A Feast Unknown by Philip José Farmer

A pulpy mix of pornography, satire, pop Freudianism, and adventure fiction straight from the 1960s. Victorian orientalism is more or less directly addressed, as are the sexless supermen that we're still dealing with at the multiplex. Will sent this to me along with The Sailor on the Sea of Fate, and it does check some relevant boxes: superhero antecedents, Victorian romance of the wild other and the strong men of civilization that straddle that line and cross between worlds, immortality and how immortal people might truly be, airy, compunctionless sex, cathartic perversity. I could have read it in a few hours if I still read books.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

A system built on self-conscious, ideological subjugation of nature confronts a natural force it can scarcely comprehend, much less control.

Soviet men pride themselves on hurling their bodies into the nuclear pyre, which is chunks of irradiated graphite scattered across a reactor roof, and also months spent burying dirt beneath more dirt and shooting housepets.

"People are already living after the nuclear war—though when it began, they didn't notice. I felt like I was recording the future."