going on at length. His universes are brightly colored with unusual (but logically consistent) working parts - think a world of Lego or K'nex.

Dr. Jan Amos Sangan Dongo (whose last name is a play on words that essentially means 'big') is a veterinarian - in space! He specializes in "super extra grande" creatures, giants from all planets. When we meet him, he's literally wading through shit as he walks through the bowels of a giant space whale. He's huge himself, for a human, and his previous two assistants (both beautiful women, for their species, who he had to fire because they were in love with him) were also incredibly tall. Sangan Dongo can't do anything small.

The book gets off to a slow start. Sangan Dongo wades through shit for a good third of the book, with many asides and reveries that give the reader background on this world. We learn that Spanglish is the universal human language. We learn that there are seven spacefaring species who all happened to discover interstellar travel at the same time. We learn that Sangan Dongo has always had an affinity for larger creatures - because in veterinary school, his size was a hindrance when working with the smaller animals - and the only giant species he has never worked with are laketons (so named because the single-celled organisms look like large lakes, and weigh tons). Once he gets out of the belly of the beast, he's sent into the belly of the beast again - to rescue his assistants, who have crash-landed (together!) on the home planet of the laketons. The plot wraps up as quickly as the beginning was slow, but altogether, it's a good ride. As I said before, the book is a riot, and it's a quick read, so if you have the chance to pick it up, do!

Personally, as a linguist who's currently in a lab focusing on bilingualism and code-switching, I'm fascinated by Yoss's (and the translator's) idea of what Spanglish will be in the future. I'd be really interested in seeing the changes Frye made in translation - what words did he switch from Spanish to English, and vice versa? Did he change the syntax? Because honestly, I don't know if I would've understood huge patches of the story if I didn't know Spanish, but it's also not in line with general patterns of Spanish-English codeswitching. One easy example: If you switch from Spanish to English in the middle of a determiner-noun pair, the determiner will almost always be masculine - you'll say "el fork" or "el spoon," never "la fork" or "la spoon," even though fork is masculine and spoon is feminine in Spanish. But "la (English noun)" occurs a lot here. So what does this sound like in the original Spanish to native Spanish speakers - like a natural extension of Spanish/English contact, or like some strange futuristic evolution of the two languages?

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Review: A Planet for Rent

A Planet for Rent by Yoss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After the huuuuge disappointment of "A Legend of the Future" - another Cuban SF translation, by the same translator and from the same publishing house, that near unreadable due to both awkward translation and poor formatting choices - I took a risk with "A Planet for Rent." But it paid off - this is easily one of the best pieces of fiction I've read all year.

The book is a compilation of stories - about eight of them, from what I remember - that all take place in the same universe, with an equal number of short interludes that give more information about that universe. It's a world in which Earth has met aliens, and was immediately threatened, colonized, and exploited. Aliens visit Earth, whose only industry is now tourism, but humans rarely leave - the ones who do must do so in the custody of (usually owned by) an alien, or have some wonderfully rare skill or talent. Even in those cases, their memories are usually blocked or wiped if they are allowed to return to Earth. This keeps Earth in perpetual economic deference to the rest of the world; they can produce no technology, nothing that they can sell or trade or use to leverage their way into equality.

Many of the stories are struggles for freedom, attempts to escape the financial, physical, and mental prison humans are now in. These struggles are intensely personal; this is the first piece of literature in a long time that has, in its exploration of the caverns of human emotion, unveiled a sensitive place inside me that I previously hadn't discovered. I cried. I gasped. I was alarmed. It was a viscerally emotional experience at points. I don't want to go into details at this point in the review (though I will write some about each story below, for my own reference), because any description of my own would cheapen the effect of the book itself. Yoss has created a world where death in many senses has little meaning - cloning exists, as do mind back-ups - and instead of writing tragedies where the stakes are life or death, his stories are about people who must make choices between miserable, safe lives or glamorous, short ones; between lives of servitude among family and friends or freedom among the stars; between their own, personal happiness and a slim chance for Earth to gain back some power.

So yes, a lot of the meat of the book is haunting (which is a good thing in itself, since it's done well!), but Yoss does a tremendous job weaving in moments of hope and humor to keep the spirits up. Some of the most horrifying parts simultaneously have a dry, dark humor. Some alien interactions are intentionally hilarious. One story follows a group of humans who play the interstellar equivalent of soccer (and while it's probably the lightest of the stories in terms of subject matter, it still has its wrenching moments).

Yoss does characters so well. His world is not very complex, but incredibly well thought out, and each character feels born into the world, shaped and formed by the forces and systems Yoss has laid out. Even in what I feel is the weakest story, mostly told as a didactic lesson from an older agent of the Planetary Tourism force to a younger one, is elevated by the clear voice of the character (and I must note here that some considerable credit should go to the translator, because character nuances are one of the first things lost in a translation, from previous translated stories I've read - they can easily be dropped entirely or turned into caricature).

I can't say enough good things about this book. I hope that Restless Books' future translated works are on this level, and not like the other one I read. And hopefully we'll soon get some more Yoss!

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