A Legend of the Future

by Agustín de Rojas

“Finally, we have the chance to read a landmark work from one of Cuba’s greatest science fiction writers…. If you like intensely psychological sci-fi that deftly piles on the suspense, this novel’s for you…. The boundaries between dream and reality, and then between human and machine, almost melt away as the story progresses. And it is de Rojas’s skillful manipulation of those boundaries that makes A Legend of the Future so addictive.” —SF Signal

The first book by the father of Cuban science fiction to be translated into English, this mesmerizing novel, reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a science-fiction survival story that captures the intense pressures—economic, ideological, and psychological—inside Communist Cuba.

A Legend of the Future takes place inside a spaceship on a groundbreaking mission to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons; back home, a final conflict between warring superpowers threatens the fate of the Earth. When disaster strikes the ship, the crewmembers are forced into a grand experiment in psychological and emotional conditioning, in which they face not just their innermost fears, but the ultimate sacrifice—their very humanity.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Latino, Dystopia, Adult

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Agustín de Rojas (1949-2011) is the patron saint of Cuban science fiction. A professor of the history of theater at the Escuela de Instructores de Arte in Villa Clara, he authored a canonical trilogy of novels consisting of Espiral (Spiral, 1982), for which he was awarded the David Prize; Una leyenda del future (A Legend of the Future, 1985); and El año 200 (The Year 200, 1990), all of which are scheduled for publication in English translation by Restless Books. While he was heavily influenced by Ray Bradbury and translated Isaac Asimov into Spanish, de Rojas aligned himself mostly with the Soviet line of socialist realism defined by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and Ivan Antonovich Yefremov. After the fall of the Soviet Union, de Rojas stopped writing science fiction. He spent his final years persuaded—and persuading others—that Fidel Castro did not exist.

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I originally received this to review via Netgalley, but took so long about it, I ended up picking it up in a shop. I’m actually not really sure what to make of it: on the one hand I found it engaging, but on the other I found the way it was set out maddening. I don’t know if this issue was deliberate, present in the original, introduced in translation, or a result of some typesetting issue, but scene breaks were several times completely elided so that one scene slid into the next and you only realised because one character was saying something that didn’t make sense in the context of the previous conversation. This happened enough to be completely confusing, rather than just happening once or twice. The other thing is that thoughts are denoted in the exact same way as speech, so you never know if a character is saying something aloud or just thinking it.

Awkwardness of language I’m quite prepared to put down to the issue of translation, and also the fact that the original was written in a wholly different context to modern SF. But combined with the layout issues, I found it frustrating.

On the other hand, the story is interesting, featuring the slow psychological breakdown of a crew as they must adjust to the fact that they won’t make it home, that one of them has to be hooked up to a computer and another is turned into a human calculating machine. The beginning doesn’t work as well as I’d like, because you don’t already have the emotional connection to give it impact, but I can’t see how else the book could sensibly be structured. There is quite a bit of exposition delivered by dialogue, which can be annoying — but I do wonder if part of that is different literary conventions.

The final chapters, the resolution of the story, also tell us why the title is A Legend of the Future. It’s an excellent ending, to my mind; wrapping things up with just enough uncertainty left that you’re not sure exactly what happened, what is real and what is hallucinated and suggested…

When I read the first few sections, I wasn’t much impressed, but my interest grew as I kept on — I think it rewards the effort.

Originally posted here.

[Book Riot Community]

Described as "the patron saint of Cuban science fiction," this is the first Rojas book to be translated into English. And we are all better for it. A Legend of the Future is a survival tale that reflects the turbulence inside Communist Cuba. A crew of astronauts returning from a mission to one of Saturn's moons must deal with the shocking discovery that aliens may exist, not realizing that back on Earth, the planet is set to destruct. Roja died in 2011, but I hope we'll see more translations of his work.



Tune in to the weekly All The Books podcast for the latest in new books each week: http://bookriot.com/category/all-the-...

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED!

