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.
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