A Planet for Rent

The most successful and controversial Cuban Science Fiction writer of all time, Yoss (aka José Miguel Sánchez Gómez) is known for his acerbic portraits of the island under Communism. In his bestselling *A Planet for Rent*, Yoss pays homage to Ray Bradbury’s *The Martian Chronicles* and *334* by Thomas M. Disch. A critique of Cuba in the nineties, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, *A Planet for Rent* marks the debut in English of an astonishingly brave and imaginative Latin American voice.

Wracked by economic and environmental problems, the desperate planet is rescued, for better or worse, by alien colonizers, who remake the planet as a tourist destination. Ruled over by a brutal interstellar bureaucracy, dispossessed humans seek better lives via the few routes available — working for the colonial police; eking out a living as black marketeers, drug dealers, or artists; prostituting themselves to exploitative extraterrestrial visitors — or they face the cold void of space in rickety illegal ships.