A Legend of the Future by Agustín de Rojas, translated by Nick Caistor

A Legend of the Future
Agustín de Rojas
Translated by Nick Caistor (Spanish)
Original published 1985, I read ebook of 2014 translation
227 pages, hard science fiction

Many thanks to Restless Books for providing a review copy of this novel, part of their Cuban Science Fiction series. 

A tight-knit crew of six cosmonauts has embarked on the cutting-edge ship Sviagator. Their mission: explore Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, and return the experimental ship safely to Earth. When disaster strikes, only three crewmembers survive: Isanusi, the captain, who is physically incapacitated; Thondup, an engineer and psycho-sociologist, who is emotionally fragile after the death of his partner Alix; and Gema, a physiologist whose conditioning has been activated so now she has all the skills of a computer. All three of them are dying, some more quickly than others. Now they need to figure out how to return the ship to Earth, without autopilot and without any of them being able to survive the three months required to make the trip.

Philosophy, politics, psycho-sociology

This book involves a lot of sitting around talking. Granted, due to their assorted physical disabilities there’s not much else the crew can do at this point, but it struck me as incredibly wordy. This sometimes passed into being really boring. There are a few themes that keep appearing, and which provide the majority of the plot:

First, the novel explicitly touches on the philosophical question of man vs. machine. Even though Thondup activated Gema’s conditioning, he doesn’t approve of it; he believes she has been made into a computer. Isanusi does not agree. Gema spends much of her time trying to combine her new personality with pieces of the old one, but the question still remains about whether she is actually a human being anymore. If you read a lot of science fiction (particularly older works), this is nothing that you haven't seen before.

A Planet for Rent by Yoss, translated by David Frye

A Planet for Rent
Yoss (José Miguel Sánchez)
Translated by David Frye (Spanish)
First published 2011, I read English language ebook 2014
266 pages,  hard science fiction, satire

Many thanks to Restless Books for providing a review copy of this novel. 

I first heard about the Cuban Science Fiction series from Restless Books sometime earlier this year (probably in this New York Times article). Immediately, I knew that I had to read and review them. Here is a chance to read international science fiction, my favorite genre, that had been completely off my radar. This book is the first I have read from the series, and it did not disappoint.

The novel tells several intertwined stories, featuring characters that are loosely related through mostly random events. Yoss does not bother to flesh out the connections between the characters, instead relying on the reader to figure that out for themselves. This trust in the reader's intelligence was quite refreshing, and it also made the satirical aspects of the story more apparent. It also made the ending harder to predict; for the first time in a long time, I was actually surprised by a book! This may have been because I was reading an ebook, which always makes it a bit more difficult for me to follow the story and pick up on clues.

The basic background is that aliens have *cough* invaded the earth, and taken complete control, forcing humans to be second-class citizens solely used for the purpose of bringing (mostly sexual) pleasure to the xenoid tourists. *cough* Sorry, I must be coming down with a cold or something. As I was saying, aliens have saved humanity by restoring the environment and bringing peace to the planet, making it a very safe place for tourists to visit.