Review of Ten Planets: Stories by Yuri Herrera

Like many things in life, pretentiousness is subjective. One person's annoyance at a pince nez is another's Saturday walk in the garden (with a cane, natch). And books are of course the same. What the fuck is Ulysses about? Why can't this Joyce guy just come out and say what he wants to say? In Joyce's case, and with many other such dense, difficult to penetrate writers, there is reason to push through the early fog, however. A course, a study, a conversation with a friend—there are ways of illuminating the previously unseen to make the work relatable. But with Yuri Herrera's collection Ten Planets (2023), no, it's just pretentious.

The reason Ten Planets is pretentious is because no lecture, journal article, or learned conversation is going to enlighten to any significant degree. It's pop art, art with pretensions of offering more but ultimately empty, or at least of minimal relevance. The surface might sometimes be flashy or edgy, but pick away the paint with a fingernail and it becomes lacquered egg cartons... or just a black rectangle. (Rothko, looking at you.)

Ten Planets is predominantly flash fiction, or at least short stories of few pages. Here are a few examples: a man watches the world disappear from a window; an intestinal bacteria gains a mayfly's sentience; a speaker for the dead comes to the scene of a corpse and there has some strange premonitions; a nose reader (yes, nose reader) runs into trouble with men in suits when examining a cosmonaut; a fantastical bureaucracy highlights one man's pleasure in details. And so on.

I will go into one story with a bit more detail, a story that exemplifies the vapid nature of the collection. It is about an AI-controlled/sentient house and the family which lives in it. The family members come and go from the house in everyday life, but in an ever increasing number of times, the house exerts it authority ultimately kicking the family out. I could chatter about how such stories have been written since the 50s, or how it condescends toward technology without recognizing it as the two-edged sword it is. But the real issue worth addressing is how little humanism the humans—the ostensible point of concern—are presented with. 2D at best, Herrera would want us to relate to their situation: to feel their pain at the injustice of “technology”. But the reader can't fully do so due to the abstract nature of the storytelling. It's a story at odds with itself, the pretension kneecapping potential.

On the whole, Herrera's formula quickly becomes easy to identify. Take an ordinary scene—a man, a house, a day at work, a stroll on the street, etc. Take one element from that scene and twist it magic realist/science fictional. Relate that scene in obtuse fashion by scattering esoteric words, thus ensuring it feels out of the ordinary. Voila, a Yuri Herrera story/vignette. Anybody can do it. The fingernail has picked away the paint. It's pop art.

It's clear Herrera is inspired by writers like Borges and Calvino. The stories have that smell. But where fiction by such authors flows naturally from a concrete conception, Herrera's are not always so confident or focused. As if unconvinced as to purpose, the stories instead putter about, playing games with readers' perception rather than getting to the heart of their conception. The destination is rarely worth the journey.

In the end I have no right to objectively criticize. If you read between the lines above, maybe Ten Planets is for you? But to me the collection feels like a shy high schooler suddenly wearing a Michael Jackson costume to school one day. They want to express their individualism. They want to do something different. This is well and good, but they still lack the upright posture and confidence to make other people believe that they themselves believe in the expression, the individualism. The heart and soul to make the clothes move, to moondance (sorry), aren't there. Instead, the student walks with head hanging, in turn making you feel awkward, uncomfortable. If you want such books that moondance, try Brian Aldiss' Report on Probability A, Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Satin Island, J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, Anna Kavan's Ice, pretty much anything by Stephen Millhauser or Angela Carter, John Kessell's Good News from Outer Space, or M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise, and yes, Borges and Calvino. Any of those are more self-assured and truly singular.