Laith

This is my second foray into “published” fan fiction and I feel short-changed. The description seemed right up my alley but I am realizing that the sort of people who write fan fiction really love getting lost in the weeds. I read the omnibus 2200 page epub not realizing that this series was broken up into smaller more digestible releases, so this is a review of the series as a whole. It hardly matters since this is basically all one story. The arcs aren't really distinct from each other, and this whole story takes place in the same timeframe as The Sorcerer's Stone.

This is a Rationalist take on Harry Potter. What that means in practice is that Harry in this series is a child prodigy raised by a muggle professor, and as such is highly educated and possesses an adult understanding of the world around him. His behavior, personality, and thought process are significantly divergent from the original work. We largely follow the plot and setup of The Sorcerer's Stone but there are minor differences in the setup alongside the largescale changes to characters.

There is a lot of the scientific method, a lot of decision theory, and a lot of ethical debate and philosophy in this book. This story is written by a self-taught but by all accounts legitimate scientist/researcher who is using Harry Potter as a medium to talk about his area of expertise. This author is not a novelist and you can tell. This book is really leaning hard on the framing and story beats of the original while at the same time actively dismantling that structure. The parts where he is making up a “brand new story” are interesting but are lacking when it comes to prose and polish. His story beats are logical and easy to follow but lack any of the punch and drama that come with OG HP.

The draw here is seeing how a “smart” Harry would have dealt with the challenges he faced at age 11. He makes different choices with his friends, he reads into the power structure of the wizarding world early on, and he is constantly trying to introduce science and the scientific method into the magic system. Watching Harry pick apart problems and plots in two or three chapters that were sustained throughout the entire original series is pretty satisfying in its own way. There's also a Sagan-esque quality to this whole thing; Harry introduces and applies various models of logical and rationalist thought/problem-solving. Through hypotheticals and examples, there's a real effort made to explain the rationalist worldview and philosophy. What is best about this book is the logical reordering of events. Despite how bogged down this fic is, it does stick to its own rules and maintains consistency as events play out - though it does cheat a little with small details and tweaks to the setup (For example: Draco's mom is presumed dead for much of this story and it does factor into his motivations and decision making)

There are hiccups. Science and reason don't map onto the Harry Potter universe very well, a lot of Rowling's world is just silly nonsense at its core. Taking the rationalist approach means that everything needs to be logically consistent and explained, but the world of Harry Potter is intrinsically irrational. Thanks to that incongruity there is way more hypothesis and speculation in this book than there needs to be. Maybe some readers liked the conjecture and structure that was added to the magic system here (because I will admit the lack of structure did bother me in the original) but I did not and it choked the pacing something fierce.

I finished this work only to see the complete version of events. All things told I didn't like this series, and a lot of it has to do with this version of Harry (honestly I didn't like any of the altered cast, but it all flows from this Harry). He seriously lacks the charm of the original; this oddly aged-up Harry man/child thing that is the main character really put me off. He got on my nerves from the outset; the way this Harry speaks to people early on is so unnatural and condescending. What really got my goat was his multi-person inner dialogue and his “mysterious dark side” alter-personality, the whole thing reads like bad manga to me. The further the story goes the more “Eighth Grader Syndrome” gets injected into his personality and I think by the halfway point I'd totally written him off and considered dropping the novel. There is an explanation provided by the story, Harry's scar horcrux imprints a part of Voldemort's personality rather than merely establishing a psychic link like in the original. It's a plausible explanation for this whole telling of events but man is it lame. I'm not trying to be a weeb by calling this out either, there is a distinct and unwelcome anime/anime-trope slant to this whole thing and it spoiled any sort of atmosphere or tonal consistency for me.

This is HP nerdcore and if you aren't a serious head then I recommend skipping this one. If you want to know what happens do yourself a favor and read the Wikipedia summary instead.

TL;DR: “smart” Harry Potter, an 11-year-old boy genius uses the powers of science and rational thinking to speed run the plot of the original series. This is a quality rewrite but it is also nerdy, dense, and stilted.

