Looking For Dragons in Yuri Herrera’s Ten Planets

by Andres Vaamonde

The short stories in acclaimed Mexican author Yuri Herrera’s intricate, genre-bending new collection, Ten Planets, are short. Very short. Some hardly break a page. The longest in the collection clocks in at around ten pages—a veritable tome. Ten Planets is a thin little book,  barely enough to kill a cockroach.

Don’t be fooled, though. Brevity does not imply simplicity (or accessibility). Ten Planets  is light only in terms of its word count. It is exceedingly rich in ideas, insights, and provocations. 

One way to describe Ten Planets is to call it science fiction. This is somewhat appropriate but misleading on the whole. Many of Herrera’s stories resemble science fiction, or even crime fiction in some cases, but they read like philosophical thought experiments, fragmented dollops of an arcane work of scholarship lost to time—or perhaps a set of hitherto unknown retro-futuristic parables unearthed from alien ruins. The blurb on the back of the new English-language edition, published in March 2023 by Graywolf Press, compares the collection to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, those masters of dense, illusory, parabolic fiction. It’s an ambitious comparison of course, but it’s entirely justified.  

Herrera packs a lot in twenty stories that collectively span one hundred pages. He depicts a whole wide universe teeming with adventurers, researchers, zookeepers, jailers, spies, obituarists, conspiracists, enlightened cosmonauts, enthusiastic bureaucrats, dogs in space, monsters who make art, houses that imprison their inhabitants, planets made out of muscle, therianthropic office workers, nasophillic detectives, depressed sentient microscopic bacteria, explorers who think the natives are dragons, natives who think the explorers are dragons, and a bunch of super horny aliens who workshop a little story called Quixote. 

Ten Planets is a literary kaleidoscope. Some stories are plotted while others better resemble snippets of an arcane academic’s notebook. Some stories are set in the hyper-futuristic past while others travel to the primitive future. Some climb aboard rocket ships in the far reaches of outer space while others reside within the confines of the small intestine of a random British man. 

Ten Planets is just as varied in theme. Herrera explores the retributive violence of the oppressed and the tortured anguish of the oppressor; applauds the ambitions of innovation and warns of its greedy undertones; honors the duty of work and exposes the demeaning nature of labor; asserts the beauty of life and the toil of sentience; proclaims the virtuous necessity of storytelling and simultaneously derides the act of documentation. As his brilliant, longtime translator Lisa Dillman notes in her postscript note in the Graywolf English-language edition: 

There is no univocal significance, no terrestrial secret code to unlock…one constant in both Yuri’s writing and his generous perspective is the belief that meaning is never fixed…his work, like so many of its words, is polysemous.

Dillman isn’t being precious when she describes  Ten Planets  as being polysemous down to the “word.” Herrera’s fiction bucks convention and leans into enigma at every available opportunity, even with its diction. His best known book to date is “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” a blistering, beguiling picaresque novella about a young woman journeying across the US-Mexico border to deliver a message to her brother. In the novella, characters don’t have sex; they “shuck”. Characters don’t walk, they “verse”. These lexical flourishes may sound pretty, but they aren’t purely cosmetic. Herrera (and Lisa Dillman) play with their words with intention. “Shuck” isn’t just a fun rhyme; it’s a nod to the perils lying in wait for our protagonist. “Verse” isn’t just flashy verbiage; it’s an implication of the poesy inherent to the very act of crossing borders, be they national, cultural, or linguistic.

Herrera (and Dillman) play with words in Ten Planets, too. While there are many examples to choose from, in the interests of brevity, I’ll focus on the most noticeable of his diction choices: “ápice.” In Spanish, “ápice” can mean “apex” or “bit”, as in, “the team reached the ápice [apex],” or “I don’t care about him one ápice [bit]”. In her translation, Dillman chose to translate ápice as “iota”. On the basis of sound and rhythm, “iota” is a good match for ápice, given how both words are most frequently used in similar kinds of phrases. Although, as you might expect, Herrera uses the word in a different, unfamiliar way in the collection. 

