Red Dust

De: Yoss

Narrado por: Javier Vazquez Jr

From beloved Cuban science fiction author Yoss comes a bitingly funny space-opera homage to Raymond Chandler, about a positronic robot detective on the hunt for some extra-dangerous extraterrestrial criminals.

On the intergalactic trading station William S. Burroughs, profit is king and aliens are the kingmakers. Earthlings have bowed to their superior power and weaponry, though the aliens—praying-mantis-like Grodos with pheromonal speech and gargantuan Collosaurs with a limited sense of humor—kindly allow them to do business through properly controlled channels.

That’s where our hero comes in, name of Raymond. As part of the android police force, this positronic robot detective navigates both worlds, human and alien, keeping order and evaporating wrongdoers. But nothing in his centuries of experience prepares him for Makrow 34, a fugitive Cetian perp with psi powers. Meaning he can alter the shape of the Gaussian bell curve of statistical probability—making it rain indoors, say, or causing a would-be captor to shoot himself in the face. Raymond will need all his training—and all his careful study of Chandler’s hardbitten cops—to outmaneuver his quarry.

As he did in his brilliantly funny and sharp science-fiction satires A Planet for Rent, Super Extra Grande, and Condomnauts, Yoss makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar in Red Dust, giving us an unforgettable half-human hero and a richly imagined universe where the bad guys are above the laws of physics.

©2020 Yoss (P)2022 Scribd Audio

Gives sci-fi a bad name

How this work got published in its original language, let alone translated, is inexplicable and—I can only assume—a giant slap in the face to any writer who has had a competently written story rejected by publishers. ‘Red Dust’ makes moves to be an extraplanetary adventure AND a hardboiled mystery AND a mecha-inflected action tale AND an android’s rights think piece and succeeds on exactly none of these fronts, instead offering a confusing mess of half-formed ideas and genre fiction clichés. The only thing (and I mean ONLY thing) remotely redeeming in this entire story is the coinage of the word ‘Gaussical’. That’s a cool word.

The narration is cleanly engineered but otherwise unimpressive (Vazquez manages to mispronounce more than a couple of words, most surprisingly ‘misshapen’).