ALPHALAND by Cristina Jurado, translated by James Womack, Sue Burke, Monica Louzon, Steve Redwood and Inés Galiano (BOOK REVIEW)
Cristina Jurado – Alphaland (2023, translated by James Womack, Sue Burke, Monica Louzon, Steve Redwood and Inés Galiano)
“For him, light has always been something foreign and treacherous, a phenomenon that defines shapes and forms, makes them angular and sharp. Reality becomes a dangerous place; objects become concrete and acquire strange and malignant capabilities. On the other hand, in the dark everything is uncertain and evil only exists in potential, without being fully defined. Forms disappear, sharp edges are smoothed, and all things recover their neonatal state, in which no such thing as a threat exists. That is why he closes his eyes and imagines himself sinking into a shrouded lake, protected by the fluids that pour from the young woman.”
Cristina Jurado is a bilingual Spanish author who has won awards in her native Spanish for her SF novel Bionautas (2018) and does important work as an editor, translator and promotor of the genre. Alphaland (2023) is a short story collection that was published in Spanish in 2013 and is her first book to be published in English, thanks to Calque Press. Truly all fans of intelligent and innovative speculative fiction owe them a debt of gratitude for this. This is an absolutely remarkable collection from a stunningly original and powerful voice in speculative fiction. Jurado writes across the spectrum of genre, from Weird to science fiction to horror and mashups of all the above, with an unmatched intensity. Her stories drip with Philip K. Dick-ian paranoia, and are crafted with the care, love of language and desire to experiment with form that makes Marian Womack and Nina Allan such exciting writers. They focus on characters in the grip of monstrous transformations, realities on the verge of collapse, people and creatures living on the fringes of society. This is one of those books that turns up to reaffirm your love of genre fiction, and rekindle your excitement at what speculative fiction can do. Cristina Jurado immediately enters the ranks of my favourite writers, and I cannot wait for more of her wonderful work to be translated into English.
At just under 200 pages, Alphaland consists of nine short stories and one essay, ‘Short Fiction as the Seed of Speculative Fiction’, in which Jurado talks about the importance of the short story as the engine that drives speculative fiction’s development. But within this short space Jurado crams a veritable galaxy’s worth of imagination. From the opening of the deliriously weird ‘Vanth’ it’s clear that we are in the presence of a master. From the story’s opening, which reveals why the reprehensible protagonist is the way he is, to its brutal climax as he is consumed by a horrific cosmic horror, ‘Vanth’ is a masterpiece of taught narrative control, unexpected turns and dark eroticism. These are stories in which both consensus reality and the human body itself are profoundly unsafe, subject to the whims of bizarre and uncomfortable transformations. ‘Inchworm’ draws on an image from the iconic music video for David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and transforms it into a body horror space nightmare that would surely have made Bowie himself proud. And the title story ‘Alphaland’ demonstrates just how much Jurado can rip apart the strands of reality in only four pages, putting the reader directly in the perspective of a person who thinks themselves mad when their dreams encroach into reality, only to be terrified when the hallucinations finally leave them alone.
‘Second Death of the Father’ is the closest thing the collection has to a straight horror story, but told with Jurado’s transgressive hallucinatory intensity. The story tells of a woman mourning the death of her estranged father, only to be haunted by nightmare images of a horrendous creature that preys on limbless figures in a muddy swamp that grows out of her bedroom ceiling. The story is both a powerful exploration of the difficult grief that comes with the death of someone you have complicated feelings about and a truly stomach-churning horror story. ‘Lamia’ also veers close to horror, telling the story of a revenant whose baby was murdered by its father in life, so she spends her afterlife murdering babies in a twisted attempt to prevent mothers from feeling the same pain.
Other stories possess a much more complex relationship to genre. ‘The Shepherd’ is an impressively bonkers blend of science fiction and horror, in which alien vampires have taken over the Earth and breed humans as livestock, told from the point of view of the vampire entrusted with caring for the human livestock. The story is told without exposition, forcing the reader to traverse the seemingly disparate genre elements in order for it to properly coalesce in their heads. The vampire shepherd’s visceral disgust at the humans he looks after drives the story, forcing the reader to look upon themselves in the abject. The abject recurs in ‘The Dump’, a complex science fiction story about the people who live on a planet of waste, scavenging for valuable technology and materials thrown out with the rubbish so that they can sell it and rise up the rigid hierarchy of scavengers. The protagonist Naima is a Rat who hopes one day to rise to the position of Homie, where she can partake of such luxuries as a place to sleep and regular access to food and water. But Naima is also possessed by a parasite that lives in her head and protects her, all the while cynically looking out through her eyes. And ‘Embracing the Movement’, my favourite story in the collection, tells of an alien encounter between humans and insectoid hive aliens, from the point of view of the insectoid hive, who make no secret of the utter disgust with which they view humans and their social interactions.
Alphaland is an incredible, disturbing and vital collection from a truly exciting voice in speculative fiction. I found myself immediately impressed by Jurado’s intensity of vision, her originality, her command of prose and atmosphere. I am so glad that Calque Press have brought Jurado’s incredible voice to the anglophone science fiction readership, and I can only hope that this will mean that we will see more of her work in English soon – surely a translation of her award winning novel Bionatas would be a reasonable next step. For now I am simply thrilled to have discovered a new favourite writer, and can’t wait to see what else she brings our way.
Alphaland is available now, you can order your copy HERE