When aliens turn planet earth into a tourist colony, humans are forced into slave labor in order to eek out a meager existence. Off the Press editor, Susannah Rodríguez Drissi, reviews this collection of interconnected tales by Cuban SciFi writer Yoss, weighing in on the merits of David Frye’s English translation and the book’s significance to both the Cuban experience and that of the global community.
I read everything. Everything, except science fiction. Perhaps this is why when I picked up David Frye’s translation of Cuban SciFi writer Yoss’s A Planet for Rent (Restless Books, 2015), my eyes rolled back into my head a little. It’s not that I consider science fiction a lesser genre; it is simply that to wrap myself around different species, other than the ones I come into close contact with while driving on an LA freeway on any given day is, well, too much of an effort—and, possibly, not as exciting. Sure, at some point I read Ray Bradbury, cringed as a baby alien romped inside Sigourney Weaver’s reluctant uterus, but that’s as far as I ever got. I’m neither a Trekkie nor a Star Wars fan. You will not meet me this summer in St. Louis at Gateway Geek Fest 2015. I’ll be in Hawaii.
But I decided to put my money on Frye and give Yoss (and his planet) my best Go. After all, it was Frye who brought me Abilio Estevez’s Distant Palaces (2004) and Thine is the Kingdom (1999), two books that either in Spanish or in English are the stuff of exquisite prose. Frye was also responsible for “The Joys of Translation,” an essay on translation’s finer moments that ushered me into my first work as a translator. If anything, I was curious to find out how he would manage to translate the raucous, alien (Xenoid, in the book) prose of a Cuban rocker turned-science-fiction writer into American English. Look, I hate to say it, but both Yoss and Frye had me at hello—or, as the first lines of the book announce, at Planet for Rent.
Although reviewers (myself included) have called Yoss’s latest book a novel, to be accurate, A Planet for Rent constitutes a series of interweaving stories. When Earth’s faulty, misguided, and corrupt leadership finally brings the planet to the brink of economic and environmental ruin, the opportunistic xenoids move in. Turning our sad and washed out globe into an interplanetary vacation get-away. The rest is a round-up of the usual suspects one may find in Cuban literature at least since the 1990s: the jinetera, the pinguero, the jack of all trades, the corrupt state official, and the censored and exploited artist—among others. All under the alien thumb (or, possibly, a tentacle or antennae) of the Planetary Tourism Agency. But there’s one caveat: it is now our planet’s future that is at stake. Not just Cuba’s. It is not just the Cuban’s body that is for sale to the highest bidder. We are all Cubans. We are all for sale. The opening sequence in the book tells us so:
Step on up, ladies and gents, right this way!
But only if you’re xenoids, it goes without saying.
We don’t want any humans…
A once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity!
An offer you won’t be able to turn down!
For rent, one planet!
Thus, in “Social Worker,” the opening story, we meet Buca, the jinetera whose very social work has led her to establish a relationship with an insectoid named Selshaliman, described in the following fashion:
His rapid, quasimechanical gestures were still extremely unsettling to Buca. Like he was a gigantic spider or praying mantis. But the image became more bearable when she recalled that she would soon have the human equivalent of a credit appendage: a subcutaneous implant reflecting the generous bank account that this exotic had just established in her name.
As with many Cuban-tourist relationships on the island, Buca’s relationship with Selshaliman allows her to breeze through checkpoints without being bothered, gaining access to areas of privilege. She’s not an authorized social worker and, as a freelancer, she has to be accompanied by xenoid. Her work, however, comes with risks, and she’s forced to keep her guard up. As she reminds us, there are plenty of stories about social workers and others who put their trust in xenoids who later turn out to be humans, disguised with bioimplants. Paying later for their gullibility with months or years in Body Spares. Moy, the narrator in “Performing Death,” explains:
Earth wasn’t the only place where races with physiologies incompatible with local biosphere turned to using native bodies to be able to walk around without cumbersome life support systems. But among Cetians and other cultures, candidates for Body Spares were well-paid volunteers who considered it an honor to serve as “horses” for representatives of other races.
In this story, perhaps the most unsettling of the collection, Moy is a human artist who becomes the main attraction for an alien audience. Suspended on an enormous cross, his body is pumped full of anesthesia. Without the mediation of his lungs, an artificial oxygenation system swaps out oxygen for carbon dioxide in his red blood cells. Medical tools penetrate his bronchial tubes, and hydrogen is driven into his pulmonary tissue. With no air in his lungs, careful pumping by a pneumatic nanomachine attached to his larynx allows Moy to address his audience. The monologue reminds us of Kafka’s The Hunger Artist: “The artist can and must die— in, through, and for his art. The artist is obliged to deconstruct himself in his art.” Much like in Kafka’s story, however, the audience cares little for the artist’s words and motivations. The spectacle is the thing, so Moy is entirely destroyed before a clamoring audience. While for Moy the performance ends with a spectacular act of self-governance, for the reader, horrified and forced to wince at the visual details, the story ends not with a bang but with a whimper.
Ultimately, while we may be unable to resist nailing our eyes to the human wreck taking place, “Performing Death” is a story about immigration. Being an alien in Ningando, the Cetian capital, is an enviable position on Earth. While on the one hand, Moy feels lonely and disengaged, and struggles to learn the language; on the other, he’s able to support loved ones at home by sending money through teletransport, a sort of interplanetary remittance system. He makes enough to purchase a condominium in the most expensive neighborhood, gain lots of credits, and get hooked on telecrack. Truly, the uses and abuses of Moy’s body both at home and abroad, under the auspices of self-direction, personal freedom, and financial gain are disturbing; but perhaps the only recourse in an otherwise oppressive universe where humans are forced to eke out an existence through whatever means possible—or, to possibly give meaning to their possibly meaningless existence.
A Planet for Rent turns the sci-fi experience into a spectacle of human indignity.
In A Planet for Rent, each story builds upon the last, making the familiar strange and back again, in a way that—much like in Moy’s story—turns the sci-fi experience into a spectacle of human indignity. With local struggles, mountains, valleys, sea, and human bodies and ingenuity, at the mercy of alien greed. Along the way, I marveled both at the kind of imaginative writing that has turned Earth into a tourist colony for alien species of all colors, genders, and appendages; and the kind of translation sleight of hands that makes possible an exhaustive nomenclature that includes the Colossaur, polyps of Aldebaran, guzoids from Regulus, the Auyars, the Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation, and many others.
One of the challenges I encountered while reading the stories was my need to bring into the realm of the “real” the foretold allegorical aspects of the novel. Whether intentional on the part of the author (the blurb on the book prompts the reader to consider the connections to 1990s Cuba) or not, this particular feature of the collection is sufficiently transparent to a reader more or less informed in the ways of Cuba in the last decades. But Yoss is a writer guided by both imagination and historical context: while allegory has its time in the stories, so does a hard-core dystopia that forces the reader to grapple with racial discrimination, class distinctions, human rights violations and, of course, tourism on a grander scale. If this is Cuba, World, take a lesson. If this is Sci-Fi, count me in.
A Planet for Rent (Paperback, 272 pages)
Publisher: Restless Books (June 23, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1632060361
ISBN-13: 978-1632060365