Red Dust: A Novel by Yoss
Reviews
By Gabino Iglesias
There is something magical about reading a narrative in which the author’s unbridled joy pours from every sentence. Yoss, who was born José Miguel Sánchez Gómez, is perhaps the most singular voice in contemporary Cuban science fiction, and Red Dust, his most recent novel translated by David Frye for Restless Books, is an explosive mix of science fiction and noir that pays tribute to both genres while also showing how much the author loves them.
Raymond is an android who works as a cop on the intergalactic trading station William S. Burroughs, a place where aliens from different races trade with humans. The humans are at the bottom of the food chain and long ago gave up on any ideas of being superior. Grodos, a race of aliens that speak through pheromones, and the Collosaurs, who are gigantic and almost impossible to beat in battle thanks to their power and hard exoskeleton, run things with superior bodies, intellect, and weapons. Raymond’s existence isn’t too exciting because everything is more or less under control, but that changes when Makrow 34, a fugitive Cetian perp, escapes prison with the help of two accomplices and his psi powers, whereby he can bend time and space and do everything from making things explode or fly to making it rain indoors. Raymond is tasked with finding Makrow 34 and bringing him to justice, but it is a task he is ill-equipped to pull off on his own, so he enlists the help of Vasily, a prisoner with psi powers, to aid him in capturing Makrow 34. Together Raymond and Vasily will embark on a dangerous transgalactic mission in which they’ll meet strange beings and even float lost in space while attempting to put the escaped criminal back behind bars.
The most prominent element in this novel is the mixture of science fiction and noir. Raymond is a positronic android who lives in the future as is surrounded by alien science and gadgets, but he’s also obsessed with the novels of Raymond Chandler and noir films. These things are constantly clashing against each other in the narrative, and it’s a lot of fun to see an android discussing how things are done in classic noir novels and how those things may or may not be good options for him while surrounded by aliens.
While love for noir is at the heart of the novel, science fiction is the heart itself. It’s also the entire structure of the novel. Yoss has never been afraid to come up with wild ideas, and he does that a few times in Red Dust. From weapons and languages to alien races and even strange poisons from other planets, the narrative offers an onslaught of unique ideas and concepts. Makrow 34 and Vasily are the perfect example because they’re both Gaussicals, and the mental gymnastics of what that means make for some of the most interesting reading in the book. Mix in Yoss’s penchant for names, which the positronic detectives get from things they’re passionate about, and unadulterated love for science fiction, the result is a book that delivers plenty of passages that entertain while also presenting bizarre science and strange possibilities:
So the fugitive was one of those statistically near-impossible Psi oddballs who could alter, through some as-yet undiscovered means, the shape of the Gaussian bell curve that describes the statistical probability of any number of events. The macroscopic equivalent of Maxwell’s famous demon, according to a pozzie name Einstein who knows more about physics than Sandokan Mompracem does about alien languages and customs.
Much like the work of fellow Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas, whom we sadly lost too early, all of Yoss’s work has some degree of political or social critique intertwined in the narrative. Red Dust is no different. While most of the alien mayhem isn’t overtly political, there are a few instances in which he gets political or does a brilliant deconstruction of how the center-periphery model operates and how it is designed to ensure those who possess power retain it and those who depend on the center are doomed to remain in ignorance and dependency:
Fuck technology. Don’t you think we’d be better off now if they’d left us alone? We have heaps of wonderful little gadgets and they might as well’ve told us they work by magic. Not like they ever taught us how they work or what theories they’re based on. We let them turn us into a race of customers. We don’t invent anything—what’s the point? The aliens already invented more than we could dream up in a thousand years. Get me? I don’t think they really even want our raw materials. All they want is to keep us down, keep us like this, neuter our initiative.
Red Dust is an odd mix that somehow works beautifully. Fans of science fiction will immediately fall in love with Yoss’s imagination, and fans of noir and detective stories will get a kick out of seeing the author taking classic tropes into outer space and seeing classic novels through the eyes and mind of an android. Restless Books has done a fantastic job by bringing Yoss’s work to English speakers, and translator David Frye has once again managed to translate a narrative with strange words, unique phrasing, funny turns of phrase, and even a hint of Spanglish without losing any of the spark and humor that make Yoss’s work such a pleasure to read. If you’re a fan of Yoss, this is a superb addition to his oeuvre. If you’ve never read Yoss, then this is the perfect place to start.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides: Stories from the Border. You can find him on Twitter @Gabino_Iglesias.
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