"The best Latin American science fiction novel" - Bernardo Fernández, BEF
"Like the best science fiction novels, Iménez is an optical instrument, a time telescope that allows us to access, hardly beyond the known, the disturbing limits of humanity. With literary grace, bursts of black humor and disillusionment, Luis Noriega manages to pull memorable passages, philosophical reflections and high-level expressions from deep dark pessimism. His characters have something of existentialist heroism: to live without a network - neither God nor society - in the absence of morality, and to sustain despite all their freedom to choose, even without hope". - Guillermo Martínez
Iménez works in the field of funeral services. You make a simple phone call at the Institute of Determination of Vacancies and you are given the final push, the body is incinerated and the housing prepared for the next occupant. The drawback is that you have to make the call before turning forty-five: If you have signed a contract with Determination of Vacancies, you cannot live beyond that date in the Dome, the only place in the City of Andina where it is possible to be safe from rats, thugs and cannibals.
This novel, winner of the UPC Science Fiction Award in 1999, offers the reader a complex literary game; a haunting and startling vision of a dystopian future, that is as dark and as the humour Noriega injects every one of his pages with.