In “Ten Planets,” an “iota” is a measurement of time, mass, or space. Iotas are moments (both interminably long and flippantly brief), physical objects (both unimaginably large and impossibly small), and distances (both immense and insignificant). Herrera’s characters “move beyond” or “traverse” iotas. They also contain iotas themselves. Herrera pushes the word even further in the case of the term “iotafication machine,” which is some kind of device used by scientists searching for distant, life-supporting planets. Why or how is the word iota being used here? Is Herrera saying that to discover a planet that bears life is to give that planet thingness? Perhaps. Maybe it's best to realize here that the story is ambiguously titled, "Appendix 15, Number 2: The Exploration of Agent Probii," but never mentions the book in which said appendix appears. You might then conclude that Herrera wants to defy neat explanation whenever possible and so, instead, you should ride on vibes alone. 

You don’t need to know exactly what the words “iotafication machine” mean in order to get a sense of what an “iotafication machine” is, nor grasp how its existence adds dimension to the story. That’s what reading Ten Planets  is all about tossing the key, throwing open the gates, and allowing Herrera’s nebulous ideas to flow and flow and flow over you. 

So, let’s be brave and ask the logical follow-up question: What are those ideas?

One prominent strain in the collection is tech fatigue and skepticism. In general, Herrera doesn’t preach, perhaps with the lone exemption of “The Objects,”in which an artificially intelligent Find-My-iPhone-esque application takes revenge on its lazy, ungrateful users. Usually though, Herrera only uses the products of innovation as vehicles to get to more nuanced terrain. 

Herrera is also very interested in what it means to record, and what it means to want to be recorded.  Herrera’s story “The Obituarist” is set in a world in which everyone is essentially invisible and unknown to one another thanks to a tech gadget that can obscure your identity. The protagonist is the titular obituary writer, whose job it is to examine the effects of the deceased and, thereby, historicize the said person for the public. The story hinges around a person who vainly stages their own death by murdering a transient in order to read what the obituarist (and the public, of course) thinks of them. Here, we see Herrera pointing his lens at the paradox of the internet age. We love convenience and comfort and privacy, yes—shout-out to the work-from-home culture.

However, Herrera seems to point out that at our core, we’re just conceited social creatures. 

Many of the stories in Ten Planets are (unsurprisingly) preoccupied with the import of language and communication. In some stories, language comes across as an ingredient that is essential to life—in the story “Living Muscle,” a planet made of human tissue is discovered to hum a little musical scale in the style of solfège. In other stories, the art of language is just an ironic gut punch—“Inventory of Human Diversity” follows an alien zookeeper who hopes that his sole human specimen will stop babbling unintelligibly (i.e. speaking a normal human language) if a “practically identical” animal (i.e. an orangutan) is added to his cage. 

Herrera seems particularly fixated with miscommunication and misunderstanding. One of the best such examples is from the aforementioned story “Appendix 15, Number 2: The Exploration of Agent Probii”. In this story, the titular explorer, Agent Probii, has landed on a distant planet populated by a race of human beings who evolved in isolation from the rest of mankind. 

One difficult feature of life on this planet, Agent Probii discovers, is that these strange earthlings all speak their own languages, each indecipherable to one another. Clearly though, they can cooperate, having built a sophisticated global infrastructure. So, how? By way of “the planet’s lingua franca: copulation,” of course! They transcend their language barriers and manage to work together to build things by having sex. Take, for instance, that “the planning of the city’s biggest bridge required the amatory efforts of ninety-seven people at once” or that Agent Probii’s supervisors surmise that “If we’ve correctly interpreted the massive orgy that has been taking place at the planet’s equator for some two years now, they’re in the process of imagining a spaceship.” 