Back in September I read Agustín de Rojas’ The Year 200, and discovered part way through that it’s the third book in a “trilogy.” Undaunted, I finished and completely adored The Year 200, and so I was greatly looking forward to approaching the preceding books as “prequels.”⁣⁣
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A Legend of the Future is the second book in the series, and I’m happy to report that the term trilogy does appear to be used quite loosely! The technologies of conditioning and the “groups” are familiar from The Year 200, but none of the characters overlap and the story follows a very different trajectory. (The full verdict on the trilogy nomenclature is still out, as the first book, Spiral, is not yet available in English. I’m excited though, because I just discovered there’s now at least an official publication date for the translation - July 2020 let’s go!)⁣⁣
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A Legend of the Future follows the surviving crew of a spacecraft after a devastating crash kills half their group and their navigational computer system. The remaining three crew members must work together to repair the ship, cope with their own injuries, and ensure the success of their return trip to Earth in the face of their own deaths. One of the most thrilling aspects of this novel is de Rojas’ deep exploration of the concept of “groups” (which was one of my favorites side notes in The Year 200.) These small groups of people are selected for their compatible psychological profiles and trained as one codependent unit, enabling them to cohabitate and problem-solve successfully while confined together in close quarters for the extended periods required for space travel. The dynamic created by the group training, as well as the psychological conditioning that, once activated, turns one of the characters access to a more robotic/analytical version of herself makes this novel sort of a more-Science-Fiction less-Science-Fact version of The Martian. Rather than exploring the problem solving ability of a single isolated individual however, this novel takes on the relationships and immense bonds between its three characters. ⁣
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My one squabble with this book is with the disruptive choices in punctuation! Dialogue and characters’ inner thoughts are notated identically with quote marks, often causing confusion over whether a line is being spoken or thought. Other than that though, flawless, exactly my jam novel! An absolutely unforgettable ride, I loved reading this book and was captivated from start to finish. Highly recommend.⁣

[Kalin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is one of three science fiction works by Cuban writer (and weirdo?) Agustín de Rojas. He is touted as a "patron saint" of Cuban science fiction but I don't know if that label is warranted. This book wasn't very good, at least in translation. And part of the book's problem is incredibly sloppy editing by Restless Books, which is a shame, because poor editing makes it hard to tell if the issue is book itself or the presentation. But as reviewer Nicky pointed out years ago, this book suffers from two glaring editorial oversights:
1) the book jumps POV perspectives and time periods quite frequently, and only uses a spatial separation on the page to denote this, but there are multiple instances where they just forgot to do this, so one scene bleeds right into the next and the reader only realizes the scene changed because the lack of continuity is so jarring they are thrown out of the story.
2) the book uses "quotation marks" to denote normal speech dialogue AND internal thoughts, which in English prose are most often denoted by italics. This becomes a comprehension nightmare when someone is speaking and then having an internal thought and then speaking again in one paragraph, which happens a lot. It's a total mess and I hope the person who decided this was a good idea got fired.

So those are my gripes with the editing. The story itself isn't much better, it's a disaster story set on a spaceship sent to explore TItan, where a catastrophic meteorite collision kills half the crew and leaves the rest mortally wounded. Realizing they won't make it back to Earth, the characters try to come up with a plan to get the ship itself back to Earth. Lots of weird psychobabble ensues, including the female character getting turned into a human computer because she is too emotional to cope with the disaster. The major problem with the writing of this book -- and I don't know if it is from the original or an artifact of the translation -- is that the characters are utterly lifeless. The dialogue is flat and dead, there is nothing to distinguish them from each other except names. And the whole book is dialogue, with extensive exposition. In fact, this book has the funniest exposition I've ever read, in which one character expounds at length about some topic while his interlocutor begs him to shut up and stop talking, to no avail. And this unintentionally hilarious sequence repeats multiple times! Just swap out the perpetrator and victim of exposition, et voila! We have a backstory. Apparently De Rojas was primarily influenced by Asimov (whom he translated into Spanish) and Soviet writers, so it's not surprising that characterization is so unimportant to him. But I am a reader in the 21st century and SFF is usually not interesting unless grounded by well developed characters.

Halfway through the book, we finally get flashbacks to when the group was training together and forming a unit. These almost rescue the book from itself, but unfortunately I didn't feel anything for anyone basically from start to finish, so they came too little too late, and didn't do enough to create people out of names. Gema, Thondup, and Isanusi were not individuals. But maybe that was the point?

