Sunday, May 24, 2026
Book Review: The Franchise by Thomas Elrod
Book Review: AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
480 pages, Hardcover
Published, 2021 by Crown Currency
Full review and podcast coverage coming...
Book Review: Acquired Taste Clay McLeod Chapman
Acquired Taste by Clay McLeod Chapman
304 pages, Hardcover
Published September, 2025 by Titan Books
Full review coming...
Book Review: Monsters in Archive by Caroline Bicks
304 pages, Hardcover
Published April, 2026 by Hogarth
Full review on the way. I am also interviewing Caroline on the Live PKD hangout Tuesday June 23.
Book Review: Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia Zoë Perry (Translator)
Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia (Zoe Perry Translator)
99 pages, Paperback
Published April, 2023 by Charco Press (First published in Brazil 2013)
Full review on the way...
Book Review: Philip K. Dick and the World We Live In by Evan Lampe
396 pages, Paperback
Published: 2015 by Wide Books
In the early days of the Dickheads podcast I found Evan Lampe’s solo podcast covering PKD. Many of the episodes shared the same research DNA as this book, and I suspect if I were to go back and listen, you could hear Evan forming his ideas. It is a treat of these types of podcasts, our first episodes of Dickheads I knew hardly anything. Evan’s journey on the podcast is more than a decade ago, but here is where he is now…
This book is in the limited sub-category of non-fiction titles about Philip K. Dick by folks who have read the entire canon. It compares nicely to Palmer’s PKD Exhilaration and Terror, Rossi’s Twisted Worlds of PKD, and most recently Lapoujade’s Worlds Built to Fall Apart.
There are several reasons you can accuse me of bias. Evan was a long-time guest on my podcast, but more importantly, I share much of his negative view of Capitalism. One person told me they were afraid that the book was all Marxist politics, but it is actually more Kropotkin than old Karl. He is a trained labor historian, so it is going to happen. I love a PKD book that quotes from The Conquest of Bread. It was also interesting timing because Ray Nayler’s Palaces of the Crow (my favorite new release) also quoted the old anarchist theorist.
The gist of the skepticism is that a radical left narrative based on PKD’s canon might seem off. After Thomas Disch called Phil a Marxist, he was mad and often pointed to the Man Who Japed as supercritical of Chinese communism. Lampe’s argument for anti-capitalist leanings might have gotten the same reaction out of Phil that Disch got, but it is well-sourced. Just as PKD’s fiction presented animal rights ideals he didn’t live up to, tons of political and social concepts came out of the 44 novels and 120 short stories, and no one has done a more top-to-bottom look at the ouvre that Lampe has here.
So what was the intention…
“What I hope to do in this book is offer Dick as a potential guide to currently existing late capitalism. My hope is that this may make Philip K Dick less of a prophet and more of a companion as we face the increasingly bleak and horrifying future that goes beyond just the condition of the postmodern and the posthuman that seems to sap our very freedoms.”
I found every chapter meaningful and helpful, but let's go a little deeper.
The first chapter, which is about the end of work, becomes even more interesting considering how much we are debating the loss of work. It was fine when the lower classes were losing hard labor jobs, but now that the middle class and even some upper class are losing wages to computers, the debate is becoming important. A decade ahead, Lampe wisely points to when PKD jumped into this debate in the 50’s. There is a sub-chapter devoted a story written in 1953. For the morality of technological post-scarcity, “To Serve the Master.” Lampe highlights how PKD weighs into the ethics of scarcity and machine workforces. This post-war tale is set after a conflict between Leisurists (who want computers to do everything) and moralists.
That chapter, combined with The Tragedy of Post Scarcity: A Detailed Look at the Crack in Space are great examples of the strength of the book. Deep cut stories and a novel that is admittedly not a high point in PKD’s career get as much attention as the masterpieces. He highlights not just the messages and themes, but PKD’s growth, for example, how the expanded Penultimate Truth develops a smarter and more thoughtful political stance over the source short story The Defenders, a decade earlier. The early version seems to show the robots deciding on their own to keep humans underground, but the novel shows a ruling elite of tech oligarchs who control the robots. (Sound familiar?)
Another chapter I thought was one of the best, The Empire Never Died: The search for order, political power, and global capitalism. Stretching from Stability written when he was a teenager to High Castle and The Zap Gun this chapter looks at the forces of political power in PKD’s fiction. It is worth the book alone.
One of the best and most in-depth chapters is Window Shopping at the Commissary: Consumerism, Conformity, and Power. Here, Lampe veers into something that affected me because I just read Christopher Palmer’s book. One of the new Ideas for me in that book is how PKD writes about consumption. Lampe expands on this and ties to left-leaning political takes on deep cut stories.
