Book Review: Encounter with Realities: Critical Reflections on the Novels and Short Stories of Philip K. Dick by Frank C. Bertrand, David Hyde (Editor), Lord Running Clam (Introduction)

 

 Encounter with Realities: Critical Reflections on the Novels and Short Stories of Philip K. Dick by  Frank C. Bertrand, David Hyde (Editor), Lord Running Clam (Introduction)

185 pages, Hardcover

Published June 13, 2026 by Wide Books

 

They say only Nixon could’ve gone to China. If I were more petty or held a bigger grudge, I would not have bought this book at PKD Fest, read it, or reviewed it. Since I started the podcast, one person in the PKD community has been rude and dismissive of my efforts, and that would be the author of this book. It is not just me; his negative comments across the PKD community is legendary, and that type of stuff comes with consequences. Despite the fact that his name personally causes intense eye-rolling on my part, I gave this book a fair shot. 

The reality is…and I honestly hate to say this…Damn, this is a fine piece of PKD scholarship that should be in the collection of anyone seriously interested in understanding the work of Philip K. Dick. This collection of shorter works about PKD written over several decades is valuable for many reasons.

The book's strength comes from two elements. It draws on essays written over decades, and Bertrand makes observations no one else could. The book opens with various essays on A Scanner Darkly, and these alone are worth getting the book. The essays on The Man Who Japed and Eye in the Sky have their strengths. 

These types of essays and commentary that dig deep into the meaning of the stories and novels and take advantage of multiple points of view help to expand PKD studies in a way that is very important. Wide Books does a wonderful job of putting out deep-dive books that maybe we didn’t know we needed. 

The first essay that I really thought was unique was a 1999 essay about A Scanner Darkly that points to how the universe of ASD was different; the exploration of those details was very important. However, the best essay about that novel was “Kant’s Noumenal Self and Doppelganger in PK Dick’s A Scanner Darkly,” which is worth the entire book. The interview with Phil on Philosophy is great; of course, it is available in many places online.

Bertrand might not like me, but this book is an important document of all the work he has done. The most important thing is it is useful information on PKD. Therefore, I recommend it.

 

Book Review: Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler Susana M. Morris

 

 

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler Susana M. Morris

272 pages, Hardcover

Published

August 19, 2025 by Amistad

Octavia Butler shares a few things with my guy Phil, a prophetic SF author whose fame grew mostly after death. I was excited to get to know Butler through a well-researched biography.  The author Suzanna Morris has done a wonderful job bringing Butler’s life to us. I am a sucker for Writer bios because I like to know what was going on in an author's life when they wrote the books I love. 

Octavia Butler’s position in the SF canon is assured at this point, but sadly her output compared to some authors is thin; the power of the works we have is undeniable. This book does look at her life, and has wonderful glimpses of her process, but it also does a nice job of showing Butler’s impact. One of the nice ways Morris does this is to tell stories of the time she herself was taught a Butler story or novel, and the many times she taught Butler’s work herself. 

Morris went deep with the research, not only reading the text, letters, and interviews but also drafts and unfinished work.  Learning about how Butler traveled and experienced places during her research phase made sense. 

I am sure that several reviewers will complain about the focus on her work more than her life. There were some gaps, like more interviews; it seemed Morris did not to interview anyone who knew her, and that could have added a lot to the project, but I suspect Morris is more interested in the fiction of Butler and how her process fed into the final product.

Yeah, I would like to understand a bit more about her students at Clarion thought of her as a teacher, and how she coped with her dyslexia. I have my own dyslexia strategies,  so comparing them would have been cool. But the reality is that I read The Parable Books around the time she died, and I suspected her life would be a mystery. Many women who wrote genre fiction from CL Moore, Andre Norton, and others, are hard to find information about.  Catherine Moore is often remembered for her husband, Henry Kuttner, or her letters with Lovecraft, when her biography, for example, is just as interesting. 

I think we should be very happy this book exists.

Book Review: Dengue Boy by Michael Nieva & Translated by Rahul Bery

 

Dengue Boy by Michael Nieva & Translated by Rahul Bery 

205 pages, Hardcover

Published February , 2025 by Astra House

 

I don't remember where this book got on my radar; I think I was poking around on the library app and saw the comparisons ¨Michel Nieva follows in the footsteps of Kafka, Cronenberg, Philip K. Dick, and Junji Ito to create a universe entirely his own, holding up a mirror to our faces and asking the dire question of what we want our future to really look like.¨ You invoke Cronenberg and PKD; you have my attention. A translated work of international SF with a Cli-fi angle this ticks many boxes. 

There are many elements of this novel I really enjoyed. The concept is interesting. A boy engineered to be part mosquito to better survive the climate post-apocalypse is one of our point-of-view characters. The title character, Dengue Boy, is bullied at school and gives the novel a social justice angle. 

