Thursday, September 24, 2026
Book Review + Podcast coverage: Glitch by Brian Evenson
Book Review: Encounter with Realities: Critical Reflections on the Novels and Short Stories of Philip K. Dick by Frank C. Bertrand, David Hyde (Editor), Lord Running Clam (Introduction)
Encounter with Realities: Critical Reflections on the Novels and Short Stories of Philip K. Dick by Frank C. Bertrand, David Hyde (Editor), Lord Running Clam (Introduction)
Book Review: Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler Susana M. Morris
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler Susana M. Morris
272 pages, Hardcover
Published
August 19, 2025 by Amistad
Octavia Butler shares a few things with my guy Phil, a prophetic SF author whose fame grew mostly after death. I was excited to get to know Butler through a well-researched biography. The author Suzanna Morris has done a wonderful job bringing Butler’s life to us. I am a sucker for Writer bios because I like to know what was going on in an author's life when they wrote the books I love.
Octavia Butler’s position in the SF canon is assured at this point, but sadly her output compared to some authors is thin; the power of the works we have is undeniable. This book does look at her life, and has wonderful glimpses of her process, but it also does a nice job of showing Butler’s impact. One of the nice ways Morris does this is to tell stories of the time she herself was taught a Butler story or novel, and the many times she taught Butler’s work herself.
Morris went deep with the research, not only reading the text, letters, and interviews but also drafts and unfinished work. Learning about how Butler traveled and experienced places during her research phase made sense.
I am sure that several reviewers will complain about the focus on her work more than her life. There were some gaps, like more interviews; it seemed Morris did not to interview anyone who knew her, and that could have added a lot to the project, but I suspect Morris is more interested in the fiction of Butler and how her process fed into the final product.
Yeah, I would like to understand a bit more about her students at Clarion thought of her as a teacher, and how she coped with her dyslexia. I have my own dyslexia strategies, so comparing them would have been cool. But the reality is that I read The Parable Books around the time she died, and I suspected her life would be a mystery. Many women who wrote genre fiction from CL Moore, Andre Norton, and others, are hard to find information about. Catherine Moore is often remembered for her husband, Henry Kuttner, or her letters with Lovecraft, when her biography, for example, is just as interesting.
I think we should be very happy this book exists.
Book Review: Dengue Boy by Michael Nieva & Translated by Rahul Bery
Dengue Boy by Michael Nieva & Translated by Rahul Bery
205 pages, Hardcover
Published February , 2025 by Astra House
I don't remember where this book got on my radar; I think I was poking around on the library app and saw the comparisons ¨Michel Nieva follows in the footsteps of Kafka, Cronenberg, Philip K. Dick, and Junji Ito to create a universe entirely his own, holding up a mirror to our faces and asking the dire question of what we want our future to really look like.¨ You invoke Cronenberg and PKD; you have my attention. A translated work of international SF with a Cli-fi angle this ticks many boxes.
There are many elements of this novel I really enjoyed. The concept is interesting. A boy engineered to be part mosquito to better survive the climate post-apocalypse is one of our point-of-view characters. The title character, Dengue Boy, is bullied at school and gives the novel a social justice angle.
Climate destruction, adaptation and capitalism prospecting play a central role in this novel. Weirdly for me, the character stuff didn't connect. But the world-building was magical and on point.
“When the Antarctic ice caps that had once covered the Argentine Atlantic finally melted for good, the YPF company (with the backing of British capital) began extracting hydrocarbons from Belgrano Base 2, an activity that over the years yielded huge dividends from multiple sectors of the economy. Given this, no one could explain how nor why two or three years ago the drilling had been suspended overnight and the wells submitted to rigorous carbon sanitaire, monitored around the clock by the army.”
The setting was wildly evocative of a world almost alien compared with ours, transformed by our actions today into something alien tomorrow. It was also interesting to me because it was the effects of climate change in a part of the globe American readers often forget. Keep in mind the rest of the world is dead.
“A wonder of planetary geoengineering from Atlantic Pinamar to Nueva Mar Azul, the Bellinghausen Seas are the refreshing waters that bathe the shores of this Caribbean, famous for being the only ones on earth without scolding hot temperatures. With the global average of 194 Fahrenheit and maximum temperatures of up to 392 Fahrenheit, it is calculated that in some regions such as California or the Middle East a Turkey will roast at room temperature around 20 minutes, and then the egg will fry in less than one.”
This climate apocalypse interested me most, more than the characters, though it is hard not to be interested in the mosquito-hybrid boy. The subplot about the historical video game totally lost me.
Overall, this is an interesting, thoughtful work of international SF, and I want more of that, so I hope people check it out, and talk about it.
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Book Review: Time's Rabbit Hole by Lord Running Clam
101 pages, Paperback
Published July 25, 2026 by Wide Books
Lord Running Clam, that’s Mister Clam if you're nasty. Sometimes at the Oscars they say it was just a certain filmmaker's year. Winner of both the lifetime Achievement award and Best Book for the Pink Beam Companion was Lord Running Clam. In PKD circles, you might know LRC under his third variety title, David Hyde. In the 90s, when Paul Williams fell out of doing the PKD society newsletter, Lord Running Clam (named after the slime mold character of Clans of the Alphane Moon ) picked up the mantle of keeping PKD fandom/ studies going in a variety of ways. His role in writing Pink Beam Companion (or the online version) alone makes him important, and it deserved recognition for the level of research that went into it. Well, I know LRC as a deep student of PKD who has been obsessed with his work since the 90s, I didn’t know he wrote fiction.
