Bookwild - Sci-Fi, Philip K. Dick & the Birth of Pink Beam Press

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

This week, I talk with Keith Giles, David Agranoff, Brian Evenson, Gordon Bonnet, and Andrew Turck about Pink Beam Press, a new speculative-fiction imprint inspired by Philip K. Dick and the strange, reality-bending possibilities of science fiction. Listen to hear about: The origins of Pink Beam Press and how Philip K. Dick’s legendary “pink beam” experience helped inspire its identity and mission. Why speculative fiction is such a powerful way to explore reality, consciousness, identity, technology, privacy, and other big philosophical questions. How the authors behind Pink Beam’s novellas transform wildly different concepts—from digital replicas and mind reading to cyberpunk technology and artificial realities—into deeply human stories.  Why writing shorter doesn’t necessarily mean easier, and how the novella forces writers to crystallize their ideas while still leaving room for complex characters and themes. How research, personal experiences, literary influences, and unexpected discoveries during the writing process shape stories—and why sometimes the best fiction teaches the writer something, too. All the Bookwild Links:Check Out the Bookwild SubstackSubscribe to Bookwild on YouTubeGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramCheck Out Author Social Media Packages Follow Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mbaErin Ashley @bellametaphor

I am back today with Keith Giles, who's been on a few times, and he brings his friends, and he's just, he's publishing all kinds of stuff and now has a new imprint called Pink Beam that I have some questions about later too. But since we have a full house, can you guys go through and introduce yourself and then just kind of like briefly mentioned the novella that you wrote? All right. Who wants to start? you should go Keith okay I'll just I'll start yeah my name is Keith Charles as Kate said I'm very fortunate to have been on this podcast a couple times in the past I'm sort of the co-founder of Pink Beam Press which we'll talk a bit more specifics in a minute but I also published a my very first science fiction novella with Pink Beam as part of this little thing that we did

my novella is called hard video and it's kind of about what happens when we get addicted to our devices and what happens when someone decides to turn off the device and look around. Right. Yeah. You should call on somebody and then the next person. There you go. All right, David.

Well, then you go. Okay. I'm David Agranov. I am probably most known for being co-host of the Philip K. Dick, Dick. Head's podcast. But I'm a writer as well. And I wrote this novella for Pink Beam called SimCop and the Haunted City. And but I have a sequel to probably my biggest release, which was the last night to

to kill Nazis, a vampire novel set on the last night of World War II. The sequel, the next night to kill Nazis, the armies of Anubis. coming out in January and I just got my first copy of it the other day, so I'm still petting it and like being very excited about it. So, and I call on Brian Evanson. Happy birthday, Brian. Thank you so much. I'm Brian Evanson. I'm, uh, I teach at Cal Arts in, in, uh, Valencia, California. I'm a writer, uh, have published two dozen books of Wonder World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, some other things. Um, and, um, and, My novella is called Glitch.

I haven't received coffees of it yet, so I can't hold it up. It's on the way. I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. But it's a novel about someone who makes the decision to have himself replicated. There it is. Keith has it. There we go.

He had himself replicated digitally, and then things take a weird turn from there. I don't want to give too much away. Yeah. And I will call on Gordon so that. we can finish with Andrew, who's the best dressed of us all. I'm Gordon Bonnet. I am a speculative fiction author. I have 24 novels in print right now. And the novella that I published through Pink Beam is called Shadowboxing, and it is a psychological speculative fiction story about a high school student who finds that he can hear one of his classmates' thoughts and vice versa. and it's about issues of how you know what's real.

It's about issues of invasion of privacy. And it's pretty creepy. Yes. And Andrew will end with you. Okay. I'm Andrew Turk. My main back, right now I'm studying psychology. My main background is in small town newspaper journalism.

This is my first, this is my first novella. I have written a short story, but this is my first main. thing coming out. It's called Bubblegum circuit tower dash. The plot is someone has to climb a tower to stop a hurricane from coming in because the tower can release drones that see clouds into the atmosphere and can redirect the hurricane. And yeah, there's a lot more to it, basically. I keep calling it a conceptualization check for how the universe works because I can't think of a better way of saying it. And that's me.

Yeah. I love speculative fiction for the broad range of topics that you can talk about. And you guys really have quite a few going on even here. Keith, what was, what, what drew you to wanting to make an imprint that is kind of geared towards sci-fi and speculative fiction? Well, I mean, I guess very selfishly, I'm just a huge fan of science fiction and speculative fiction. Have been for a very long time. And initially, you know, as when I was young, that was my dream.

My initial dream was like, I'm going to be a science fiction author. I remember going into like the Walden books at the mall and going to the science fiction section, just imagining my book between Alan Dean Foster and Robert Heinlein, you know, and one day. one day that's going to happen. And I did become a writer, but I ended up becoming a nonfiction and wrote, gosh, I've been like 13 books, nonfiction, and just never had really done it. So personally, I wanted to do it just so I could, you know, maybe try my hand at it. But I also, like, you know, four years ago, I became co-owner of choir publishing. And I never wanted to own a publishing company. But now that I do, it's sort of like, well, hey, I can publish what I want.

