El comienzo del paraíso

Nature is no longer what it once was: altered by humans, destabilized by climate change, it gives rise to strange fruits. Animals and plants are also not what they once were: sometimes they are ghosts resurrected by technology, other times they become public threats when they merge with artificial intelligence. In the stories of *The Beginning of Paradise*, Edmundo Paz Soldán explores how, as our surroundings have changed dramatically, we too have become strange beings on this planet. In these striking stories with their vigorous narrative rhythm—written in an immersive prose capable of constructing a wide variety of atmospheres—monstrous fish from the abyssal depths appear, along with strangling trees and animals from a devastated peninsula, all undergoing mutation after mutation. The result is a book profoundly marked by mutation as the rule, in which, subjected to uncontrollable forces, everything seems threatened by extinction even as life manages to persist.