Laith
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.
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.
