The protagonist, a child forged from the world itself and shaped like a giant insect, sits at the center of Michel Nieva’s latest book. Born in Buenos Aires in 1988, Nieva has been hailed as one of the brightest young voices in Spanish-language fiction by Granta in 2021. His new work resists easy classification, blending science fiction with a fearless, kinetic humor, and a keen eye for violence, geography, and the human body. It imagines a grim future where the world’s oldest evils are finally confronted, weaving past and present into a single, restless motif. This is a contemporary Argentine novel that refuses to be neatly shelved, an ambitious and sharp experiment that captures how civilization, fear, and memory collide in a world that feels both intimate and planetary. The book invites readers to see the world anew through Nieva’s distinctive voice and sensibility, and it presents a provocative meditation on how a life can survive, even flourish, amid decay and upheaval.
What was The World’s Childhood’s biggest challenge?
The hardest task was telling vast, inhuman timescales that the modern novel rarely accounts for. Traditional narratives often focus on individuals or families, but this work contends with planetary histories and viral lifecycles, asking how to narrate a timeline that spans continents, climates, and genomes as easily as one would trace a single life. The author meditates on how big eras imprint themselves on bodies and spaces, and how a story can travel across eras without losing its edge or its sense of danger.
How did you do this?
Science fiction, treated as a minor genre by some, becomes a potent vessel for diverse cultural expressions, from video games to manga, that mainstream literature sometimes dismisses. The novel grounds itself in a speculative map of Earth as it might look after glaciers melt, and it even embeds a video game aesthetic set in a reminiscent, 19th-century milieu. By absorbing these forms, the work crafts a bridge between popular culture and high literary ambition, creating a multi-layered Playground for ideas where imagination becomes a tool for critique and invention.
It’s inspiring in how it incorporates the language of video games.
One central thread is childhood, explored as a futureable life stage that persists even when the future itself seems ruined. The narrative uses this shift to examine how innocence and potential can survive in conditions that threaten them, offering a counterpoint to cynicism with moments of wonder and resilience.
It is interesting how he intersects the body with technology, and how he approaches body terror.
The author investigates how bodies access new forms of pleasure or constraint through technological mediation. Fear of the body becomes a way to explore how virtual the contemporary sensory world has become, where direct experience is often eclipsed by mediated, digital perception. This tension fuels a startling and provocative reading of embodiment in a tech-saturated era.
There is a clear desire in his book to disable the inherited aesthetic.
The work argues that imagining the future is inherently political, and it deliberately questions the North American or empire-centered templates that often shape future narratives. It posits a different, southern worldview as a legitimate and necessary counterbalance to dominant modes of futurity.
Although you cover many topics in ‘The Childhood of the World’, climate change is at the center.
Climate change is treated as a political phenomenon born of capitalist extraction and environmental devastation, especially in the global south. Drawing on the insights of historians like Jason W. Moore, the author suggests that capitalism emerged not only in industrial England but through succession and conquest across the Americas, slavery, and the decimation of Indigenous populations. This framing positions climate change as a colonial, capital-driven story that continues to plunder the world, urging readers to rethink responsibility and global interdependence.
Why does contemporary literature use science fiction to describe the present?
We inhabit a moment when capitalism and corporations increasingly translate sci‑fi visions into real products and aestheticized futures. Case in point: tech magnates drawing on genre tropes to imagine metaverses, Mars habitats, and other grand schemes. This dynamic places contemporary writers in a critical position, inviting them to interrogate how speculative aesthetics shape reality and to challenge the simplistic glamour of the capitalist dream through sharper, more responsible storytelling.