Cuban Sci-fi with a Recipe for Love

Posted on February 13, 2022

How will future astronauts handle loneliness? The Cuban short story "Interstellar Biochocolate Mousse" posits a novel solution. We won't give it away in this blog post, but let's just say both cooking and bio-chemistry are involved.

Available bilingually in both Spanish and English, this story first appeared in English in an issue of Words Without Borders featuring Cuban science fiction. If you're looking for something out-of-the-ordinary to share with high school or college students, we highly recommend it.

Part of the story's sly humor is in its use of obscure quasi-scientific jargon like "policephalic" (multi-headed), so we would encourage students not to look up all the unfamiliar words they come across. Instead, they can get a sense of the words' meanings from context and word parts, as they might in reading Lewis Carroll's famous nonsense poem "Jabberwocky."

The story's author Yoss is an interesting character in his own right; below, you'll find him singing lead in a music video for the heavy-metal group "Tenaz" (Tenacious). To get to know Yoss, students might watch David Shook's 16-minute documentary about the author or read Yoss's profile of himself on Restless Books.

As for translator Hillary Gulley, students can find her thoughts on translating Yoss in an essay she wrote for Words Without Borders, where she comments that:

Translation can and should be as subversive as performance art or science fiction.

After they read the story, students might try their hands at science fiction, adding obscure or invented vocabulary to stories set in the future.