What a weird short story, I mean even for Le Guin this is strange, but I oddly wish there was more. Nine Lives is about a clone who has to bear the pain of becoming an individual, originally one of ten, an accident happens on a far flung planet that leaves him the sole survivor.

This is really off beat from Le Guin's other work SF work, this might be the hardest SF i've read by this author. It's also thematically distinct, more an exploration of man and individuality than it is an observation of an alien species or culture.

It's excellently written to boot, some fantastic imagery and character work in such a short piece.

Dengue Boy is the best piece of science fiction written in 2023, and I'd go further: it belongs to the foundational canon of the coming century of literature. That's a claim I don't make lightly, and I'll spend the rest of this review earning it.

The titular Dengue Boy is a half-human, half-mosquito hybrid mutant living in post-apocalyptic Argentina, where melting icecaps have submerged urban centres and redrawn the coastline across what used to be the arid Pampas plains. He lives in abject poverty, bullied for his mutations, his life devoid of comfort — even maternal love. When Dengue Boy comes of age he realizes he is in fact Dengue Girl, a female mosquito, and with that awakening comes a previously dormant lust for blood and vengeance. What follows is a brutal, gory rampage across future Argentina, interwoven non-linearly with two other narratives: El Dulce, the younger brother of a smuggler, whose story revolves around pre-human psychic stone artifacts smuggled out of Antarctica; and Rene, a girl from a wealthy family whose father is a successful virofinancier, who escapes into a popular virtual reality game called Christians v. Indians. Presiding over all of it is the enigmatic Noah Nuclopio, the wealthiest man in the world, CEO of Influenza Financial Services, and the ultimate antagonist of the book.

I'm tempted to coin a genre here: Viropunk. A mashup of body horror, climate fiction, and cyberpunk, all keyed to modern pandemic anxiety. The classic cyberpunk framework — society packed into mega-cities, classist segregation, corporate greed running rampant, body modification normalized — is all present, but instead of technology as the transhuman frontier, Nieva substitutes mutation and virology. Think of the transhuman themes in Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix and compare them to Dengue Girl's transition across gender, morality, and her ultimate abandonment of humanity; or society's transition into a hypercapitalist predatory marketplace organized entirely around disease. The digital and technological dystopia isn't absent either, it bleeds through in the hyperviolent VR game that El Dulce and Rene are obsessed with — but it's subordinate to the biological. It's not a one-to-one substitution; it's a total re-imagining.

The standout concept is virofinance: the reorganization of the world economy around the discovery and monopolization of potential pandemics and their vaccines. In this melted future, prehistoric bacteria and viruses are released and begin rapidly mutating, making pandemic and disease simultaneously the primary biological threat and the primary economic engine. It's a dangerously plausible extrapolation. We already know it's only regulatory frameworks that limit the proceeds and influence of major pharmaceutical corporations — frameworks that can dissolve overnight, as we saw with Operation Warp Speed. A relaxed regulatory environment, an ongoing exigent threat, and corporatist human greed: the logical endpoint is exactly the marketplace Nieva imagines. It reminded me of Crassus, Rome's wealthiest man, who built his fortune on slave trading and a private fire brigade that would arrive at a burning home, water in hand, and demand payment before acting. Virofinance is arguably the most predatory financial model conceivable within a fully capitalist system, and Nieva renders it with complete conviction.

Then there is the Caribbean Antarctic: a terraformed cluster of islands and peninsulas occupying the location of the former icecaps. A testament to human hubris — an artificial paradise constructed over the ruins, and the cause of the ruins, of modern civilisation. The idea that the Antarctic could melt so completely is terrifying. That we would build on top of it anyway is the kind of absurdist extrapolation that lands like a gut punch precisely because it isn't absurd at all. The novel quietly discloses that we never stopped drilling for Arctic resources either — going so deep that we eventually uncovered the frozen remnants of a prior, non-human civilization. That detail alone would be the centerpiece of a lesser book.

