The Last Cuentista

In The Last Cuentista, storytelling is a job more vital than any scientist’s or politician’s. The novel suggests that it’s profoundly dangerous when societies forget who they are and where they came from, and it proposes that the antidote for a society with such an identity crisis is a storyteller. Petra and her family are part of a lucky few people chosen to escape Earth before Halley’s Comet collides with it in 2061. Once…

The biggest ideological struggle in The Last Cuentista takes place over the question of whether total assimilation—rejection of identity, difference, and culture in favor of a group identity—can solve humanity’s tendency to tear itself and the planet apart. The Last Cuentista suggests that sameness, even in the guise of “equality,” comes with much greater problems than diversity does. For one, sameness is impossible to fully achieve or enforce in the human species, which naturally varies…

Throughout The Last Cuentista, Petra defies the Collective in increasingly significant ways. Over the course of the story, she learns that in order to lessen the Collective’s absolute authority enough to escape it, she has to resist its teachings. In a society that only values its members for their utility to the whole, Petra enacts resistance by showing kindness and loyalty to the people around her without heed for her own (or the Collective’s)…