Ten planets Stories

Herrera (Signs Preceding the Ends of the World) spins a wondrous collection of science fiction and parables about the desire for intimacy and expression. The spare opener, "The Science of Extinction," features a man alone in an increasingly "rewilding" world. He's left with only memories of his family and a fading will to sustain himself, which he maintains by leaving a note on his windowsill, in case someone else might see it. In the Philip K. Dick--esque "The Obituarist," everyone is made invisible on the street by wearing "buffers," except for tradespeople such as the obituarist, who's illuminated by a glowing badge, and who stumbles into a strangely moving scene after making a routine house call. "Consolidation of Spirits" mashes up Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" with Beetlejuice, imagining what happens when a clerk named Bartleby, who's responsible for keeping track of the spirits of the dead, becomes a ghost himself. "The Last Ones," a standout, offers a vivid account of a man walking across the garbage-clogged Atlantic Ocean and holding onto a faint hope of companionship. In another highlight, "The Monster's Art," a bailiff removes art from a monster's cage while wishing he could make his own. The emotional heft, combined with Herrera's commitment to genre, yield satisfying results. (Mar.)

A miscellany of thematically linked stories about strangers in a strange land, life on Mars, and other curiosities. In this spare but inquisitive collection of stories, award-winning Mexican writer Herrera concerns himself more with human nature and morphologic alchemy than ray guns and bug-eyed monsters despite the science-fiction character of the stories. In the opening amuse-bouche, the apocalypse comes not from planetary annihilation but four simple words scribbled on a notecard: "Everyone is going away." Readers' suspension of disbelief is challenged next by "Whole Entero," in which a stomach bug achieving consciousness dies not from her host's fatal condition but from her own melancholy sadness; or equally by "The Objects" (one of two stories with identical names), which provides a portrait of an anthropomorphized rat who muses, "When you're a pestilent creature, the world is no longer pestilent." Similarly, "Living Muscle" imagines a planet made of the stuff of people, though the narrator's final declaration that "we have decided to send no more probes" might be more of a wink than an epiphany. The marginal whodunits "The Obituarist" and "The Cosmonaut" flirt surreally with noir, noses, and "fucking invisibility." In a related branch of the genre family tree, a ghost buster named Bartleby delights in the specters embodied in "Consolidation of Spirits." A flat Earth, dragons, and a world divided into "Ones" and "Others" serve as the medium for thoughts on the human need for both connectivity and conflict in a handful of stories: "Everybody knows that the Creator is not a mouth but the eye of a dragon, and that the world is but a blink, a blink, a blink set to happen: now." A high point is "The Earthling," in which a stranger in a strange land is united with another creature who recognizes him for exactly what he is. A conceptually heavy, emotionally empathetic accounting of the most alien of conditions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.