The closest comparison I can make is Neuromancer. Just as Gibson's novel signaled the coming technological revolution, following on the heels of usenet and proto-hacker culture, Dengue Boy follows on the heels of a global pandemic and an accelerating climate disaster, and I believe it to be the harbinger of the next major wave of climate fiction. They share a conceptual density, a plausibility of imagined future, and the quality of being genuinely novel — books that feel like nothing that preceded them. Where they differ is in temperament: cyberpunk is humanist and exploratory; Dengue Boy leans into pessimism and horror. They play in the same sandbox but have built wildly different castles. And where Neuromancer dealt in a more tangible subject — technology being something we actively, relentlessly developed — Dengue Boy is more cautionary, commenting on the societal fears and power structures most ripe for exploitation when the worst arrives.

Reading Dengue Boy is an exercise in trusting the author. It is non-linear, multi-threaded, and thoroughly experimental — challenging in prose, subject matter, and structure simultaneously. I was never lost across the multiple perspectives, but the non-linear storytelling raises questions it never fully resolves, and that's a valid criticism. I'd say this: the book is not incomprehensible, but it is genuinely difficult, and whether that difficulty rewards you will depend entirely on the kind of reader you are. It also deals in body horror and some genuinely grotesque sexual imagery — sheepies, which I will describe only as living comfort objects of an intimate nature, are apparently a fixture of this future, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Personally I found it all exactly the right amount of weird: enough to make you recoil, not enough to make you stop, and if anything it made me read faster, desperate to understand what was happening.

[Spoilers follow for the ending of the book]

What cements Dengue Boy's place in the Argentine literary tradition is its ending, and specifically its debt to Borges. In the final movement, El Dulce — already dead in the present, having been killed by Dengue Girl — replaces the power source of his VR headset with one of the psychic stones, embarking on a vision quest across time and space, witnessing the entirety of creation before coming to inhabit the body of Noah Nuclopio in a future he has no right to exist in. The connection to Borges' The Aleph — a story about a point in space that contains all other points, allowing the viewer to see the entire universe at once — is unmistakable. This isn't an outright retelling, but it touches the same themes of infinity and identity with comparable prosodic complexity. I'll also say this: knowing the ending won't prepare you for the ending. This book is more experiential than anything — the journey is the point, and no summary can replicate what it's actually like to arrive there.

In the winter of 2018 I spent three weeks in Buenos Aires, originally for a work-study programme that was derailed by a government shutdown. What I got instead was an immersion in Argentine life: the political instability, the wealth disparity, the legacy of Spanish conquest, the texture of a country shaped by boom-bust cycles and a permanent anxiety about the next financial collapse. Reading Dengue Boy transported me straight back. The climate anxiety, the financial precarity, the gap between those in the towering skyline of El Centro and those eking out existence in the colorful squalor of La Boca — it's all here, extrapolated forward into a future that feels less like speculation and more like inevitability. One of my greatest regrets from that trip was not making it to Patagonia, not seeing the Pampas or the Moreno glacier, because 2018 may have been my best and possibly last chance. Dengue Boy is set in the world where that window has closed for good.

Beyond Apollo is the starting point for most people when it comes to Malzberg, it's probably his most widely read novel. Told from the perspective of Harry Evans, the sole survivor of a failed two man mission to Venus, Beyond Apollo is a recounting of those events. The heart of the story is about the death of the Captain of the mission, the How and the Why- Was he insane? Was it an accident? Was it self defense? The story is re-told endlessly, the details differing with each re-telling. What results is something fragmentary, the story-telling kaleidoscopic and generally not plot driven, the narrator is possibly (probably) insane and we are strapped along for the ride.