Climate destruction, adaptation and capitalism prospecting play a central role in this novel. Weirdly for me, the character stuff didn't connect. But the world-building was magical and on point.

“When the Antarctic ice caps that had once covered the Argentine Atlantic finally melted for good, the YPF company (with the backing of British capital) began extracting hydrocarbons from Belgrano Base 2, an activity that over the years yielded huge dividends from multiple sectors of the economy. Given this, no one could explain how nor why two or three years ago the drilling had been suspended overnight and the wells submitted to rigorous carbon sanitaire, monitored around the clock by the army.”

The setting was wildly evocative of a world almost alien compared with ours, transformed by our actions today into something alien tomorrow. It was also interesting to me because it was the effects of climate change in a part of the globe American readers often forget.  Keep  in mind the rest of the world is dead.

“A wonder of planetary geoengineering from Atlantic Pinamar to Nueva Mar Azul, the Bellinghausen Seas are the refreshing waters that bathe the shores of this Caribbean, famous for being the only ones on earth without scolding hot temperatures. With the global average of 194 Fahrenheit and maximum temperatures of up to 392 Fahrenheit, it is calculated that in some regions such as California or the Middle East a Turkey will roast at room temperature around 20 minutes, and then the egg will fry in less than one.”

This climate apocalypse interested me most, more than the characters, though it is hard not to be interested in the mosquito-hybrid boy. The subplot about the historical video game totally lost me.

Overall, this is an interesting, thoughtful work of international SF, and I want more of that, so I hope people check it out, and talk about it.

Book Review: Time's Rabbit Hole by Lord Running Clam

 

Time's Rabbit Hole by Lord Running Clam

101 pages, Paperback
Published July 25, 2026 by Wide Books

Lord Running Clam, that’s Mister Clam if you're nasty. Sometimes at the Oscars they say it was just a certain filmmaker's year. Winner of both the lifetime Achievement award and Best Book for the Pink Beam Companion was Lord Running Clam. In PKD circles, you might know LRC under his third variety title, David Hyde. In the 90s, when Paul Williams fell out of doing the PKD society newsletter, Lord Running Clam (named after the slime mold character of Clans of the Alphane Moon ) picked up the mantle of keeping PKD fandom/ studies going in a variety of ways. His role in writing Pink Beam Companion (or the online version) alone makes him important, and it deserved recognition for the level of research that went into it.  Well, I know LRC as a deep student of PKD who has been obsessed with his work since the 90s, I didn’t know he wrote fiction.

So it was a surprise when Lord Running Clam was passing out an entire novella he had written at the 4th International Philip K. Dick Fest in Fullerton.  In the introduction, it is mentioned that the guests of honor at the 2026 had all written novellas. That was true-ish: Sarah Langan and Brian Evenson, two of the three guests of honor, did, and LRC was close enough (since he was getting a Pink Beam award for lifetime achievement, he figured he would get in on the fun). 

Great idea. In Time’s Rabbit Hole is a work of what we call Pink Beam fiction, a work that plays with Phil Dickian concepts; in this case, the meta-reality time-travel novel in which LRC becomes a character in the story. Not only that a sorta meta-trip where LRC gets lost on a time-travel trip trying to get to the fest.

Along the way, he goes back and forth in time and meets a robot named Asshole. “I went closer to see a grease-stained and grimy, once-shiny, large egg-shaped machine sitting in a hoop atop a ball-wheeled metal tripod. Under the dirty surface was painted in faded red letters the word Asshole.

I yelped, “Asshole? What? You're not…”

“yes, your lordship, it is indeed I, Asshole, which is what you named me long ago after your Ukrainian friend.”

“Well, I'll be cornswaggled ha, that's great. Now you're a robot; tell me what's going on these days?”

 It is not long before the two try to go back in time to destroy the orange spray-tanned Form Destroyer from ever being born. The journey is funny for sure.  There are Dickian easter eggs, tips of the hat to members of the PKD community, but other SF writers are referenced, like the chapter called Time is the Simplest Thing. “Yes, sir! Time, as the great Clifford D. Simak wrote Time is the simplest thing; everything that has motion leaves a trail, a trace of its activity. And time, as you doubtless know, is defined by characteristic motion. Time passes it never stops. Ever since its initial expansion in the Big Bang, time has been going outwards as a part of the expanding universe of matter…”

This is a raw book; LRC admitted in the introduction that he did limited editing in part to keep the secret that it was happening. It adds to the unhinged nature. I think folks who know LRC, and will hear the book in his voice, will enjoy this the most. I had fun reading it and laughed several times; what more can you ask for in a one-sitting novella?

I am not even sure if this one is for sale, or was just a giveaway at PKD Fest, but I am very happy to have it on my shelf.