A subchapter on war and consumption, for example, looks closely at a deep cut short story, Some Kinds of Life, Autofac, and Foster You're dead in just one subchapter. Even deeper cut stories like Service Call and the Little Movement are mentioned alongside novels like Now Wait for Last Year, that's a lot of titles, but it shows you how deep cut this book goes
One of the directions of Lampe’s ideas I have not seen elsewhere is in chapter The Significance of the Frontier in Martian history Philip K Dick meets Frederick Jackson Turner. On the podcast for years, whenever I brought up the frontier, I always referenced Lampe. I think his writings here are something no one has really dived into as deeply.
A few of Evan’s appearances on DHP:
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Book Review: Trad Wife by Sarah Langan
320 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: September 29, 2026 by Atria Books
OUT NOW in the UK!
One of the benefits of getting to interview our favorite authors, is towards the end of the interviews, you get to ask the question “What are you working on?” For the moment, Sarah said I am working on a novel called Trad Wife I was almost sweating, wanting to pick that up.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room, there are two novels released this year with this title, and even more that explore the right-wing Trad Wife trend like Yesteryear. There are several real-life horror stories, but fairly Langan has pointed out that she didn't want to pick on the women who choose this life.
Langan released two truly fantastic speculative novels in a row, so honestly, I was not expecting a return to horror, but we got a taste in this year’s Stoker Award-nominated Pam Kowalski is a Monster. In a long-standing genre tradition, the novella felt like a warm-up for Trad Wife.
I want to talk about the last two novels, Good Neighbors and A Better World. They are entirely the reason I invited Sarah to be a guest of honor at PKD fest this summer. Twilight Zone might be a more obvious influence on Good Neighbors, but A Better World was Dickian to me. While it might be horror, Trad Wife takes on reality slippage. I think readers are catching that, but many are missing, and that is Dickian in a great way.
Jenny Kaplan is a canceled journalist whose career went sideways when she wrote an article about an abortion she had. Fired from the magazine she was writing for, she is offered a chance to redeem herself in the editor’s eyes ( and more importantly, the bean counters) by doing a Freaky Friday-style article where she switches places with a trad wife influencer, Mia Wright.
Mia has chosen her to open up to, something that makes Jenny nervous.
“Mia Wright.
Though she looked twenty years old, she was forty-two. According to her bio, she grew up in rural Maryland and went to a small community college there, where she studied library technology. She met her husband, Steadman Wright, on an Amtrak ride from Baltimore to
Philly. They were seatmates who got to talking, drank too much cheap wine, and got silly. Mia characterized it as love, pinot grigio style.”
She seems perfect, a brood of kids, a business. The perfect submissive trad wife. She is popular, and her videos go viral. She has a strange presence. For Jenny, it gets creepy.
“What had just happened? Had Mia Wright known her name through the screen? Had she made the lights flicker?”
Like Mia is calling to her. Like she knows her.
Now, for those of you who don’t want the slight clue, this is a good time to stop reading the review, as I am going to explore the themes. Langan is an author who excels in unified themes that could be best described as a domestic/suburban black mirror. From the climate change update of Monsters Are Due on Maple Street in Good Neighbors. To the techno utopian burbs of A Better World. Trad Wife does mock women who choose this life, but it is a theme about how motherhood, with all the struggles inherent, can consume anyone.
(SPOILER WARNING)
It starts with cleaning, cooking, and looking after the kids, and after a couple of days, Jenny loses herself.
“There were four wet towels on the floor, and the toilet was unflushed. Dried toothpaste crusted the sink. Homemade deodorants and soaps were out of their drawers. Someone had pulled all the snarled clumps of hair from the combs and brushes and thrown them on the floor like human tumbleweeds. She decided to help Mia and cleaned what she could, gathered the towels, wiped the toothpaste from the sink and mirror.
When she got back to her room, she locked the door like she locked it every night.
Three days down.”
The reality slippage becomes more and more real as the role takes over. Mia falls apart slowly, and Jenny not only steps into her role but also sees Mia in the mirror, and the number of people who mistake her for Mia grows. Rosemary’s Baby comparison keeps being made for these Trad Wife novels, but what separates Langan’s novel is that the structure is built entirely around my two favorite storytelling pillars. Parallel and reversals. Reality never snaps away; it simply bends, mutates. IT slips in subtle and frightening ways. IT is the building dread that makes this an effective horror novel. It is not about motherhood, but motherhood meeting the ideals of those who watch and judge. It is about a monster, who becomes that because she lives life in the spotlight, and two women who experience the spotlight in different ways exchange places. In this way, this novel fits thematically with Isabel Kim’s soon to be released novel Subliminal.
Langan set a high bar with the last three books, and if there is any negative, it is that I knew the ending was coming pretty early on. The references to Freaky Friday might have been needed for some readers, but I thought it telegraphed the end a bit. It is silly to nitpick such a good novel; also, it is Okay because that feeling of knowing a crash is coming can help build the dread. Trad Wife is another argument for Sarah Langan being one of the best voices in genre.
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