This is where I give the book 2* instead of 1: the central premise of the book is that dangerous space travel requires human beings to work together at peak efficiency to prevent diastrous failure. As such, part of a space crew's training is to form them into a cohesive Group. The group here is more capable than the sum of its parts, and a crew that is devastated by catastrophe loses most chance of survival because the individuals that make up the group can't cope without it. This feels to me like a very Communist Cuban approach to social dynamics, finding strength in collectivism rather than individuality. This sort of different take is what draws me to reading international SF. I just wish the rest had been compelling rather than leaving me with the feeling I was just reading to be done with it.

[Dan]

Review Originally Appeared on The Collagist

A thawing of the icy relations between the United States and Cuba has brought a renewed interest Stateside in the Caribbean island's cultural patrimony. Cuba has a proud literary tradition dating back to the 19th-century poet and freedom fighter José Martí, whose work outside the island is largely known in song form; one of his poems was adapted into the 1960's international hit "Guantanamera" by Pete Seeger. Martí's principal contribution was a call for freedom, liberty, and democracy. His enduring legacy in Cuba (and beyond) today is testament to the timelessness of those ideas, as well as a study in how concepts of liberty can be co-opted by restrictive regimes—Martí remains a strong symbol of Cuban patriotism and one oft-cited by the Castro administration.

Less international attention has been paid to the genres in Cuban writing, however. Though that, too, is changing in the new geopolitical climate. For instance, Restless Books is turning the spotlight on Cuba's science fiction by making two titles available to American readers for the first time: A Planet for Rent by Yoss, a contemporary writer and "Friki" (literally, "Freaky"; colloquially, punk rocker), and A Legend of the Future by Agustín de Rojas. While Yoss has enjoyed some exposure outside his native land in recent years, de Rojas is less known, but perhaps more influential in the world of Cuban sci-fi. In contrast to better-known Cuban writers—people like Reinaldo Arenas, who initially supported the revolution before ultimately fleeing the island as a political dissident in 1980—de Rojas' work is committed to the utopian ideals of Socialism. His critique takes a different form than Arenas' satire. By hewing closely to the convictions of the revolution, he reveals how far from the ideal Castro's regime has strayed.

Set amidst the backdrop of a global contest between two superpowers for world domination, A Legend of the Future tells the tragic tale of the first manned journey to Saturn's moon, Titan. Things don't go quite as planned for the crew of Sviatagor. Following a disaster that leaves most of them dead, the three remaining crewmembers—Isanusi, Gema, and Thondup—must find a way to get back to Earth despite their injuries and the ship's reduced capacities. What develops on the isolated ship is a microcosm of the perils and advantages of collectivism.

Following the death of so many of her friends and colleagues, Gema's psychological state is in danger of collapsing. To prevent this, Thondup activates a conditioning program that alters her consciousness and turns her into a kind of android. (Thondup himself is on shaky psychological ground, only managing to stave off psychosis with regular doses of psychostabilizers.) While the benefits of such a transformation keep the diminished crew from fracturing in the immediate aftermath of the accident, the long-term results are less clear, though they do suggest a potential loss of Gema's fundamental humanity. De Rojas writes:

"Did Thondup explain the conditioning to you?" [Isanusi asked Gema.]
"Yes."
"Was it helpful?"
"Reasonably. Why didn't they include all that explanation in my memory? I wouldn't have had to waste so much time. . ."
"Can you undertake the task now?"
"Which task?"
"Rescue all you can from your previous mental make-up, and merge it with your new one. Do you think you can do that?"
"There's a good probability of it, but . . . I'm overwhelmed with work. And to do what you're suggesting takes time. I don't know if I'll have enough to recover what you want before it finally disappears."
"You're not saying what you really think, Gema."
The young woman said nothing.
"Speak."
"Isanusi . . . Thondup is a psychosociologist."
"I know, he has been for a long time."
"He doesn't think it's possible."
"There's no reason he has to be right there's no previous experience of this kind of conditioning, Gema. Everything we say to you is simply guesswork. . . . The result depends on you, on your efforts."

