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!

View all my reviews

Review: A Legend of the Future

A Legend of the Future by Agustin De Rojas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The setting for A Legend of the Future is (as the cover says) highly reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It quickly descends into something much bleaker, where a group of tight-knit cosmonauts (I seriously adore that they stick with the Soviet Union word in the translation, rather than the American astronaut) are faced with their certain impending deaths. It took me a while to realize that this wasn't going to be some sort of triumphant story where the plucky characters overcome insurmountable odds, but instead those odds would actually be insurmountable and they would inevitably succumb. I feel like many story threads took a while to settle in, but once they did the story flowed quite nicely and the characters opened up and became real.

That lag between the beginning of the novel and when the novel really starts working was frustrating, though, and it was certainly not helped by what seem to be either printing errors or terrible formatting choices. Any time a character thinks, the dialogue is put in quotation marks as if they were speaking. There is no distinction between speech and thought. This demands a lot of double-takes and re-reads to parse correctly. There are also many places where the scene abruptly changes but there is no space (and sometimes not even a line break) between the two scenes. Put that together with the thinking/speaking problem and the book feels error-ridden and confused. These may be deliberate choices, given that the characters' mental states are slowly degrading and eventually can't tell what's real and what's not, but for the most part the odd formatting doesn't correlate with the characters' behavior or sanity, and the presence/absence of page breaks is inconsistent, so I doubt it - and either way, there are ways to convey the disorganized mentality of the characters while making it clear to the reader what is going on, or signaling that there is some intentionality in the formatting.

It took quite a while for the relationships between the characters to become clear, and while I understand the choice to begin with the incident that damages their ship, the action at the beginning and the devastation it wreaks on the remaining crew would be much more impactful if we had known anything at all about the characters first. Getting to know the characters through flashbacks in the latter half of the book was still emotional, unfolding the tragedy and effectively creating the grief we don't feel at the beginning. It also works pretty well if you see Gema as the main character, since she is almost immediately wiped of her personality and rediscovers some of it through these memories (an important arc that is heavily emphasized at first but trails off and is never explored as fully as it could have been or as it was implied it would be).

The worldbuilding also comes later in the book, and it was a delightful surprise. There's some heavy-handed exposition at the beginning (one character monologues about history known to the other characters, and one even notes that they know all this already and it's not typical for that character to talk so incessantly), but it eventually creates a pretty intriguing world where some children are selected for space-faring groups at age 14, placed with 5 other children whose personality profiles match theirs closely, and trained with that group for years before being vetted for actual space travel. It's also a world strongly influenced by the divide between the communist Soviet Union (here the Federation) and the capitalist world (the Empire) - de Rojas was passionate about communism and the Soviet Union and actually went a little insane after the Soviet Union fell, so there's a bit of wordy rhapsodizing about the wonders of communism, but it adds some flavor we don't usually see in the SF world nowadays. One bit of the worldbuilding, the Dream Palaces, suffered the same lack of development and payoff I've mentioned before, despite it being one of the more intriguing SF premises in the book.

I also feel there's some humor intended in a lot of places that isn't quite expressed in the translation, which is a shame.

Overall, I'm not sure how much this novel suffered through translation and poor publishing, but I suspect it would be a 4-star book for me in its original form. It blossoms into a beautifully tragic character study, has some fantastic cyberpunk/space exploration hard SF premises, and pulled me into the action. It feels like a rough draft, though, because the beginning feels cluttered and confused and the ending feels rushed, with many of the more interesting lines of character development and side-plots left unsatisfied.

View all my reviews