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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