“Is it true that all the fields used to be green?” 

The old man paused to pull a kerchief from the back pocket of his tunic and pass it over his neck and forehead. 

“There are books and films, boy. I can’t tell you anything they don’t.”

“But they don’t tell me about emotions. Tell me what you remember, what it felt like out there. Please.”

 I was very impressed with Cristina Jurado’s Alphaland (2023), her first collection of short stories to be published in English. So I jumped at the chance to review her novella ChloroPhilia, which was originally released in 2017 but is only just being released in English translation for January 2025. ChloroPhilia more than lives up to the promises of her short stories. It displays all of Jurado’s remarkable versatility with genre ideas, creating a warped post-apocalyptic body horror story that is intensely driven by its characters. The longer format allows Jurado to spread out, exploring her characters in depth and piece by piece revealing more and more information about the disturbing nature of the imagined future. Sue Burke’s crisp translation does an excellent job of bringing Jurado’s vision into English. The novella makes me excited to read more of Jurado’s work, and I eagerly await translation and publication of her novels in English. 

ChloroPhilia is set in the near future when the world has been destroyed by a never-ending storm of sentient nanoparticles. The remnants of humanity live in the Cloister, beneath the protective domes that keeps them safe from the destruction of the storm. Kirmen is one of the children born in the Cloister, never having known the world outside the domes. He lives with his mother, awaiting visits from his estranged father, and spends all his time with his best friend Jana. But Kirmen is not like the other children. He has strange growths on his skin, and regularly undergoes extensive surgery from the community’s doctor. For unknown reasons, the women of Cloister are no longer able to give birth, and the storm outside shows no signs of slowing down or stopping. Kirmen is the doctor’s last hope to create a new kind of human, a half-human half-plant hybrid who will be able to live and thrive in this strange new world. But Kirmen is still a young man trying to figure out his place in the world, he has little idea just how radical the doctor’s plans for him are.

ChloroPhilia, like many of Jurado’s short stories, inventively blends science fiction and body horror. The novella turns the science fictional trope of terraforming back on the human body – what if instead of transforming the environment of a planet to be more suitable for us to survive on it, we transformed our bodies to be better able to survive on that planet? This is an idea that has been explored in science fiction before, notably in Frederik Pohl’s classic Man Plus (1976), but whereas Pohl imagines a human surgically and genetically altered to better suit a Martian habitat, Jurado takes the premise further. Here, the hostile environment the new humanity must be prepared for is our own Earth, after the ravages of climate change and technology ran amuck have made our planet uninhabitable. And whereas Roger Torraway from Man Plus becomes a cyborg, Kirmen’s destination is one more organic but arguably even further away from humanity, as he ultimately becomes a plant whose pollen is capable of fighting the nanodust that has taken over the world. Jurado brilliantly explores the violence inherent in the process of terraforming, both by showing us a world transformed for the worse by human activity, and reflecting the violence of transformation back onto the human body in the figure of Kirmen. 

Jurado is not only a deployer of thought-provoking speculative ideas, she’s also an expert at drawing character. Kirmen’s story is ultimately a coming of age one, where he realizes that the authority figures in his life are flawed human beings and the society he has grown up in is not the only way to live in the world. The story is told non-chronologically, starting with Kirmen waking up after what will be, unbeknownst to him, his final surgery before his ultimate transformation, then flashing back to various stages of Kirmen’s childhood that show us what life in the Cloister is like. This is a society shaped by stagnation and entropy, in which desperate and traumatized survivors grapple with the knowledge that without drastic change they will surely be the last human beings on Earth. Crucially, before all this, we get a short prologue ‘Cyclogenesis’, which narrates the story of the conflict between the nano storm and the being Kirmen will ultimately transform into in terms of its nonhuman actors. The devastating and destructive storm and the hardy new form of life become characters in their own right, demonstrating the power and agency of the nonhuman. This is then followed by a lengthy chapter 0, which fills in the backstory of the novella’s other key character, the unnamed doctor who engineers Kirmen’s transformation. The doctor is from before the storm, and the story of how he has his humanity stripped away from him by the traumatizing experience of living through the death of the human race only to become one of the handful of people saved to live in the Cloister shows us how he is able to become the person who would perform such radical and dehumanizing surgery on a young child. These precursors to the main narrative of Kirmen’s story contextualise the rest of the novella in challenging and bold ways.

ChloroPhilia is a remarkable, powerful and disturbing novella that confirms Jurado as a key creative voice in speculative fiction. It shows that she can extend the strangeness and inventiveness that define her short fiction across longer works, and confirms her willingness to confront both science fiction’s big ideas and our current global issues head on. It’s a must-read for all fans of speculative fiction, and makes me even more excited to read her novels when they are finally translated into English. 

ChloroPhilia is due for release 14th January from Apex Books, you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org