Genre-defying ... Most of the shorts are non-categorizable ... The loss and disconnection are reminiscent of Paul Auster or Miranda July—or the more obscure works of J.G. Ballard ... There is a fascinating—if affected—afterward by the translator who walks through some of the decisions she made both in word choices and sentence structure; it’s a very satisfying peek into the process of translating both literal meaning and nuance ... Overall, a highly original set of voyages to imaginary worlds that shed unexpected light on our own.
He relies on what the narrator of one of his stories calls 'the illusion of precision' to make the unreal — or, at least, the unknowable — seem just as oversaturated as the real worlds he writes so uniquely and well ... Ten Planets' stories are linked occasionally and loosely, often by language ... More than any of Herrera's other work, it requires not only suspension of disbelief but surrender of control. Both are challenging; both are worth it. Nobody writes like Yuri Herrera, and it would be a shame not to travel with him as far as his imagination can go.
The author defamiliarizes his worlds with precise, scientific language, often estranging us from conventional meaning by making ordinary words behave oddly ... The translator, Lisa Dillman, is to be congratulated on finding a flexible and responsive equivalent in English for Herrera’s complex, often subtly idiomatic style. Ten Planets is an impressive achievement: bold, disturbing, ironic.
The collection employs many of the fantastic tropes that have become part of our shared culture... except even these tropes are confused, short-circuited ... It is hard to overstate how central this feeling of disorientation is to the experience of reading Ten Planets. It is at once the book’s most infuriating feature and its most alluring ... [Herrera's] prose reminds me of postmodernism’s playful fascination with language ... Herrera’s fiction is most satisfying when it is most frustrating. It is the more opaque stories in the collection that I find myself pulled back toward, revisiting them in a spirit of curiosity rather than confusion ... That Ten Planets can be so hazy and engrossing is just one of its many paradoxes—and I take a certain familiarity with paradox to be the mark of great fiction.
