(C) BoingBoing This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Dead sci-fi author debugs reality in Ben H. Winters' "Benjamin" [1] ['Gareth Branwyn'] Date: 2026-03-10 Science fiction has long been drawn to the unsettling possibility that reality itself might be some other lifeform's poorly coded simulation. Philip K. Dick spent much of his career wandering that rabbit hole. Now a new graphic novel from Ben H. Winters and artist Leomacs takes that idea and turns it inward: what happens when a science-fiction author wakes up inside the kind of existential puzzle-hell he used to write about? Benjamin, published this week by Oni Press, begins with a scenario that feels like it was lifted directly from PKD's notebooks. Benjamin J. Carp, a cult sci-fi novelist who died decades ago after a career of amphetamine abuse, paranoia, and near-fame, suddenly wakes up in a fleabag Los Angeles motel in the year 2025. He remembers dying. And he's fairly certain that dead people don't usually reboot. So begins a very L.A. quest through Studio City, Venice Beach, and the wider paranoiac sprawl of Southern Cal as Carp tries to answer the most obvious question in the room: What exactly am I now? The premise leans knowingly into the tradition of writers like Dick and Pynchon. Carp spent his career inventing scenarios about clones, simulations, ghosts, and artificial consciousness. Now he has to consider the possibility that he might be one of these monstrosities. Winters treats the setup with a mixture of cosmic speculation and Hollyweird absurdism. If Winters' name rings a bell, he's the novelist behind The Last Policeman trilogy and Underground Airlines, both of which play with speculative ideas in grounded, procedural ways. He's also worked in television, including creating the CBS series Tracker. Benjamin is his first full-length graphic novel. Artist Leomacs, whose work readers may know from Basketful of Heads and EC Comics projects like Epitaphs from the Abyss, handles the visual side of this existential hallucination. The whole thing sounds like a thought experiment: imagine a cult sci-fi writer resurrected into a future he predicted badly, wandering Los Angeles trying to determine whether he's a man, a ghost, a clone, or something else entirely. We at Boing Boing are running the first ten pages of the series so you can judge the quality of the trip for yourself. Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission Used with permission [END] --- [1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/03/10/dead-sci-fi-author-debugs-reality-in-ben-h-winters-benjamin.html Published and (C) by BoingBoing Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/