Stephen King once wrote a truly horrifying short story about space travel and a family having to be put asleep for the trip called “The Jaunt”. People who would do anything to keep the knowledge Petra has from getting out. Because now the ones in charge are people with genetically enhanced transparent skin. When she resurfaces, Petra will find that she’s perhaps the only person on the ship with memories of Earth. What she doesn’t expect is that in the intervening three hundred some years a revolution will occur amongst the awake Monitors that are supposed to tend to the sleeping passengers. She expects she’ll be given them to listen to and then arrive into the future full of stories. She loves her grandmother’s folktales and yearns to be a storyteller too. But Petra doesn’t want to be a scientist like her parents. They’ll be put to sleep the whole time with recordings connected directly to their brains to teach them everything they’ll need to know when they arrive. Petra, her little brother Javier, and her mom and dad are some of the lucky ones.

The catch? It’ll take three hundred and eighty years to get there.

They’re heading to Sagan, a planet that should be able to support life. Now only three ships holding a scant couple thousand people on each will contain the last of humanity. Who knew it would spell the end of Earth? But when its trajectory got knocked off-course, it ended up headed straight for our planet. A delicious mix of dystopian fiction, Mexican folklore, and good old-fashioned high drama, this is the kind of science fiction that has the potential to lure in even those people that don’t usually indulge in futuristic fantastical imaginings. All this is to say that I probably should have been ready for the conjurings out of the brain of Donna Barba Higuera in The Last Cuentista but there’s something to be said for pleasant surprises too. We’ve seen recent strides in middle grade science fiction stories that include non-binary or queer characters, and more than a few have intersectional leanings (the Yoon Ha Lee’s Dragon Pearl comes immediately to mind). The sky’s the limit (a silly phrase in this case since a lot of these books go far beyond the sky but you get what I’m saying). That’s why it’s so silly when science fiction books for kids get all samey. All fine and good things but the whole point of the genre is to think up things that could be. Say the term “science fiction” and it conjures up images of robots and space rockets and the like.

After all, the true joy of science fiction is its capacity for variety. The worst thing you can do to your dystopia is to let it grow stale. ** spoiler alert – Plot giveaways ahead **

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