One gets the sense that de Rojas is gesturing towards the larger collectivism experiment that is part of Socialism. A Legend of the Future was published in 1985, which was in retrospect, perhaps the apogee of Castro's revolution. The regime was secure from American intervention and ideologically oriented. Cuba would enjoy a few more years of Soviet sponsorship before descending into the dreaded "Special Period" of shortages and cataclysmic economic decline in the wake of Soviet collapse. 1985 was likely a relatively hopeful time on the island, a time when the sacrifices Castro demanded in the struggle to establish a new order were waning. Perhaps it would have seemed possible to rescue what was good from before the revolution and integrate it with the newly remodeled nation in much the same way Gema might yet recover the essence of her humanity while operating as an avatar of the state.

It's not just Gema who becomes a living experiment in the collectivist spirit of a utopian new society, however. As she and Thondup succumb to radiation sickness, the successful return of Sviatagor to Earth depends on whether or not the rapidly degrading body of Isanusi—whose name, de Rojas tells us, means "'the seer' or 'he who sees most'"—can be replaced by the ship itself. The scheme involves transplanting Isanusi's consciousness into the ship, which is not as easy as it might seem at first blush—even for a work of science fiction. Sviatagor's crew represent a "united, solid collectivity that...will be able to face any challenge . . .As long as they remain intact." With all of them dead (or very nearly dead) the ability of any individual to successfully bring the ship home without the support of the unit's "mutual dependence" seems unlikely unless Gema and Isanusi are able to form an "emotional telepathy" that will allow Isanusi's consciousness to maintain the emotional imprint of the entire crew and thus save him from total isolation. Sviatagor—under the control of Isanusi's consciousness—does ultimately return home, but the implications extend beyond a mere happy ending. The ship's name is a reference to a tragic figure from Russian mythology who was imprisoned and left to die in a stone coffin and who has come to embody the spirit of an edenic Russia. De Rojas draws a clear connection between the folkloric hero and the ship-of-state here, and, by extension, the utopian Socialist project underway in Cuba. Individual desire, he seems to argue, must be sacrificed in service to the collective good, yet the individual's humanity must be retained, for it is the only thing capable of holding the entire operation together.

1985 was a long time ago and much has changed in Cuba and abroad, but, in a sense, a similar historical moment is playing out on the island today. The Obama administration's doctrine of re-engagement with Cuba after five decades of isolation is one predicated on hope and, unsurprisingly, change—the hope that the reintegration of the neighboring countries can usher in a new era of prosperity for Cubans, which will, inevitably, lead to a change in the political atmosphere. Written thirty years ago, de Rojas' words serve as both justification and warning for the project. The question remains whether or not the Cuban people will be able to reap the benefits of renewed relations with their neighbor and long-standing political adversary without losing whatever benefits their long sacrifice has earned. The literature can point the way, but it's no guarantee of a safe arrival. After all, in Martí we've seen the facility with which enlightened ideas can be manipulated to bolster baser realities.

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[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Page-turning Cuban Sci-fi, super engaging and surreal.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super interesting novel. Lots of big ideas done in ways I've never seen.

It's a space opera, but all the expected action is gone. In fact, as the narrative demands action, the circumstances of the characters literally forces them to inaction.

It's a novel about solving puzzles, about trauma, about memory and identity and survival and even utilitarianism. The worldbuilding is really interesting and we get to some transhuman explorations, both physically and psychologically.

It reminds me of the Solaris films, both by Tarkovsky and Soderbergh. It manages to reflect both of them in very cool ways. It's about love and dying and memory. It's about so many things and the mechanics are all intriguing and unexpected.

Full review to come.

Highly recommended.

[Nate Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unique, hallucinatory, and thought-provoking. I really enjoyed this take on the psychology of group dynamics and the way it addressed the question of just what a mind can be.

[James Dennis Hoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Legend of the Future is a strange and difficult book. Often compared to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 a Space Odyssey, Augustin de Rojas' novel is tonally and thematically much closer to Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. Like Lem's novel, it is fundamentally a psychological work that questions the nature of reality and the boundary between the self and others. The plot is relatively simple: a group of cosmonauts on a journey to Jupiter's Moon, Titan, struggle to survive after a meteorite pierces the hull of their ship, killing several crew members and exposing the survivors to deadly radiation. As the crew attempts to make repairs and return the craft to earth, the real story unfolds. 

The crew of the Sviatagor are no ordinary collection of individuals. Out of billions of people, they have been chosen and trained together for their mutual compatibility, a trait that allows them to work together seamlessly under even the most difficult circumstances. This compatibility, however, also turns out to be their weakness since the crew are so close to one another that the surviving members are psychologically incapacitated by the loss of their crewmates. 