Like most of the Malzberg I've read there is no real resolution. It's never made clear if Harry is the killer, in fact nothing is ever made obvious other than the fact that he is the sole returning member of the mission. Whether it was aliens or murder or self defense, or even if the captain never really existed at all (or if Harry is himself the captain) remain as possibilities by the end. Many of these re-tellings come in the form of interrogations by Forrest (a psychiatrist) about the “truth” of the trip, but also in the form of dream conversations. Harry is obviously scarred by his experience, and is either unwilling or unable to tell us the truth of the experience. The truth itself a subject of meta-textual gamesmanship as Harry and the Captain play a game while on the voyage in which only the telling of absolute truth will make one a winner.

There's also the Malzbergian hallmark of sexual neurosis and ineptitude. A lot of the story seemingly focuses itself on Harry's perceived lack of sexual prowess, and his obsession with the Captain's sex life and virility. There's a distinctly gay undercurrent/slant to everything, Harry's sexual dysfunction is painstakingly detailed as chapters vacillate between moments of sexual disappointment with his wife, his impotence as a result of his training, and his hypersexual observations of the Captain. It's a little much- but I can't say that it doesn't serve the story, as it's used to flesh out Harry's character and psychosis and underpins the satire.

That's right, on-top of all of that this novel is a satire critiquing the space program- something fairly unique in the bounds of SF, where mankind's grasping of the stars is typically glorified. If there's one real continuous narrative thread in this book it's the distinct anti-space stance that the developments take. To borrow the words of the novel the space program is painted as a hyper-masculine system that makes machines out of men, explicitly stated during sex with his wife: "We have been geared for efficiency. I begin to fuck her like a proper astronaut." The message seeming that the American obsession with space is ultimately pointless and masturbatory. I cannot fail to note that this was published in 1972, the year which marked the cancellation of the Apollo program, and one of two books about astronauts that Malzberg published after being asked to resign as the editor of the Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin in 1969 because of a critical editorial he wrote about the NASA space program.

I think the primary appeal of the novel is coming in its form and prose. I've never read anything formulated quite like this, it's a stand out among the other new-wave giants. This novel is fragmentary and experimental, with a plot that never resolves- something heavily postmodern and inventive in its approach. This book can be a disconcerting and tedious exercise to read, it's definitely not for everyone, and while I typically like inventive structures the lack of resolution is something I didn't much care for. I'm also decidedly in the NASA-good camp so I didn't much relish him shitting all over the space program. That said, I can see genius at work here, and I can appreciate the immense talent on display even if the book didn't cater to my particular tastes.

A fair amount of books we call classics are real stuffy, boring reads — written for a different audience, they don't hit the same for a modern reader. You know the type, the ones you only half-assedly read for class. That was my impression of Crime and Punishment, and so my copy sat fearfully unread on my bookshelf for years. Until now. Contrary to my expectations, this is not one of those books — it's a genuine joy to read, closer to modern literature than its stuffy contemporaries.

Dostoevsky's own history looms large over this book. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with a group of radical intellectuals and sentenced to death by Tsar Nicholas I — a sentence carried out right up to the point where he stood before the firing squad, before being commuted at the last moment to hard labor in Siberia. By the time of his release years later, Russia was undergoing a period of liberal reform, with relaxing censorship fueling a burgeoning literary scene. It's against this backdrop that Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, while sinking into immense debt thanks to a gambling addiction — and the destitute conditions Raskolnikov suffers throughout the novel feel unmistakably drawn from this period of his life.

Every scene, every character, the city of Petersburg; it's all brought completely to life. The prose sings, the dialogue is deliciously dramatic, and the inner turmoil of the main character is rendered in the most gripping detail. This is a psychological thriller, and I don't just mean that it arguably established the genre — I mean it's so damn good in execution, in getting across the feeling of a murderer's guilt and paranoia, in watching him ever so slowly unravel.

The plot is deceptively simple: rather than a who-dun-it, this is a why-he-dun-it. The book opens on the destitute student Raskolnikov contemplating something terrible. Unable to pay for his education and thoroughly depressed, he has spent months locked away in his filthy closet of a bedroom entertaining dark thoughts; he's decided to murder and rob a local pawnbroker. Not quite in his right mind, and incensed by news of his sister Dunya's engagement to a dubious lawyer, he waits till dark, borrows an axe, and quietly sets about his gruesome business. What follows is nothing less than psychological torture, as the fires of Raskolnikov's guilt are stoked by illness, madness, and paranoia.