In Ten Planets, the antidote to misunderstanding is sometimes horny…but only if you have pure intentions. Things don’t go so well for Agent Probii, for example. He’s just a transient researcher, keen only to export his discoveries. The fornicator-builders don’t take kindly to that prerogative. That’s why, near the end of the story, when Agent Probii asks (or tries to ask) to join in on the fun, they slit his throat. 
Imperial misadventures of this sort frequently pop up in Ten Planets.  While seeking new ground in which to leave a footprint, explorers are constantly stubbing the proverbial toe. Perhaps the best example of this can be found in the linked triptych of stories, “Flat Map,” “Obverse,” and “The Other Theory.” These stories open on an expedition sailing out across the ocean with the intent to prove that the earth is spherical. However, after a long voyage, the men of the expedition arrive at what turns out to be the edge of the—surprise!— flat earth. That’s disappointing enough, but worse yet is the  discovery that the underneath side of the flat earth is populated by dragons. Or at least, what looks to them like dragons. Later on, in the second story of the triptych, while the “ever-so-bearded, ever-so-filthy” explorers struggle to survive on the other side of the world, they eventually encounter a group of local people basking on a beach. But the locals aren’t very friendly. Instead, mirroring the conclusion of the previous story verbatim, the locals exclaim in horror upon seeing the explorers: “Dragons! They’re dragons!” 

We don’t know what happens next. All we know is that the expedition never returns home. We also know, from the final story in the triptych, that the folks back home on the original side of the earth are nonplussed. They believe that “whatever’s on the other side must undoubtedly be simpler and cruder than what’s on this one…” The story is quite bleak: The sides of the earth meet, only for them to underestimate and fear the other, ensuring that nothing is learned and nothing is solved.  

There’s a few ways to read the Dragon Triptych. Perhaps Herrera is implying that we only name in the world what we ultimately see in ourselves. I’m reminded of the following passage by Borges: 

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

Maybe calling someone else a dragon is really just a way of self-identifying as a dragon? The allegedly pious, crusading conquistadors of the Age of Exploration might know something about that…

Another way to read the Dragons Triptych is to deduce that the explorers actually do transform into dragons. Perhaps Herrera means to say that the men, while in feckless pursuit of proving a pre-existing belief, became beasts when they crossed the border. Why else did Herrera spend such a large chunk of a very short story detailing the explorers’ apparently decades long(!) descent down a hellish cliff towards the beach on which they found the locals? Put another way: Was Columbus a monster when he proposed his expedition to Isabella and Ferdinand in Granada? Or did he become a monster upon landing in the Caribbean and realizing that he needed to return to Isabella and Ferdinand with something to show for his journey? I’m not sure. I’m only sure that Herrera would absolutely rock Columbus for his lifelong commitment to the fiction that landing in the so-called “West Indies” did achieve his goal of finding a sea route to Asia. 

Ten Planets loves to satirize the act of conquest. Although these are easy pickings, Herrera isn’t dull. His polysemous fiction aims to illuminate the full scope of the moral spectrum,even the uncomfortably nuanced bits. For example, the story “The Monsters’ Art” is about a group of unspecified monsters imprisoned in a bleak underground maze of cells who make “art” that is routinely seized by a vague organization for similarly vague purposes. The protagonist of this story is the bailiff charged with venturing into the monsters’ cages in order to collect their art. There are a plethora of ways to read this story:  You could consider it a send-up of the fine art and publishing industries, or an evisceration of the exploitative, fetishizing portrayal of the pain of marginalized peoples in “art,” or even an expression of Herrera’s own anxiety about creating work that is sold for commercial purposes. (This latter analysis seems evidenced in the story, though I’d prefer not to imagine myself proverbially pummeling Herrera over the head while reading his fiction.) Either way, the most compelling part of the story comes at the very end, when the bailiff, his brutal collection duties complete, mindlessly bites his own nails until “he noticed he was gnawing the bone.” What’s this now? An abuser traumatized by their own violence against others? Yes indeed. Herrera loves picking at self-inflicted wounds.  

Readers familiar with Herrera’s work will be unsurprised to find the author exploring the unintended long-term consequences of colonialism. The story that most acutely addresses the colonial headache might be “The Conspirators.” This story is set in a world divided between the Ones and the Others. The dynamic between these two groups is familiar: the former group make-up a large percent of the population, but find themselves living at the whim of the foreign (and yet more socially powerful) Others. The story huddles around a contingent of conspirators who believe that the Others have surreptitiously inoculated the general population of the Ones with an anti-insurrection vaccine. This story seems to be the one in which Herrera most directly comments on his native Mexico. This is apparent in the following passage, in which one of the conspirators explains how the powerful minority came to power in the first place: 

“The Others took not just our land but our language, and the world we’d imagined and constructed with that language…They made our language theirs, said it was theirs and always had been, and then imposed it on us so we’d forget that it had been ours, turned it into a broad brush to paint us in whatever way they pleased. And we forgot it. We forget that it had been ours and had to relearn it through them.” 

