A collection about the infinite, wonderful possibilities contained in intermixture
There's no such thing as a pure culture. Every culture contains blends of various influences. But in Latin America, the blending is taken to a whole new level, as showcased by the spectacularly titled collection of stories The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, by Carlos Hernandez. (Full disclosure: I was a playtester in Hernandez's TTRPG Negocios Infernales.) The very concept of a "quantum santeria" alludes to this hybridity that pervades mestizo identity, a fusion of contrary particles that would be expected to annihilate each other but instead create something richer and marvelous.
The Aphotic Ghost, about a grieving father traveling to Mount Everest to retrieve his son's body, plays overtly with this kind of opposition of extremes. The son, Lazaro, learned from his mother a love for the creatures of the deep sea, but after winning awards for his oceanographic documentaries, he felt the urge to climb the highest mountain, to get as far as humanly possible from the place where he spent most of his youth. The twist is that Lazaro's mother, a biologist who studies the immortal life cycle of jellyfish, is something more than human, so it may be possible to rescue him from the frozen mountain.
The prose style in this story is deceptively simple for the multitude of thematic layers it contains. Lazaro is a clear stand-in for mestizo children of mixed families. The repeated mentions of jellyfish and their powers of regeneration occur first as backstory, then as allegory, and lastly as a central plot point. Although the sections of the story are alternatingly titled "Mountain," "Sea-Level," or "Aphotic Zone," which signals to the reader what degree of reality is involved, the story is a unified, harmonic whole where even the mundane can't happen without the otherworldly working in the background.
It was the size of a sleeping dog and looked something like
hand-blown Italian glass, impossibly whorling and curling
into itself, a hyaline nautilus relentlessly tearing sunlight into
rainbows. Deep in its center there seemed to be a dark nucleus,
and strange, ciliated veins circuited throughout its interior.
Homeostasis, about a woman adapting to her husband's subtly changed personality after he receives a brain implant to heal a head injury, does away with the overly abstract concerns that usually accompany this type of digital brain story. Is my husband still the same person? Does he keep the same soul? Is his identity an immutable monolith or an aggregate of attributes? Stop worrying about all that. Instead, hold his hand and feel his warmth. If that's intact, he's still there.
The robber's knife went all the way through his head;
its point poked out from his palate like a shark
tooth. It’s a miracle he didn’t die instantly. It’s a
miracle he didn’t die during the operation to remove
it. It’s a miracle his eyes are open and saccading.
Entanglements, about a Many Worlds researcher in an affair with a married woman, is a cute little comedy where the road not taken should have stayed that way.
I pushed a stalk gently, set it swaying. Flexible, but solid. Vibrantly
alive. Indistinguishable, yes, from the thousand of others in
this field: until you get up close. Then it becomes uniquely itself.
The International Studbook of the Giant Panda, about a panda breeding program that uses human-piloted robot pandas to teach the real ones how to mate, explores big questions about the embodied component of identity. If your nervous system is hooked to an artificial body in such a way that you can feel it walk like a panda, breathe like a panda, quack like a panda, how close does that get you to being able to say that you've become a panda?
She brandishes the helmet I’ll be wearing. It looks like a
bear skull made from machined aluminum, with rubbery
black patches holding it together. The eyes are covered
with what reminds me of the metal weave of a microphone.
In all, it looks like the lovechild of a panda and a fly.
The Macrobe Conservation Project, about a future humankind struggling to save an alien ecosystem they'd unwittingly endangered, returns to the same questions about identity, this time in the form of symbionts that invade your nervous system and eventually take over you. Although this premise is very strong, it's executed rather inelegantly. The first-person narrator is a researcher's young son who discovers a cruel secret about his family, but the secret in question is immediately obvious to the reader, and its coverup depends on more spinning plates than one person could believably handle. And the story ends precisely at the point where the really interesting events could begin to happen.
She was like a pillow, a walking talking pillow. But she gave
good hugs and smelled right. They did a good job with her:
sometimes when she hugged me and I closed my eyes it felt like
it’s supposed to feel and I forgot that she’s not my real mom.
Los Simpáticos, about a crime-themed reality TV show derailed by a real-life murder, isn't a speculative story. It's a moderately convoluted whodunit that pits together contrasting notions of getting even.
We weren’t ready for her, but in the reality-TV biz you learn to adjust fast. While
the rest of us hid, Xavier slipped into character: a laconic, efficient sociopath.
More than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give, about a man's quest to recover the soul of his mother, who was executed during the Cuban Revolution, establishes symbolic links between love and pain. For example, the object with the strongest emotional resonance for an old married couple is the wife's false tooth; a widower keeps a knife stuck to his chest to preserve his wife's soul; and the victims of a firing squad still linger in the bullet holes left on the wall.
When a guard offered her a cigarette, she smacked the entire pack out of
his hand. The crowd whooped. Here was someone who knew how to die.
Bone of My Bone, about a man slowly growing a horn on his head, is a brief but effective allegory for the bits of themselves that people leave in us after they leave.
When he woke up the next morning, thirsty and woozy, he
found that the horn had mercilessly shredded his pillow.
The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory, about an interdimensional migration of unicorns into our universe, reads like a fable with a nuanced position on when truth is necessary and when it can wait.
I don’t want
this magnificent creature to die without knowing
some comfort and love in his
passing. It’s a girlish, sentimental
thought, I know. That doesn’t make it any less
authentic.
American Moat, about alien explorers meeting vigilante enforcers at the US southern border, casts a satirical look at the patriotic impulse and questions what exactly it is that conservatives want to conserve.
Neither Ham nor Alex should have been able to hear her so clearly from
that distance. It was like her voice had emerged from within their own heads.
Fantaisie-Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66, about a dead pianist's mind preserved in a brain implant, comes up with a creative way to negotiate the not-really-so-inevitable clash between spiritual beliefs and computer science.
I am not making this music happen, but every time the
glove strikes a key, the music shoots up my fingers and
passes into my body, just as if I were playing this piece
myself. It’s so pleasurable and enchanting to feel the music
course through me that I forget for a moment to hear it.
And finally, the titular story, The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, about a child with an overactive curiosity who resorts to untested rituals to help his widowed father find love again, returns to the theme of pain linked to love, this time through sacrifice. In the world of this story, to steer your life into the desired timeline necessitates that you sacrifice all other potential timelines, even those where you would have lived with less sorrow.
This story is framed as an extended flashback; in adulthood, the narrator is simultaneously a quantum physicist and a priest of the Orishas, and has a knack for unusual innovation in both fields. This character is another example of successful mestizo life: the creative acquisition of dual competence in separate traditions that needn't be opposed.
As I got closer, I thought I saw the house … waver. Like a mirage. And
then, like any good mirage, it became solid again, reasserted its reality.
The thread that binds these stories together is, naturally, hybrid identity. All through the book, a case is made for rejecting strict dichotomies. You can both be fully human and also a jellyfish; or be fully human and also a digital pattern; or be fully human and also a robot panda; or be fully human and also an alien symbiote; or be fully human and also a channel for ghosts; or be fully human and also a truck. At the same time that you're assimilated by a dominant culture, you can choose to assimilate it in turn into you. You can be all. You can contain multitudes.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
Reference: Hernandez, Carlos. The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria [Rosarium Publishing, 2016].
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
