Dengue Boy
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A cyberpunk fever-dream of climate catastrophe: the full-length fiction debut from one of the boldest new voices in Argentinian literature, thrillingly translated by Rahul Bery.
After the last Antarctic icecaps melt, calamity follows. Landscapes are radically transformed, diseases mutate and spread with unprecedented speed, and, in response, forms the ghastly “virofinance” exchange—a market for corporations to profit from pandemics and global suffering.
It’s in this grim near-future of 2272, where words such as “winter” and “cold” have no meaning, the Dengue Child grows.
The monstrous humanoid mosquito emerges in newly tropical Argentina, carrying its namesake virus and despairing of its own existence. Bullies brutalize the child until a violent eruption of revelation and transformation takes place, shockwaves of which will extend far beyond the schoolyard into a society full of terrors and wonders enabled and exposed by climate collapse.
Powerful telepathic stones from the bowels of the earth, sought after by smugglers, seem to hold a volatile, primordial wisdom. The meager remaining glaciers are harvested for skating rinks on luxury cruises. And the youth obsess over an immersive, addictive video game that presents a virtual world far more attractive than reality.
In the tradition of Kafka, Cronenberg, and Philip K. Dick, Michel Nieva's brilliant, hilarious, and demented Dengue Boy draws on manga, body horror, and gaucho-punk science fiction to tell a delirious, frenetic, singular story about the ravages of capitalism and what hope might exist, if any, for revenge and rebirth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Argentine writer Nieva sets his ingenious and outré English-language debut, expanded from an O. Henry Prize–winning short story, in a far-future world radically altered by climate change. It's 2272 and the Caribbean Sea extends into South America's Pampas, Buenos Aires has sunk into the ocean, and the Antarctic has thawed into a humid new Patagonia. The global economy is tied up in "virofinance," from which investors have grown rich by speculating on pandemics. Dengue Boy, a child-mosquito hybrid spawned from a vaccine experiment gone wrong, battles bullies at school, renames herself Dengue Girl, and goes on a quest to discover the truth of her parentage. Her journey takes her from the La Pampa Stock Exchange to the terraformed Antarctic Caribbean as she vows to see mosquitos "reign over this world!" Other narrative threads involve sinister time-traveler Noah Nuclopio, whose rise to power is linked to the popular video game Christian vs. Indians, in which players participate in colonial genocide, as well as telepathic stones, which might be humanity's only hope of surviving the coming insect revolution. It all culminates in a showdown between Dengue Girl—now evolving into the prophesied Mighty Anarch—and Noah, who holds both the secret of Dengue Girl's creation and a Borgesian power to fuse past and present into a so-called "eternal origin of the world." Delightfully gonzo and hilariously surreal, this novel turns nightmarish visions into vital art. It's a sui generis showstopper.
