Nature is no longer what it was: intervened by humans, destabilized by climate upheaval, it gives rise to strange fruits. Animals and plants are also no longer what they were: sometimes they are ghosts recovered by technology, other times they become public threats when they mix with artificial intelligence. In the stories in The Beginning of Paradise, Edmundo Paz Soldán explores how, by dramatically changing what surrounds us, we too have become strange beings on this planet. In these striking stories with a vigorous narrative rhythm, written in immersive prose capable of constructing highly varied atmospheres, monstrous fish from the abyssal depths appear, transformed into specters of obsessed scientists; strangling trees in protected areas, suspected of being responsible for the death of a pair of tourists; animals from a devastated peninsula, which go from mutation to mutation, while one of the main culprits of this mutation, the human being, also changes, until suddenly discovering that it may no longer be the center of creation.