The Childhood of the World, Michel Nieva

The protagonist of this story does not understand the meaning of the words "winter," "cold," or "snow" because he has never experienced the phenomena they describe. We are in Victorica, in the Argentine province of La Pampa, in the years following 2197, the year the last Antarctic ice melts and an unprecedented climate catastrophe ensues, radically transforming the region's landscape into a Pampean Caribbean. In this context, the dengue child grows up, the protagonist, a carrier of this virus; a humanoid mosquito whose monstrous appearance not only makes him cannon fodder for his classmates –led by a tyrant named el Dulce– but also causes his own mother's disdain.

Another surprising effect of the melting ice is the appearance of powerful telepathic pebbles from the Earth's depths that seem to recover the wisdom of the world's childhood, which el Dulce and his brother smuggle. But this "filthy world," in the words of Aurora Venturini at the beginning of the novel, is threatened by a socio-environmental crisis that becomes a source of financial speculation, while a multinational planetary engineering company promises to adapt the geographies of Argentine Antarctica, Mars, Jupiter, and its satellites to the demands of international tourism.

If capitalism has destroyed nature, can it reuse its own methods to rebuild it? Is the virtual reality offered to the characters in the video game Christians vs. Indians more livable than their own lives?

The world's childhood is written at the frantic pace of "virofinance," with a delirious prose that builds bridges between picaresque, manga, body horror, and gaucho-punk science fiction. Michel Nieva plays at "terraforming" (using the terms of his own universe) a world of worlds that is as rich and vast –following in the footsteps of Kafka, Cronenberg, Octavia E. Butler, Philip K. Dick, or Junji Ito– as it is groundbreaking. The result: an extraordinary novel about a crazed future that, perhaps too clearly, shines through in our present.