So it was a surprise when Lord Running Clam was passing out an entire novella he had written at the 4th International Philip K. Dick Fest in Fullerton. In the introduction, it is mentioned that the guests of honor at the 2026 had all written novellas. That was true-ish: Sarah Langan and Brian Evenson, two of the three guests of honor, did, and LRC was close enough (since he was getting a Pink Beam award for lifetime achievement, he figured he would get in on the fun).
Great idea. In Time’s Rabbit Hole is a work of what we call Pink Beam fiction, a work that plays with Phil Dickian concepts; in this case, the meta-reality time-travel novel in which LRC becomes a character in the story. Not only that a sorta meta-trip where LRC gets lost on a time-travel trip trying to get to the fest.
Along the way, he goes back and forth in time and meets a robot named Asshole. “I went closer to see a grease-stained and grimy, once-shiny, large egg-shaped machine sitting in a hoop atop a ball-wheeled metal tripod. Under the dirty surface was painted in faded red letters the word Asshole.
I yelped, “Asshole? What? You're not…”
“yes, your lordship, it is indeed I, Asshole, which is what you named me long ago after your Ukrainian friend.”
“Well, I'll be cornswaggled ha, that's great. Now you're a robot; tell me what's going on these days?”
It is not long before the two try to go back in time to destroy the orange spray-tanned Form Destroyer from ever being born. The journey is funny for sure. There are Dickian easter eggs, tips of the hat to members of the PKD community, but other SF writers are referenced, like the chapter called Time is the Simplest Thing. “Yes, sir! Time, as the great Clifford D. Simak wrote Time is the simplest thing; everything that has motion leaves a trail, a trace of its activity. And time, as you doubtless know, is defined by characteristic motion. Time passes it never stops. Ever since its initial expansion in the Big Bang, time has been going outwards as a part of the expanding universe of matter…”
This is a raw book; LRC admitted in the introduction that he did limited editing in part to keep the secret that it was happening. It adds to the unhinged nature. I think folks who know LRC, and will hear the book in his voice, will enjoy this the most. I had fun reading it and laughed several times; what more can you ask for in a one-sitting novella?
I am not even sure if this one is for sale, or was just a giveaway at PKD Fest, but I am very happy to have it on my shelf.
Book Review: An Empire in The Clouds by Ai Jiang
384 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: September 8, 2026 by Titan Books
I may or may not finish this novel poolside at a fancy hotel I was not staying at. If anyone asked, I am there for an education conference, visiting from, uh Ohio; I mean, I am not lying if I say I am Indiana.
Ai Jiang is an important new voice, and I have enjoyed her short stories for a little while. It was her appearances in Clarkeworld that first got my attention; she is an excellent writer, and I dipped my toe into her first novel, A Palace Near the Wind. Her bio says Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Nebula, Bram Stoker Award winner, Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist, and an immigrant from Changle, Fujian, currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. She is greatly influenced by Chinese fantasy, Peking Opera, and you can see hints of the classics of Western genre. All this gives Ai Jiang the tools to write novels you can´t really compare to anyone else. Every author has their own alchemy, but Jiang’s personal mix is singular. As a long-time reader of Louis Cha translations, I recognize some of the elements, but there are not many of us around. This novel is like court intrigue mixed with Dune, Princess Mononoke, Wuxia, and Peking opera. But that combo is a bit reductive. This novel feels like it is in the same universe as Natural Engines Duology; since it is from different publishers, they may not be considered one series. I may be mistaken, but that is my impression.
The Ai Jiang short stories that I have read have a bit more standard horror or SF, but I reading that first novel really felt like nothing I had read before. As a lifelong Wuxia fan, I was interested in what the novel was offering up. The thing is, I enjoy Wuxia and fantasy more as a movie guy than reading. Fantasy novels don't reach me as much these days, but these books are not exactly pure fantasy. They have a fantasy feel, but hints of technology are the primary way the novels force you to acknowledge the SF elements.
It is easy to go pages feeling like you are in an ancient world and then a scene like this one whips you back. “Next to the man sits a child without the blue outline glow to his mask. Smog filtration off.
“Smog eaters,” he wrinkles his nose. “Tasked with literally consuming the smog in hopes of lessening the amount in the atmosphere.”
“Does it…affect their bodies? Negatively?”
So you see it is actually set in a far future; these characters are bioengineered for this. In Ai Jiang’s first books, I got the sense that there are memories of technology; a few survive into this future, but this feels just as cyberpunk-influenced as Peking Opera. The story follows an opera trope in this sometimes ancient-feeling, sometimes far future land; it is very Chinese, but it is a fantasy kingdom, Piāo, the floating empire of lotuses. The emperor's sister escapes to a high-tech land called Opera where she joins the performers there, and an outcast No Face.
The question then becomes: is this a debut novel as it is marketed, or a third novel, a second novel? The Natural Engines books clearly felt like a novel broken in half, and each were longer than many novels considered complete works. The only problem I have with this novel is not the fault of the author or the story, but I don’t think it is fair to call this novel a debut. Might be a second or third; either way, you cut this is a fantastic work that feels like it was a 10th or 12th work by the author.
In the end, An Empire in the Clouds balances feeling fresh and inventive at times and comfortable and familiar at other times. Is it for everyone? Not sure I can say that. Jiang doesn’t compromise and Westernize all the languages. There is heavy use of Chinese terms, and that will lose some readers. Fantasy readers should love the setting and vibe. Opera is such a richly described fantasy world; it feels like a tangible place, and it seems like Ai Jing has been dreaming about it her whole life.
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