“Nobody loved Dengue Boy. I don’t know if it was his long beak or the constant, unbearable buzzing sound his wings made as they rubbed together, which would distract his entire class, the fact that when recess came and all the other kids shot out into the yard to chat, and joke, and eat their sandwiches, poor Dengue Boy would remain alone at his desk, staring into space, pretending to revise a page of his notes to avoid the embarrassment of going out into the yard, where he didn’t have a single friend to talk to.”

Michel Nieva’s debut novel Dengue Boy, translated into English by Rahul Bery and published by Serpent’s Tail, is the first book published in 2025 that I’ve read, and if it’s any indication then my god are we in for a bonkers and brilliant ride. Nieva is an Argentinian writer, and based on Dengue Boy an incredibly exciting new voice in speculative fiction. He has labelled his work gaucho-punk, and while I’m usually suspicious of new genre labels, Dengue Boy is a work singular enough to require its own genre. The short novel is set in the year 2272, on an Earth ravaged by climate change where most of the landmass has sunk, leaving only the Patagonian archipelagos as habitable for humans. Into this ghastly dystopian future, in which the rich bank on pandemics in the stock market and the poor have no future, steps the mutant figure of Dengue Boy, a human/mosquito mutant who undergoes various transfigurations across this dying world. Drawing together elements across climate fiction, cyberpunk, body horror, satire, magical realism and surrealism, Nieva creates a monstrous new literature for these monstrous times, a timely fable about humanity’s self-destructive greed. It’s shocking, hilarious and often oddly moving. Dengue Boy shows that genre fiction is alive and kicking and in fine strength going into 2025, and I can only recommend that everyone read it as soon as possible.

Dengue Boy is a mosquito/human hybrid, a child with antennae, maxillary palps, compound eyes and wings. Unloved by his mother and ostracized by his classmates, he leads a wretched existence even compared to the other poor children whose parents must work in toxic rubbish dumps, grisly automated slaughterhouses, or as poorly paid servants to the rich. One day at a summer camp for the poor on the rotting beaches, the taunting by El Dulce, an aggressive bully whose brother runs an amateur smuggling ring, becomes too much and Dengue Boy snaps, murders El Dulce and his other tormentors, and discovers that he is in fact Dengue Girl, the blood-sucking and egg-laying female of the species. Dengue Girl lays her eggs in her victims’ corpses and goes on a rampage, targeting the wealthy stock marketeers who keep her mother in abject poverty, on a mission that will take her face to face with Noah Nuclopio, head of AIS-Influenza Financial and richest man in the world. Meanwhile the narrative also follows El Dulce’s story backwards. Working for his brother’s smuggling operation, El Dulce finds in one of their boxes of contraband a stone that was buried deep below the permafrost in Antarctica and is imbued with telepathic powers that communicates on behalf of an ancient primordial force calling itself the Mighty Anarch. Events soon spiral out of control of even humanity’s richest, as a battle for control over life and non-life rages across the terraformed solar system, across cyberspace and beyond alternate universes. 

Dengue Boy manages to somehow juggle all of these bonkers ideas into a coherent whole. No small part of this is down to Nieva’s narrative voice, which is captured brilliantly by Bery’s translation. The novel’s omniscient narrator is lively and humorous, prone to both shaggy dog stories and bizarre exclamations, all of which provide a cynical and amusing tone that perfectly counterpoints the novel’s bleak future and violent story. It also gives the disparate strands of the novel a single recognizable voice, as we follow not only Dengue Girl through her various transformations but El Dulce’s exploits with his smuggler brother and his journey playing as an Indian in the popular VR game Christians vs. Indians, René, the spoiled daughter of a privileged stockbroker who chooses the side of the Christians in the VR game, and the more general exploits of AIS, derogatorily referred to as “Climate McDonalds”, who use their resources and geoengineering prowess to create pre-ordered artificial replicas of temperate old Earth environments for the disgustingly rich both on Earth and on terraformed Mars. Nieva’s ironic detachment throws the frequently horrible actions of his characters into stark relief, inviting us to both laugh and to be horrified by the sheer lack of compassion and empathy on display in this shell of our former planet that the rich are still doing their level best to make a quick buck from at the expense of their fellow humans.

Indeed, perhaps the most powerful aspect of the book is Nieva’s literalisation of necrocapitalism through the idea of “virofinance”. All-powerful billionaires like Noah Nuclopio have made their fortunes by using AI to run simulations of the most recent virus outbreaks and investing their money in the medical resources needed to combat it, thus tying global finance directly to the latest pandemic. Of course, the medical resources will be invested in and traded by stock brokers rather than alleviating the suffering of the poor who are going to be most violently affected by it. Nieva’s ghastly speculative finance system cuts out the middle man, directly and visibly linking financial speculation to the disenfranchised lives it ruins, creating the ultimate metaphor for the uncaring brutality of late-period capitalism. Against this backdrop, it is possible to see Dengue Girl’s violent revenge as a reasonable reaction, and the Mighty Anarch’s complex plan to return all existence to a primordial state of pluripotency before life and non-life had separated into separate elements seems like a blessed relief. 

Dengue Boy is a striking reminder of the power of genre fiction to speak truth to power and to vividly reveal the uncomfortable inequalities our society is built on. It mixes plausible biological and technological speculation with cutting satire and imaginatively surreal imagery. Nieva has created a modern masterpiece, and established himself as a key new voice in speculative fiction. I look forward to seeing what he does next. 

Dengue Boy is due for release 20th February from Profile Books. You can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org