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

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a 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: THE IMMEASURABLE HEAVEN

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a 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:

The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon (Solaris)

Geon’s novel packs a myriad (pun, for those of you who have read the book) of worlds, characters, objects, and situations into 352 pages. I find that page count hard to believe. The publisher’s marketing copy assures me it is correct, but the novel seemed much longer than that as I read it in e-book form.

The novel comes across a bit like Gnumph, one of the novel’s few important characters standing out amid the welter of others. Gnumph is a fuzzy spore with the ability to expand hugely, to serve as a vehicle for travelers among all the many universes that populate the fictional world of the novel, and even to contain within himself a few extra dimensions encasing their own universes. Not like a Russian doll, though. They are speckled around him more haphazardly than that. Reading this novel is like boarding Gnumph and–like Gnumph’s passengers–discovering you can’t get off. Sort of a spherical Hotel California.

The premise behind the world-building is: there’s no single universe but instead the multiverse (by now an SF staple). But in Geon’s conception of the multiverse, the universes are all layered in strata like rock, and another is created every nanosecond. In this novel, I think we visit them all. That’s because characters in the know can escape any predicament in their own universe by Dropping–moving into a lower-strata universe than the one they currently occupy. Unfortunately, in this idea of the multiverse, yes, you can go down, but you can never move back up. Sort of a vertical Hotel California.

Or can you? This is murky. One of the main characters, a shadowy figure who begins the novel with the provocative statement, “They sent me to hell,” is determined to get his revenge on the people who did this to him (it?) by clawing his way back up through a flaw in the universes. But as he had fallen to his seemingly eternal fate, sort of like Satan in Paradise Lost, he had emitted a scream so horrifying that multiple beings in multiple universes pick it up via multiple senses. And it is so horrific that it even kills one of the listeners/smellers/viewers/touchers/tasters.

That’s the set-up. Then several other characters pursue him–one charged with her emperor to find and eliminate him, another a sort of bounty hunter looking to sell the knowledge to the highest bidder, and so on. But these are only a few of the multitudes and multitudes of characters in the multitudes of universes that are given names (as per usual in SF and fantasy, unpronounceable multisyllabic ones), and there are multitudes and multitudes more who are not named. But they are described. Multitudes and multitudes of them.

In most fiction, when the author gives a character a name, the name sends a signal to the reader: here’s a character you should pay attention to. This novel is not most fiction. With few exceptions, when this novel names a character, we never see that character again. Or that one. Or that one. Or that one, over there, or this one, over here, or. . . Do I sound annoyed? I am. But at the same time, I am in awe of the richness of the world the author has built.

The main characters really are interesting. Gnumph, the vehicle who is a spore. The personage of the horrifying yell. The two main characters pursuing that personage: Draebol, a person who has completed the monumental task of mapping the known universes and the pathways among them but then succumbs to despair. Whirra, a person sent out by her emperor to identify and thwart the guy who screams. (Why? Hard to say.) There are a few memorable others. In fact, when I could catch my breath and think about the screamer character, he seemed very Miltonic to me. I think of Satan in Paradise Lost contemplating “the immeasurable abyss.” I think of his vow to get out of hell and punish the creatures in the world above him. So is the title a reversal of this line from Milton? Maybe, maybe not. And why? Well, it’s indeed immeasurable, so there’s that. But we seem to stay in hell the entire way, unless you count a few idyllic episodes rapidly swept away into the sweep of all the other stuff. Above all, I wanted to stay with these major characters, and I wanted to understand their often inexplicable actions better. At the end, there’s a lot of back matter: lists of characters, place names, timelines, and the like. That helps.

Where this book does shine is in its endless descriptions. Each setting in the many, many, many universes is lovingly, intricately described right down to its (usually ) disgusting stench and defacatory and vomitory habits. Each body of each character is lovingly described–because for the most part, the characters never stay in one body. Every time they Drop, they acquire a new one. So not only do we have a bazillion characters to keep track of, but each one seems to have multiple bodies. Each one lovingly, intricately described. As I say, a world-builder’s delight. But I should also mention this book has one trait I prize very highly: the writing is great.

I think the problem and also the glory of the novel is that it’s an Hieronymus Bosch of a book. Think of an Hieronymus Bosch painting and all the wriggling, usually disgusting creatures who occupy every inch of canvas.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgment, triptych, oils on panel painted around 1482. Source: https://www.pubhist.com/w22008

No, really. Enlarge it and take a good look. This novel is that, in book form. And I love looking at Hieronymus Bosch paintings. So why, I ask myself, don’t I love this book? I think it’s because we encounter a painting in a very different way than we encounter a novel. The painting hits our eye all at once. Our eye roams it, picking out details, always drawn back (in a good painting) to the whole–the pattern, the focal point, whatever the painting tries to accomplish. But a book is by its nature sequential. Page one–one detail. Page two–more. Page three–more. And so on. The task of the author is to unify all these sequential details into a whole by giving us clues all the way through about how they fit in. Page one of this book is a knockout. “They sent me to hell.” I love that first sentence. I want to know more. Who? Why? Who is “they”? What do they have against the speaker? etc. We finally do find out who this person is, but–at least for me–too little, too late. And while this book does give us clues to the overall picture (I think–I’m not sure I ever really got the overall picture, though), the clues are lost in a plethora of details that I found just distracting.

You are a different reader and you may feel very differently about this book. Many readers prize ingenious world-building above all other traits in a work of speculative fiction. You’re this reader? This is your feast. This is your book.

Coming up next: Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha (Undertow Publications)

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)