In order to survive, they must shut down, through the use of mood stabilizing drugs and psychological programming, their most vulnerable emotions, becoming in the process, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally, human computers. Ultimately, however, it is only by becoming more empathetic, more mutually bound together in their shared histories and struggles for survival, that their mission to return to Earth succeeds. 

Though the main plot takes place almost entirely on the Sviatagor, the background of that story unfolds through a series of flashbacks and dreams (it's not always easy to tell the difference) in which we are given a glimpse not only of the relationships between the living and dead characters, but of the political and social world from which they came. 

[Mike Collymore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really hyped to get into this book and experience some seminal Cuban hard science fiction. The first half (about 130 pages) felt very lacklustre, there are large overdescriptive sections about the failry mundane routine maintenance. None of that is helped by this novel's formatting; The lack of page breaks, punctuation, or chapter markers other than time of day make the reading more work than leisure while the story itself at this point is barely interesting.

To put it simply, I can read a Cormac McCarthy novel like Blood Meridian with its density and erratic punctuation because the story is engaging enough to carry the reader through it. This was not the case in part 1 of A Legend of the Future. It is possible, too, that the translation has something to do with that.

The story does really pick up in part 2, however, and I began to see why Rojas' work was so lauded. Deeper, more interesting concepts of science and the mind are suddenly introduced while long drawn-out allusions to capitalism vs. communism (the empire vs. the federation) are pushed to the fringes... along with TOD markers and even further punctuation. The formatting actually hurts this section more but now, in the latter half of the book where we slide in and out of the present, the story is far more engaging and the characters are actually being developed so it's not as much of a chore to power through.

In the end, I more or less abhorred the first half, yet -adored- the second half. So I am still excited to read more of Agustín de Rojas' work, with The Year 200 already waiting for me on my shelf.

[Antti Värtö · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a quick read, although the English edition was atrociously edited; the book had constant shifts in time and/or POV, and although these were neatly separated in the original (I checked from Google Books), in the English edition they were often mistakenly crammed together or cut even more confusingly. Also, the characters often had internal thoughts but for some unimaginable reason the translation used quote marks for both these thoughts AND dialogue, causing confusion. The original used quote marks for internal thoughts and a dialogue line for dialogue. I guess it would've been too difficult to just follow that same format for the English edition, huh?

Reading the book, I got flashbacks to my childhood, when I found 60's-70's Soviet SF books in my local library. There was a space ship with a mixed-gender crew that is nominally equal but not quite so, thanks to deeply-ingrained sexism; there was the final triumph of Communism (that happened during the story, no less); there was the pseudoscience that feels even more pseudo than the technobabble of contemporary Western SF; there were the cardboard characters.

But it wasn't all bad. I liked how it was clear from the beginning that the crew was doomed and they only tried to salvage at least some value from the expedition, with no expectation that any crew member would survive in the end. I liked some ideas (like the conditioning) that I had not encountered before in SF.

So, not exactly good, but worth reading, nevertheless.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a good book! The book is a unique one and gloriously suspenseful/psychological. And it's lovely to read sci fi from someone other than the typical US/UK author.

While the book is not perfect:

- Some things are occasionally disjointed.
- You have to catch up figuring some things out that the author doesn't explain.
- Thoughts are written in quotes so you can't easily differentiate between them and conversation.
- There's some awkwardness of language which is likely a combination of the translation and the fact that this isn't modern sci fi

...these are all fairly minor balancing out a real treat of a book.

After the first chapter, I thought I wasn't going to enjoy it and would put it down as a "did not finish." But decided to give it a few more chapters and am so glad I did! It got better and better, and I just got more and more invested.

The ending was also excellent.

[Carlos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Esta novela fue creativa, especialmente cuando se considera que fue escrita en los 1980s, y lo suficientemente entretenida como para terminarla. Aunque las referencias a la Guerra Fría son un poco irrisorias para la audiencia moderna que sabe cómo acabo, estas son pocas y no distraen demasiado de la trama. Igualmente, la leve misoginia que permee la novela es irritante pero no opaca los aspectos interesantes de la exploración de como un equipo puede lidiar con reveses significantes. Todo acaba dando una novela interesante, sin llegar a ser sobresaliente, y con aspectos curiosos como la primera descripción, que yo conozca, de las cabezas flotantes que se ven en la serie de televisión Futurama.