It’s difficult to read this story and avoid comparing it to post-Columbian Mexico. Does the Others’ strategy of domination sound anything like the white, criollo-dominated Mexican government’s longtime habit of co-opting indigenous motifs for nationalistic and self-aggrandizing purposes? Perhaps. Does the fact that the conspirators only invented the story of the anti-insurrection vaccine in order to create an excuse for generations of submissiveness when “the truth is that some of us have lived comfortable lives in submission” sound anything like the local acquiescence essential to the Iberian colonial project in Latin America? Maybe so. It’s only a hunch. Like with his words, Herrera likes to play too much with his history for us to know for certain.

Unlike his opaque historical references, Herrera is more direct with his literary allusions. He’s a bigtime name dropper in Ten Planets. In the final story, an evil-coded company demanding readers’ blind obedience is the Rand Corporation. In “Consolidation of Spirits,” the character named Bartleby is a bureaucrat charged with maintaining records on a post-human planet beset by poltergeists. One story is literally titled, “Zorg, Author of The Quixote” and it’s basically a pornographic sci-fi retelling of the story of the authorship of Cervantes’s epic, as well as a riff on the title of a somewhat similarly imagined Borges story. Ten Planets is a work of intricate cerebral dexterity. It’s also liable to make you laugh really hard. In the Quixote story—between descriptions of fervent masturbation and group sex—the founding novel of European literature is blithely described as “the one about the guy who goes around and another guy who goes with him and stuff happens to them or something, right?” 

As previously mentioned, Calvino and Borges are named on the back of the edition published by Graywolf. But it is actually one of Borges’s friends and compatriots that earns Herrera’s most unavoidable literary citations in Ten Planets: Julio Cortázar. One of Cortázar’s best known works is his story, “House Taken Over,” which follows a pair of well-heeled siblings who acquiesce to a mystery force taking over their aristocratic family’s ancestral home. Ten Planets  features a story of precisely the same name and, indeed, an ostensibly similar plot construction—albeit, inverted. In Herrera’s story, the house isn’t taken over, it takes over Attack of the smart home. Not even the house’s occupants are safe. In fact, the occupants (a family whose names entirely consist of punctuation, another allusion to Cortázar) are especially unsafe. In the climax of Herrera’s story, the family find themselves forcibly locked inside, left to futilely throw furniture at the windows. 

On the simplest level, Herrera is modernizing Cortázar’s story with some light techno-horror in order to explore the invasive role of technology in modern life. There’s much more to it, though. Herrera doesn’t make his literary allusions lightly. He’s not just subverting the past. He’s pulling the thread.   

The original “House Taken Over”, written in 1946, describes the inheritors of generational wealth unable to define their “intruder” nor able to defend their crumbling home. So, they depart. This metaphor is not too hard to grasp when one considers the context of the 1945 election of populist sandbagger Juan Perón to the presidency in Cortázar’s native Argentina. The landed gentry have fallen asleep at the wheel and now the car is bound for a wreck.  

Though in Herrera’s take, the family isn’t listless. Cortázar’s siblings infuriate the reader with their lackadaisical lifestyles full of knitting and reading while shirtless peasants starve outside their opulent door. Herrera’s family infuriates the reader in a different, more contemporary—dare I say, neoliberal?—way. Consider the scene immediately preceding their imprisonment, in which they force-feed a birthday cake to a homeless man, snapping self-congratulatory selfies all the while. Moments later, they cannot escape their fancy home. Whereas Cortazar’s rich folks lose their “home” (i.e. position) thanks to their introspective ignorance, Herrera’s rich folks lose control of their home thanks to their performative, self-satisfied, condescending philanthropism. Here lies one of the most interesting, most deceptively simple ideas of Ten Planets: Do less, babe. 

