Before his name became an essential reference for reflecting on the great questions of science and their entanglements with vertigo, destruction, and madness, Benjamín Labatut wrote Antarctica Starts Here, his first book: a collection of short stories that already contained, in embryonic form, the obsessions that would come to define his later work.

Originally published in 2010 and revised by the author for this new edition, these stories depict worlds in which reality fractures and human experience turns strange. Six narratives threaded by a sense of diffuse menace and latent violence, where a single, seemingly minor decision can unsettle everything. Something breaks without a sound: a certainty, a relationship, an identity. Here, Antarctica is less a place or physical destination than a frontier—the boundary beyond which death or revelation lies, the threshold where language begins to fail and the human condition is exposed in all its fragility.

Even in this first book, Labatut reveals a sensibility capable of evoking abysses without ever fully showing them, drawing us into a zone where the threat of collapse is absolute. Read today, this volume takes on a special resonance: it is not only the starting point of one of the most singular voices in contemporary literature, but also a glimpse into the origin myth of a writer who will go on to interrogate, with implacable clarity, the limits of the world and of the mind. For at its core pulses the question that animates all his work: what happens when human beings come too close to what they cannot understand? Antarctica Starts Here offers no answers, but it leaves a lasting imprint: a sensation of extreme cold that lingers with the reader long after the final page.