Tag: book-reviews

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

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy1 Comment

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:

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

book cover of Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, by Thomas Ha
Find out more HERE.

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 with the illusion she lives in 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)

2026 Philip K. Dick Award Nominee: CASUAL

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

The Nominees

Casual by Koji A. Dae (Tenebrous Press)

book cover of Casual, by Koji Dai
Find out more HERE.

Casual is a compelling novel about trauma and abuse, set in a future Bulgaria, where the Haves live in the crystal-paved luxurious New Sofia deep underground, while the Have-Nots have to make do with crumbling Old Sofia (a city, I discovered, that has been continuously inhabited for around 7000 years). In the far future of this novel, it is still inhabited, but anyone living there wishes they weren’t. Pollution and disaster have made Old Sofia–and much of the world–almost unlivable.

Into this bleak world, the narrator, Valya, is about to bring a child, a girl. Valya will be a single mother. Just before realizing she was pregnant, she had had a bitter break-up with the father. She hasn’t told him about their child and plans to keep it that way. Yet she desperately needs help and support. She is addicted to a device, Casual, implanted in her brain by her psychiatrist to enable her to cope with her crippling anxiety, but her obstetrician wants her to remove it for the baby’s sake. Valya is torn between concern for her baby’s well-being and concern for her own terrible mental health challenges.

Casual is not a drug but it acts like one. It is an implanted gaming device plunging the user into a virtual-reality landscape tailored to that particular user’s needs. The game has settings sensing how much anxiety the patient is experiencing and automatically adjusts the game experience to soothe the anxiety.

As Valya’s pregnancy progresses, the novel reveals more and more of her backstory, helping us understand the roots of her anxiety and how her ill-chosen relationships, especially with the baby’s father, stem from her deep and troubled history.

If not for the setting and the device of the implanted game, this novel would be one among many about traumatized women and how they cope with trauma and come to understand its sources. The marketing labels the book “horror.” I don’t see that. As I understand it, horror exposes the reader to uncanny and disturbing events and atmosphere, especially those arising from the supernatural. However, in the subgenre of psychological horror, this disturbing atmosphere originates in the inner lives of the characters, so I suppose this novel is that sort. As I think I’ve mentioned, I don’t read much horror, although some fantasy and SF vehicles cross over into horror, and many works of horror have strong elements of fantasy and SF. I’m thinking, for example, of the Ridley Scott film Alien, the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, and many others. As for psychological horror, a classic example might be Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Maybe we shouldn’t quibble over labels here and simply note them as marketing devices. Certainly Valya’s deep-seated trauma and the symptoms arising from it are horrific. The abuse in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is horrific, too. I think of Casual as a novel more in that vein than in a book like, say, Christina Henry’s fantasy/horror crossover, Alice.

The picture Casual draws of a woman tormented by abuse is skillful and compelling. I only wish that the author had further developed the many hints of the nature and depth of Valya’s torment. I was left with a lot of questions: The motivations of the baby’s father. The motivations of the medical device company wanting to capitalize on Valya’s vulnerability–and where does it get the clout it has to avoid accountability? and why does it have that clout? The role of Valya’s new friend vs. her old childhood friend. What the reader is supposed to make of the hints that women in New Sofia have trouble conceiving. Exactly why–because I’m not completely sure–Valya acts as she does at the end. Most of all, I’d like to understand more about the nature of Valya’s trauma. By the end of the novel, we readers come to know the facts of it, but I want to know more about the whys–and how deep it goes, how many people were involved in it. I’d also like to know why, in the technical sense, the novel ends the way it does. Are we to expect a sequel? Or are we meant to go on wondering?

In spite of all these questions I’m left with, I did enjoy reading the book and thought it dealt in a sensitive and deft way with some very troubling topics. These are some of the most urgent of our time: power dynamics between men and women, corporate control of a citizenry, our addiction to screens and other technology, the nature of suppressed trauma and the silence surrounding it, the dynamics of abuse, divisive forces creating a population of the pampered rich and the left-behind poor with no middle ground. And also: climate change and its effects, although as a reader I’m not completely sure climate change is the source of the disaster that has befallen the novel’s bleak world.

Up next: The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon (Solaris)

2026 Philip K. Dick Award Nominee: OUTLAW PLANET

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

Here’s the second of my posts reviewing the 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

Outlaw Planet by M. R. Carey (Orbit)

Find it HERE.

In this New Weird/Neo-Western, sentient animals (the Wise Peoples) have taken over the world. Other animals (understock) are just. . .animals. Kind of like how Goofy is a talking dog but he, a dog, has a dog, Pluto, who is just a dog. (Wait–I promised I wouldn’t talk about Disney. . .) Humans, known as Pugfaces, are outcasts congregating in clans resembling Native American tribes. But the rest of the characters in this far-future vision of the U.S. are right out of Owen Wister’s The Virginian, crossed with the dark and often gothic humor of the Coen brothers’ 2018 film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs–except they’re animals–with a touch of China Mieville’s The Iron Council thrown in. Thronging the pages are wolves, bears, birds, prairie dogs, you name it. Prim dog schoolmarm Elizabeth from the east heads west by stagecoach and then by katy wagon. (Wagon pulled by a katydid. A large one.) Gets held up by murderous bandit (bear). Ends up in a two-horse (er. . katydid) town at the end of the middle of nowhere. During a plot development that parallels the U.S. Civil War pretty directly (but with animals), prim Elizabeth evolves into Dog-Bitch Bess, the fearsome renegade.

Going against the usual grain of talking animal stories, there is no cutesy stuff in this novel. Nothing twee about this one. It’s not all grim and serious, though. There are jokes. For example, the mayor, a wolf, is described as having a smile “three parts avuncular to two parts blow-your-house down.” Mostly, though, the whole thing is told totally straight-faced.

Okay, I’m lying. That’s just what PART of the book is about. Interwoven with with Bess’s story, a series of field reports from a completely different set of characters inhabiting what seems to be a completely different world starts changing the narrative. It’s pretty jarring. This second narrative takes a completely different tone. The characters are completely different kinds of characters. the whole genre is completely different–hard military SF. The world the author builds is completely different. The contrast with the talking-animals-out-west story is shocking.

Yet as the novel moves forward, the reader begins to realize how ingeniously the author weaves these two disparate story lines together. I doubt many writers could bring something like this off, and Carey does it, brilliantly. I am in awe of his skill. I’m going to have to read other books of his to see if he does anything similar–he is a new author for me. That’s what I love about these lists–a regular reader like me, no particular expertise in the genre, finds many new and delightful books and authors to treasure.

In retrospect, I see clues from the very beginning of the animal narrative that point to the emergence and development of the second story line. Bess’s encounter with one of the Pug-faces at one of the mysterious dream-towers that dot the landscape is one. Another is all the chatter about the Precursors and their prized relics, especially a Precursor weapon that appears early in the book.

This was a fun book to read, and quite thought-provoking. In many ways, it is a cautionary tale. But don’t think Orwell and Animal Farm. This animal book is very different. No THIS ANIMAL = THIS KIND OF HUMAN, or not directly. Actually, I’ve always found Animal Farm kind of ham-handed (bad pun) in its satire. Carey’s novel is much subtler and cuts, in my opinion, much deeper.

NEXT UP: Casual by Koji A. Dae (Tenebrous Press)