Of all the intricate, challenging, inspiring ideas that Herrera develops in Ten Planets, it’s this idea of “doing less” that stands out the most to me. He returns, again and again, to probe the problematic nature of enterprise and warn of the consequence of too much action. You can find this idea explored in nearly every story I’ve already discussed above, but it’s probably most succinctly and poignantly explored in the very Borgesian story, “The Cosmonaut.” This story follows a detective who solves crimes and mysteries by studying the noses of his clients and charges. In “The Cosmonaut,” the detective is  hired by some unseemly government types who want to figure out what exactly happened to a cosmonaut who, while on an expedition in deep space, had some kind of abnormal interaction with an alien comet. In the end, the detective realizes that the cosmonaut has discovered something—a distant civilization, maybe. The detective knows that the unseemly government types will want to visit the distant civilization should they learn of its existence. So, he lies, saying that the cosmonaut is just kooky bananas. Herrera puts it no more clearly anywhere else in the collection: You don’t always have to climb the tree. Sometimes, it’s best not to. Especially if your typical instinct is to pillage every fruit-bearing tree you come across. 

This idea feels wonderfully apropos of our contemporary moment here in the West, as we careen through the smiling maw (and potential final act?) of the Move Fast and Break Things era. Herrera isn’t just preaching the tired gospel of tech skepticism, or chastising unrepentant capitalism, or mourning colonial enterprise. He’s telling his explorers, his neoliberal philanthropists, his tech innovators: Do less, babe. Don’t just be thoughtful when you act. Be thoughtful about whether or not you should even act. Why? Because you might not have the answers you think you do. And because there’s sublimity in the acceptance of and acquiescence to the infinite unanswerability of the universe. 

Herrera declares this idea from the jump. In the very first story of the collection, the protagonist of “The Science of Extinction” suffers the cruel duplicate fate of not only being the last man on earth but also simultaneously suffering a debilitating form of dementia. A sad story, right? But that’s not how Herrera sees it. Consider the following excerpt :

“There were moments of wordless euphoria, when he’d marvel at his lack of fear of a noise or an object he could no longer name. And he’d decided—and could recall this decision though not the exact words with which he’d made it—that he was no longer going to lament…Sometimes he would see something, an object with four legs and a flat surface, and call it a cup. And he saw that this was good. Sometimes, he noticed something fluttering in the wind and it didn’t occur to him to call it anything in any lasting way, but he saw that this too was good.” 

I love this idea. Not just as we approach many unanswerable dilemmas of our era—How to address climate change while also not stifling the growth of emerging nations? What does it mean to be a writer in the age of ChatGPT?—but also as we aim to untangle the puzzle that is Ten Planets. Go ahead, Herrera says. Read my story however you want. Call a table a cup. It doesn’t matter. It will be “good” enough. You don’t need to name everything perfectly. Nor can you. My stories are polysemous, remember? Down to the word. 

I’ve read through Ten Planets many times now. Five times? Ten times? I can’t get enough. I keep going back to the well, not just for the humor and the thrills and the bizarre eroticism, but also because I have this vain idea that, if I just read the stories one more time, I will finally reach the end of the labyrinth. It’s intoxicatingly easy, you know. The stories are short. The collection is thin. Hardly enough to kill a cockroach. So back I go, returning to the well, sure that I’ll return to the surface soon enough with a bucketful of water and a map of answers. And yet? Here I am. Writing this review. Hands full. But full of what? Lots of questions. Few answers. 

Which side of the flat earth are we on? Are we conqueror, or conquered? Are we the people landing our ships on foreign shores? Or are we the people watching the aliens descend towards our earth? Are we dragons? Or are they? Or are we both? And if the latter is true then…what does it even matter? If an “iota” is both large and small, both a unit of weight as well as distance as well time, then…I mean…screw it, right? We’re all dragons, in the end, which makes none of us dragons. In the final plotted story of the collection, one of Herrera’s characters says to another: “We’re always on opposite ends of the universe”. When I read this line, I laughed out loud. As if there were “sides” or “ends” to such a shapeless, infinitely-expanding thing as the universe…or this book…

No matter how badly I (or you) might want to find them, there are no fixed answers or messages or meanings in Ten Planets. That’s what makes looking for them so fun. So, go ahead. Explore. Just make sure that you’re willing to meet a dragon in the mirror.