Question reality in Benjamin #1

A cosmic quest is about to begin in the pages of Benjamin, a three-issue mini-series by Ben H. Winters and Leomacs, that will have you questioning reality at Oni Press.

More than just a writer, more than just a science-fiction icon, Benjamin J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Over the course of 44 novels and hundreds of short stories — including the counterculture classic The Man They Couldn’t Erase — Carp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers’ perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982.

Until 2025 . . . when Benjamin J. Carp awakens, alive, in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldn’t exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time, Carp pondered all of these scenarios through his fiction—and, now, as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles, he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself.

“I grew up reading a lot of science fiction, writers like Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, William Gibson, all that gorgeously weird stuff,” said Winters. “I’ve always favored sci-fi that digs into the basic existential quandary of life—like, what are we doing here? How did we get here, and where do we go? I thought how fun and funny it might be, if a writer who had spent a career trying to figure out what existence means, woke up decades after his own death. Unless he’s a clone. Or a robot. Or a dream.”

“The result is quite literally a journey of self-discovery, although you should note that the fact that the character and I have the same name is just a coincidence,” Winters insisted. “BENJAMIN is a bit of a mystery story, a bit of a caper, and—believe it or not—a story of friendship. And/or violent death.”