[Sean Kottke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey are well-earned, but underneath its enigmatic trippiness is an ultimately more accessible narrative that critiques the limitations of socialism's faith in behaviorist conditioning to reprogram the human mind. In that regard, it's more on a par with Heinlein's brand of science fiction realism in which the brave new world of space exploration and utopian technologies meets the human animal with all its primal emotions and jealousies.

[K's Bognoter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agustín de Rojas, der er blevet kaldt cubansk science fictions fader, lægger i det stemningsfulde rumepos, “A Legend of the Future,” en overbevisende billet ind som arvtager til Arthur C. Clarke. Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick og Isaac Asimov er andre oplagte referencer. Hvis det appellerer til dig, så læs min anmeldelse “A Legend of the Future” på K’s BOGNOTER: https://bognoter.dk/2019/07/14/agusti...

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Caveat, I did not finish this book. So my rating is perhaps unfair. The characters remained totally one dimensional after 100 pages; the plot was very focused on ideas of behavioral conditioning and how governments and medical specialists try to alter human minds in anachronistic futuristic-seeming ways. The plot hinged on how to get the ship back to earth but I didn’t feel compelled to care. I wanted to like it!

[Wally · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read a long time ago, during a burst of Cuban sf publishing.

A voyage to Titan is cut short by a meteorite, which quickly kills half of the six-person crew. As the survivors fight mental instability brought on by the deaths of their friends and lovers, as well as the effects of radiation sickness, they devise a radical plan to return to earth, even if only one of them will survive the journey.

[Willy E. A. Ramírez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Técnicamente hablando es mejor que el año 200 de Agustín. Aunque parece más bien una novela precuela. El argumento del final daba para mejor Historia. Al igual que en el año 200 el primer 1/3 esta escrito magistralmente, después va menguando, con la diferencia de que este final estuvo (relativamente mejor [pensado]). Ahora solo me falta espiral (creo que las leí al revés jajaja).

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas, for sure, but I was distracted by characters who didn't quite come across believably...although that could have to do with the fact that this is from the 80's and translated from the original Spanish. I liked it, but wouldn't necessarily read the other two in his SF trilogy.

[Luis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough going - whatever sense of style and language this might have had in the original is lost in this translation. But the twist at the end shifts me from 3 🌟 to 4.

[Rafael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot remember reading a book with so much compassion. Each scene, character, and action is pulsing with the dim light of hope and a frailty of the human spirit. Simply beautiful!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The setting for A Legend of the Future is (as the cover says) highly reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It quickly descends into something much bleaker, where a group of tight-knit cosmonauts (I seriously adore that they stick with the Soviet Union word in the translation, rather than the American astronaut) are faced with their certain impending deaths. It took me a while to realize that this wasn't going to be some sort of triumphant story where the plucky characters overcome insurmountable odds, but instead those odds would actually be insurmountable and they would inevitably succumb. I feel like many story threads took a while to settle in, but once they did the story flowed quite nicely and the characters opened up and became real.

That lag between the beginning of the novel and when the novel really starts working was frustrating, though, and it was certainly not helped by what seem to be either printing errors or terrible formatting choices. Any time a character thinks, the dialogue is put in quotation marks as if they were speaking. There is no distinction between speech and thought. This demands a lot of double-takes and re-reads to parse correctly. There are also many places where the scene abruptly changes but there is no space (and sometimes not even a line break) between the two scenes. Put that together with the thinking/speaking problem and the book feels error-ridden and confused. These may be deliberate choices, given that the characters' mental states are slowly degrading and eventually can't tell what's real and what's not, but for the most part the odd formatting doesn't correlate with the characters' behavior or sanity, and the presence/absence of page breaks is inconsistent, so I doubt it - and either way, there are ways to convey the disorganized mentality of the characters while making it clear to the reader what is going on, or signaling that there is some intentionality in the formatting.