The ideology that incites Raskolnikov to his crime is just as important as the crime itself. He's convinced himself of a theory: that certain crimes are justifiable in service of the goals of extraordinary men, that humanity is split into two classes: mere mortals, and a Napoleonic class to whom ordinary morals and laws don't apply. It's a dreadfully half-baked utilitarianism, and Dostoevsky's commentary on the egoism of the Russian radicals of his time. There's a striking echo here of the arguments later made by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man — the idea that rationalist thought reduces man to a mere product of physics and biology, and the warning against suppressing Christian compassion in favour of a nihilistic elite entrusted with the future. Raskolnikov believes himself one of these elites. But he is shocked, confused, and crushed by the guilt and horror he feels once confronted with the actual consequences of his deed, and it's this collapse — and his eventual absolution through Sonya and her faith — that gives the novel its real shape.

Raskolnikov is an asshole to basically everyone, all book long — and yet, seemingly despite himself, there's a whole host of characters who love and care for him. The rest of the cast is brilliant, and several completely transform the narrative in their respective moments. My favorite has to be the outwardly affable Inspector Porfiry; he absolutely steals the show, his innocuous, bumbling dialogue barely concealing a hunter's gaze, every seemingly innocent question oozing with suspicion and double meaning. Then there's Razumikhin, ever the upbeat and loyal friend — the golden retriever of the cast — his efforts to help unwittingly provoking Raskolnikov exactly as Porfiry intends. And finally Sonya, the self-sacrificing and compassionate daughter of a drunkard, whose shame in her profession and quiet moral strength become the catalyst for Raskolnikov's eventual confession.

There are people who insist you need to puzzle this book apart, to break it into its constituent symbols and philosophy, to really think on it. They should just try reading the story, because it's an awesome piece of writing, sure to captivate on its own terms. Part of what makes it so readable today is a stylistic innovation that was genuinely ahead of its time: Dostoevsky's fusion of third-person omniscient narration with the stream of consciousness of his characters. Contemporary readers were used to more linear, orderly narrative techniques, but this blurring of narrator and the inner thoughts of the protagonist is exactly what makes Raskolnikov's psyche feel so immediate to a modern reader. His stream of consciousness, the not-quite-first-person perspective, projects a vivid scene — an amazing drama of a man coming to terms with the crime he has committed. You peer into his psyche, come to know him, and watch his internal justifications crumble in the face of madness-inducing guilt. Just as you come to understand his mania, you also understand his weariness, the toll his guilt takes on mind and body. But you never lose yourself entirely in Raskolnikov; the scene stays grounded, the supporting characters animated and just as richly imagined as he is.

Crime and Punishment is proof that the classroom impression of a book and the book itself are often two entirely different things. I went into this recalling homework, and what I got was a genuinely gripping psychological thriller, one that happens to have also basically invented the genre. There's a tendency to assume that "classic" means "good for you" rather than "good", that anything assigned in school must be a chore to be endured rather than enjoyed. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes a book is a classic because it's genuinely that good, and reading it on your own terms, decades after it was forced on you (or you faked your way through it), is when it finally gets the chance to prove that. Being the grandfather of the genre doesn't make this book worse than the latest Stephen King novel — if anything, it's a testament to just how well it holds up that so much of what followed is still chasing what Dostoevsky pulled off here first.

P.S.The translation I read was the Pevear and Volokhonsky edition, which is significantly better than the older Garnett translation and worth seeking out. If you don't love the constant repetition of Russian names and patronymics, there's also the Katz edition, which is more modernised and localised to American English. Both are great — read Katz if you want something less Russian, and Volokhonsky if you want something as true to the original as you can get in English.