Dengue Boy belongs to that fin-de-siècle genre, the video game novel. I don’t get to read that many of them, but it reminded me of Pelevin, and I imagine William Gibson, (who I’ve never read). The virtual reality novel, where characters plug into worlds within worlds. Neva makes an explicit reference to Borges towards the end of the book, (The Aleph), suggesting a larger genealogy to the genre, and perhaps it might also be said to reference back to Huxley, Swift, More, etcetera. The invention of imaginary parallel worlds has always been the stuff of fiction. The technological gizmos of high capitalism only serve to garnish another layer of accessibility to these worlds.
Neva’s dystopian text is set in a futuristic climate-warmed hothouse world where concepts like cold are a thing of the past, only existing in expensive reproductions for obscenely wealthy tourists who travel to an ice-free Antarctica for a taste of something they have heard of in folk tales. The world is afflicted by giant mutant mosquitos which are capable of laying waste to everything in their path, spreading disease, death and destruction in their wake. These diseases are then monetised, as the bio-industry produces profitable vaccines to counter them. The reference to Covid 19 is implicit. In amongst the catastrophe porn, Neva invents a new sub-genre of mosquito splatter-gore. That the novel is Argentine is perhaps surprising, with its playful reimagining of Argentine geography post the rise in seal-levels which has liquidated Buenos Aires and the coast. Above and beyond the politics, the mash-up of ideas and excess seems to echo the trajectory of contemporary Argentina and its current Dengue Boy president.
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