It took quite a while for the relationships between the characters to become clear, and while I understand the choice to begin with the incident that damages their ship, the action at the beginning and the devastation it wreaks on the remaining crew would be much more impactful if we had known anything at all about the characters first. Getting to know the characters through flashbacks in the latter half of the book was still emotional, unfolding the tragedy and effectively creating the grief we don't feel at the beginning. It also works pretty well if you see Gema as the main character, since she is almost immediately wiped of her personality and rediscovers some of it through these memories (an important arc that is heavily emphasized at first but trails off and is never explored as fully as it could have been or as it was implied it would be).

The worldbuilding also comes later in the book, and it was a delightful surprise. There's some heavy-handed exposition at the beginning (one character monologues about history known to the other characters, and one even notes that they know all this already and it's not typical for that character to talk so incessantly), but it eventually creates a pretty intriguing world where some children are selected for space-faring groups at age 14, placed with 5 other children whose personality profiles match theirs closely, and trained with that group for years before being vetted for actual space travel. It's also a world strongly influenced by the divide between the communist Soviet Union (here the Federation) and the capitalist world (the Empire) - de Rojas was passionate about communism and the Soviet Union and actually went a little insane after the Soviet Union fell, so there's a bit of wordy rhapsodizing about the wonders of communism, but it adds some flavor we don't usually see in the SF world nowadays. One bit of the worldbuilding, the Dream Palaces, suffered the same lack of development and payoff I've mentioned before, despite it being one of the more intriguing SF premises in the book.

I also feel there's some humor intended in a lot of places that isn't quite expressed in the translation, which is a shame.

Overall, I'm not sure how much this novel suffered through translation and poor publishing, but I suspect it would be a 4-star book for me in its original form. It blossoms into a beautifully tragic character study, has some fantastic cyberpunk/space exploration hard SF premises, and pulled me into the action. It feels like a rough draft, though, because the beginning feels cluttered and confused and the ending feels rushed, with many of the more interesting lines of character development and side-plots left unsatisfied.

[Chelsea Mcgill · Rating 2 out of 5]

A tight-knit crew of six cosmonauts has embarked on the cutting-edge ship Sviagator. Their mission: explore Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, and return the experimental ship safely to Earth. When disaster strikes, only three crewmembers survive: Isanusi, the captain, who is physically incapacitated; Thondup, an engineer and psycho-sociologist, who is emotionally fragile after the death of his partner Alix; and Gema, a physiologist whose conditioning has been activated so now she has all the skills of a computer. All three of them are dying, some more quickly than others. Now they need to figure out how to return the ship to Earth, without autopilot and without any of them being able to survive the three months required to make the trip.

Philosophy, politics, psycho-sociology

This book involves a lot of sitting around talking. Granted, due to their assorted physical disabilities there’s not much else the crew can do at this point, but it struck me as incredibly wordy. This sometimes passed into being really boring. There are a few themes that keep appearing, and which provide the majority of the plot:

First, the novel explicitly touches on the philosophical question of man vs. machine. Even though Thondup activated Gema’s conditioning, he doesn’t approve of it; he believes she has been made into a computer. Isanusi does not agree. Gema spends much of her time trying to combine her new personality with pieces of the old one, but the question still remains about whether she is actually a human being anymore. If you read a lot of science fiction (particularly older works), this is nothing that you haven't seen before.

Read the rest of my review here: http://thegloballycurious.blogspot.in...

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The jacket said this book was part of the inspiration for "2001: A Space Odyssey," which explains why it was as long and confusing as a Kubrick film. But then again, it also raised some good HAL-like points about the thin line between manipulation and emotion when it comes to distinguishing between robot and human.

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story of a space mission gone wrong, was interestlng but hard to get emotionally invested in. Very obviously a metaphor for Communism vs Capitalism in many fundamental ways; I find myself in the book , as in life, going against the natural order and becoming more sympathetic to Communism the older I get.

[Odo · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5.0

[Wes Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. It's a different sort of sci-fi than I'm used to. In a good way. Not so much the technology or setting, but the pacing and structure of the actual story.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

love it as much as the first read - yet no one else seems to!

[Restless Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Finally, we have the chance to read a landmark work from one of Cuba’s greatest science fiction writers…. If you like intensely psychological sci-fi that deftly piles on the suspense, this novel’s for you…. The boundaries between dream and reality, and then between human and machine, almost melt away as the story progresses. And it is de Rojas’s skillful manipulation of those boundaries that makes A Legend of the Future so addictive.”

—SF Signal