2026 Philip K. Dick Award Nominee: SCALES

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment


After a brief hiatus to catch up on reading (fast!) the seven short-listed nominees for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award, I’m returning to my reviews of each one. See earlier posts in this series for all but the last, coming soon. 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:

Scales by Christopher Hinz (Angry Robot)

book cover of Scales, by Christopher Hinz
Find out more HERE.

“Perfect for fans of Jurassic Park,” the marketing copy reads. It does not lie. If the Jurassic Park fictoverse farms out spin-off novels to other authors, this is one they’d spin off. HERE is a review that gives the reader some perspective.

In Hinz’s novel, mad scientists and evil military black box operations and lunatic kleptocrats are not cloning dinosaurs from ancient dino DNA. They are cloning dino-MEN. Super-soldiers. One reviewer amusingly dubs the main dino-man “Rambosaurus Rex.” So, as several reviewers have commented, this novel is not just a techno-thriller. It is combination techno thrill-ride and military SF.

As the novel opens (not a spoiler, because we find this out almost immediately), the dino-man project has a problem. After producing four dino-men cloned from four different types of dino DNA, a crazed military/oligarch-funded research institute has chosen Eddie as the one dino-man most likely to succeed as the public face of the project. Embedded in a mission to rescue a kidnapped CEO from terrorists, Eddie has performed admirably. Saved the day, even. As the grateful rescued CEO gushes to Eddie, “Watching you was like watching one of those superhero movies!”

There’s only one problem. When Eddie enters a stressful situation, his carnivorous dino side takes over his human side. “Bad yen,” his psychiatrist back at the institute calls it. And in this most stressful of all situations, Eddie’s bad yen rapidly devolves into outright bloodlust. He chases down one of the terrorists and cannibalizes him.

Very bad for publicity.

Now the institute and the military guys have a decision to make. Abandon their bazillion-dollar investment in Eddie and start over? Or try to train Eddie to control his most ferocious dino impulses.

They go with that one. They call in Dr. Addi LaTour, a kickass and sexy Cajun psychiatrist with unorthodox methods of aversion therapy involving shock collars. The novel works hard to get us to accept that the growing attraction between Addi and Eddie is okay, not creepy. Also, Cajun character. . .cue the swamp scene.

This is an improbable pulp fiction plot for sure. But do we care? Not for nothing, I guess, that the author has also written for DC Comics and Marvel. He paces the novel well, so we are swept from one improbability to the next without thinking about how preposterous it all is. Has that ever stopped the writers of comic books and pulp fiction and superhero movies, though? Has that ever kept their readers/watchers from maximum enjoyment? Are dino-men any more improbable than a guy bitten by a radioactive spider who turns into Spider-Man? Less, probably.

If you love this type of book, I’ll bet you will love this one. The characters are kind of cardboard, the writing is kind of flat, the situations are perfect for adolescent boys–or the adolescent boy in us all. But it’s a lot of fun.

I think it MIGHT have been more fun if it had gone for the broad vibe of Starship Troopers (the movie, I hasten to add, not the fascist Heinlein book). Still–this novel is fun.

NEXT UP: City of All Seasons by Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley


And now, a word from the universe. . .

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy1 Comment

As I take a quick break from my reviews of the finalists for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award, here is a reflection on the nature of things. As usual–we are tampering with it:

I love DST, by the way. Everyone else in my family hates it.

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)