In some sense, that’s what Herrera is saying a character can be: an object that may look like a person but, at its most fundamental, is a vehicle for communication. You write a character and send it off into the world, free to be interpreted however it will be. There’s a story in the new book called ‘The Earthling’ in which a Martian, describing one human to another, puts it well: ‘A message came who walked like you.’ - from A Message Like You, a review of 'Ten Planets' by Yuri Herrera, by Daniel Soar via The London Review of Books