2026 Philip K. Dick Award Nominee: UNCERTAIN SONS AND OTHER STORIES

Here’s my next post reviewing the seven short-listed nominees for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award. A reminder–the awards are made by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and will be presented at Norwescon‘s annual conference on April 3, 2026.

The Nominees:

• Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press)
• Outlaw Planet by M. R. Carey (Orbit)
• Casual by Koji A. Dae (Tenebrous Press)
• The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon (Solaris)
• Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha (Undertow Publications)–REVIEWED IN THIS POST
• Scales by Christopher Hinz (Angry Robot)
• City of All Seasons by Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley (Titan Books)

Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha (Undertow Publications)

Wow. I don’t review much short fiction on this blog, but this is some of the best writing I’ve encountered in a long, long time. These stories are truly weird, too. The uncanny is huge in every one of them, some set in a near-future dystopic world, others set in an alternate reality. That’s an important aspect of every one of the stories in Ha’s collection. More important than the uncanny: these are horrifying, unreal, tender stories of human relationships–especially the father-son relationship–relationships that come across to us as extraordinarily, stunningly real.

While I admire the short story form–especially in its resemblance to poetry, which I write–I have an undying affection for the novel, where a story can stretch out, and a reader can immerse herself in the illusion she inhabits that world. I keep trying to write those, too. But the short story requires the poet’s discipline and the poet’s precise placement of words and sounds and beats. AND it is a narrative. Although, as Gregory Orr points out, every poem, no matter how lyric, has a nugget of narrative at its center, and poetry aligns along a sliding scale of very narrative–think The Iliad, The Odyssey, Paradise Lost–to very lyric–think Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” or the haiku of Basho. So can we say every successful short story, no matter how wholly narrative, contains a nugget of the lyric? I’ll say it. I’ll say it does.

These stories have more than a nugget of the lyric–and I don’t mean by that any kind of croony, flowery stuff. Every word in Ha’s stories counts and has weight in its sentence–how long, how short, where the word is placed. What kind of sentence. Is it a sentence appropriate for a tough guy, or for a troubled but inventive and intelligent young girl, or for a person terrified and running for his life, or for some wise and mysterious and faintly (or very) menacing woman? Yes. All of that.

And while these stories are short, the longest being novella length, they have the heft of a great novel. We may not spend as much clock-time inside the worlds they build, but in our imaginations, these stories explode. I can’t “explain” any of them, even to myself. Some are more Kafka-esque than others, but they all have a nightmare atmosphere that punches you in the gut even if you’re not entirely sure why.

Many of them share the same mysterious elements. Through these, Ha gives us a lot of clues. There’s a man with a tall hat. There’s the child, knowing but not knowing the terrors that surround him and his family. There’s the phrase, “On your way with you.” There are the floating alien balloon-like horrors that can’t be fought, can’t be outrun. A pair of bearded brothers. There’s a wise, enigmatic, dangerous woman. The question Is any one of us the same person we were yesterday or even only moments ago? Especially, there’s the relationship between father and son.

Hard not to pick them all, but here are some of my favorites from Ha’s collection:

• House Traveler: A man from a group that might or might not have been neurologically tampered with makes a perilous journey from house to house of a neighborhood to consult a woman called The Liar. Every house he re-enters seems to be the same house he entered moments before, but maybe it’s a different house uncannily like the first. Are you the same person you were, a moment ago? What are we to make of the ritualistically repeated phrase “On your way with you” and its variations? Can the wise, gnomic pronouncements of someone named The Liar be trusted? The only solid, trustworthy character in the story seems to be a young boy trying to draw something. I am weirdly reminded of the ending of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, where the main character experiences everything in nauseating flux, until he is able to pin down one still point through the power of art (in his case, a jazz recording). Does this have anything to do with Ha’s story? This may just be me and my private associations, a danger–but also a source of enrichment–for every reader.
• Balloon Season: Alien balloon-like creatures arrive every year to terrorize a town. This year, they’ve arrived earlier than ever, and in more menacing numbers. This is a story of relationships, and of a man attempting to come to terms with himself. The man refuses to go out balloon hunting because, he says, he needs to stay inside to protect his family. Now he is denying the balloon hunters the little help he has been giving them in past balloon seasons. His brother taunts him for a coward. His wife and children trust him and are precious to him. When he goes out for supplies and the balloons arrive, he faces a personal reckoning.
• Sweetbaby: This story, like the others, establishes a nightmare scenario. The story is longer than many of the others, and provides the reader with more backstory about how the world ended up in such a perilous condition. Others in the collection just hint at why these terrors have descended on the world. In this story, a young girl kept from the truth by her parents figures it out on her own via her savvy understanding of technology and her courage in facing not only actual but existential violence.
• The Sort: Except for the title story, this is the quintessential father-son story of the collection. A father and his young son embark on a road trip to see the country. When they stop to observe a rural town’s strange, ritualistic harvest festival, the father begins to realize how much danger his son is facing. As we begin to understand why, the father has some decisions to make.
• The Fairgrounds: I thought this story was going to be James Joyce’s Araby redux. It may have started out along those lines, but it veers into something much, much stranger.
• Uncertain Sons: This is the novella-length title story of the collection, and it is great. Here are all the themes–the father/son relationship, the floating scary alien things, the wise scarred woman, the phrase “On your way with you.” Even the bearded brothers. And a whole lot of stomach-churning violence. In a way, this story takes both Balloon Season and The Sort and turns them on their heads.

Coming up next: Scales by Christopher Hinz (Angry Robot)