Carlos Hernandez' THE ASSIMILATED CUBAN'S GUIDE TO QUANTUM SANTERIA

I'd be damned if I was going to let my son's body pose for eternity like a movie prop in Everest's death zone so that overprivileged jetsetters could get an extra thrill off him.

Right from the first paragraph of the first story in Carlos Hernandez' wonderfully titled collection, The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, I realized I'd found a writer who truly makes the effort to think about things differently. "The Aphotic Ghost" concerns a man on a mission to retrieve the frozen body of his son from the "garden of corpses" left on the slopes of Mount Everest.

And yet the story's title refers to the depths of the ocean where little or no sunlight penetrates.

Zounds!

I usually take up a short story collection or an anthology at a time when I know I have a lot of waiting around in lobbies and examination rooms ahead of me, or when I know I'm going to be interrupted a lot. It's nice at such times to have small, discrete chunks of prose, whether fiction or essays, that can occupy the waiting, that can accommodate the interruptions. Sometimes this means I finish such a book over the course of weeks or months. I've been reading Gene Wolfe and Phillip K. Dick this way for years.

I read The Assimilated Cuban's Guide straight through, almost non-stop, without even my usual habit of dipping into novels and big non-fiction books on the side. While there were no continuing plot or character developments to tempt me onwards, I kept going as if they were, so delighted by what Hernandez had just shown me that I couldn't wait to see what else was in store.

Some of the stories, like the pithy and improbable "American Moat" are as much long-form jokes, complete with punchlines, as stories; others, like "More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give" and "The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory" make both sharp political points (which "American Moat" does, too) and will tug the heartstrings and jerk the tears of any reader with a feeling left in this sorry world.

Still others, in true speculative fiction fashion, entertain the classic "what ifs" of the genre, concerning themselves with lofty concerns that might be risen by continued use of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (the unicorn story again) or an invention that lets a person briefly experience the existences of their own alternate selves in other universes, used in "Entanglements" to allow a disabled veteran to live for a while as versions of himself that didn't lose his legs to an IED. 

The "quantum" part of the collection's title isn't just there as a buzzword.

Vacavito was no longer limited to two hands and two feet. He could play duets by himself. He commissioned over two dozen works that would be impossible for any other person alive to play. The 97-note smash that ends Gazón's 'Singularity Sonata' is still considered one of the defining moments of 21st century music.

So says a widow of her late husband, a world renowned concert pianist, in the collection's best story, "Fantasie-Impromptu No. 4 in C#min, Op. 66." The story is named for a famously challenging piano composition by Frederic Chopin, often used by pianists to showcase their virtuosity. The pianist in question, Vaclava Balusek, went into precipitous decline from Parkinson's Disease at the height of his career, and accepted a neural implant that, connected to a properly equipped concert grand piano (he has one custom made, a steampunk-looking baroque monstrosity with nine extra keys that is a centerpiece of the story), allowed him to play the instrument with his mind. The resulting tale of the impact of bio-cybernetics on the arts is unlike anything I've encountered, moving and full of surprises -- and brings back a character Hernandez clearly loves to write, intrepid reporter Gabriella Reál, from two other excellent stories in the collection, "The International Studbook of the Giant Panda" and "The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory." In "Fantasie-Impromptu..." Gabby manifests as a more fully rounded figure than she gets to in her other appearances in this collection, as her back-story as a lifelong fangirl of Balusek is brought up close and personal with his widow's experiences and the decisions and the criticism facing her regarding a unique relic left behind by the pianist. I would read a whole novel about Gabby*, or about his fiery Cubana widow, Consuela Oquendo. Or what becomes of Balusek's piano, because check this out: 

At first glance it might pass for a traditional grand, lacquered to a gleaming black and oozing old world, Austro-Hungarian charm. But soon you'll notice the brass-and-glass touches that a generation ago would have been called Steampunk: the scroll work on the brushed metal hinge of the fallboard; the rectangular portholes in its body, framed by verdegris-veined copper; the gorgeous, Rube Goldbergian system of pulleys, wheels and hinges that make up the gloriously over engineered pedal lyre. It's the kind of grand piano some billionaire archgeek would order as a showpiece for a living room, more for the eyes than the ears.

And then there's the title story, which brings together most, if not all of the themes explored in the other stories together in a bittersweet story of grief, family, science and a little boy-genius amateur stage magician (who grows up to teach physics at Cal Tech) who is already making up his own Ebo (essentially, a sort of prayer/spell/ritual in the Cuban/Yoruba syncretic philosophy of Santeria) to bring a smile back to his widowed father's (himself revealed as a cabeza of Eleggua after the death of his wife/the boy's mother ruins his allegiance to her Catholicism) face. What a great capstone to a great collection! 

*And I'm in luck, there: looks like Hernandez has fleshed out even more of her back story and made her a plucky schoolgirl heroine in a couple of middle grade sci-fi romps. I'm certainly not above enjoying one of those once in a while!