The most compelling science fiction is the sort which holds weight beyond its sheer inventiveness or even its ingenuity. It takes more. The best in the genre have always functioned like corner prophets reporting from the fringe ... Super Extra Grande is a work of welcome imagination, steeped in science and imbued with satire and philosophy ... One of the most endearing elements of the novel is the use of Spanglish that is peppered throughout ... Not unlike his main character, it's evident that Yoss — as an artist and cultural anthropologist — is intent on doing the dirty work, on digging through the ugly insides of human identity in order to arrive at something pure and lasting.
The surprisingly interesting details of alien veterinary science allow Yoss to draw on his background as a biologist, and Jan Amos’s complicated romantic feelings about his two assistants showcase the writer’s gift for narrative humor. One particularly amusing touch is the fact that Jan Amos and his assistant communicate in Spanglish, a galaxian lingua franca, which translator David Frye has done a good job of rendering in translation ... Super Extra Grande is certainly a more optimistic, less critical work than A Planet for Rent. Yet this may be illustrative of the moment in which Cuba finds itself. After surviving on pluck and ingenuity through varying degrees of scarcity and economic crisis, Cuba’s citizens may now have access to new opportunities, thanks in part to the normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States ... it dares us to hope for a universe in which all things (super extra) large and small can find their place.
...an unusual and hilarious little novel ... The dialogue of Super Extra Grande, also in Spanglish, is a carefully rendered triumph of translation ... Super Extra Grande takes its place among other recent novels of postcolonial sci fi, by writers like Nalo Hopkinson and Nnedi Okorafor, to imagine a future that carries with it the legacy of conquest.