So choir published a handful of science fiction novels under the choir imprint. And it's just really, it was really hard for those science fiction novels, sorry, David, to get traction with choir because the choir imprint is not known for that. And that's not what people expect from us, right? So I always felt like we needed a separate science fiction imprint. And then this Philip K. Dick Festival came along. David and Agarinoff and I started talking about some ideas about how to promote the festival. I think David came up with the idea of like, hey, we could publish these novellas and we could ask some of the people on the panel. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, I knew that you had written this novella and I wanted, as your friend, I wanted you to get it out. And so the initial idea was just that I was like, hey, we should release our novellas together for the festival. And then it just kept, we should ask so and so. Yeah. Yeah. And then you had all the ideas of doing Pink Beam and the way to do it. But it was, I will just take the role of pushing you because I wanted to read your novella more than anything. Well, thank you.

And so that was part of it. And then also I had an idea for a novella that I wanted to write. So that was part of it, too. You know. Those are good reasons. Yeah. Well, and one of the things that's funny for me is that I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm definitely a bookosphere writer.

I believe in promoting the book sphere beyond just my, my writing. And it's why I do a podcast. That's why I review everything that I read. And, you know, the last interview that we did for Pink Beam hilariously, I sold a copy of, I sold a bunch of copies of out-of-print books that we talked about. It more than I sold our books, but, you know, I have this problem with, of, you know, and part of it too is like, you know, I just, the book is fear to me, it's, I do believe the more you put into it, the more you get out of it, too. I agree. It is like, Keith, when you were saying, like, once you had, once you've done an imprint, you're like, oh, well, now I know how.

how to do it. Yeah, in the same way. It's like once you kind of have a certain skill where you kind of break into something and then you see the usefulness of it, you're like, oh, okay, this is like something I can play around with. Yeah. Where did the name come from? Obviously, as a massive pink fan, I love it. But I'm assuming you didn't name it that just to come on this podcast. Right. Well, yeah, so if you're a, pardon me, if you're a dickhead, which it means you like, you're a fan of Philip K. Dick, the science fiction office. other, you know that you would probably pick up the reference. So the author, Philip Haydick, had a mystical experience. And part of that, and this mystical experience was something that

really for the rest of his life, he was obsessed with understanding and making sense of it. He wrote about it in his various forms and probably the last, what, four or five novels that he wrote in some form or fashion. And he wrote this like million word thing called the exegesis, which was nonfiction of his own just personal journals trying to again make sense of it. So what happened was, and I'm shortening this for you, he believed that a woman knocked on the door delivering some medication because he had had a root canal or something. And when he opened the door, she was wearing one of those fish necklaces, those Icthus, kind of Christian fish necklaces, which she claims he'd never seen before.

And that a laser beam, a pink laser beam from the sky. hit and reflected off that pendant and hit him between the eyes and imparted some kind of information to him which he would he felt like whether that was god or an alien he again he that's why he spent so much time trying to figure it out what was this where did it come from and there are some genuinely weird strange things that happened to him after that so it's difficult to to write it off as just you know he had a mild stroke or something um so anyway I just thought it was just a great. I love the idea of the pink bean.

And I think to be honest, it also, I'm going to say this part, because this part, this part's significant. I'm, again, I mentioned I'm a huge fan of science fiction, and I really love vintage sci-fi stuff, and I really love Daw. Science fiction, Daw was a publisher, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, and they did something I thought was genius from a marketing standpoint. So there you go. There's them right there. So what they did with their thought was genius was every single one of their books had a yellow spine, bright yellow spine with red type. And their books were numbered, right? So it was dog number 175 was whatever.

And I just thought that was genius, right? They're doing so many smart things about marketing and branding their books and it stood out. And so I thought if we called it pink beam, it would give us an excuse to have all of our spines be pink. And we also printed in that small kind of mass market paperback format. So we're, you know, tip of the hat to DAW publishing. We think they were on to something. And we're trying to bring that vibe back. Go ahead, David.

Well, a couple things. Da is DA because the founder of Daub publishing was Don A. Wollheim. And Don A. Wollheim also was Phil's first editor. So Philip K. is for Senator. So there's another connection. There you go. I didn't know that. Yeah. And his daughter who still runs Daugh, Betsy

Wilhelm, will be on the PKD hangout for our return after the PKD fast. Look at that. Look at that. So we will be connecting to DA on that. But the other thing too is that so I did a book with choir the year before called

Great America and Dead World. And it was funny because I kept referring to it to Keith as pink beam fiction. You're planning the seed. Yeah, yeah. I kept saying I was saying that we should really start defining

fiction influenced by PKD as pink beam fiction. And the idea being that we're kind of riding that pink beam wave of like trying to get that wavelength that

because for those of us who really like Philip K. Dick, one of the reasons we like him is that he operates on a certain wavelength that is between genius and insanity and and and riding and like one of the things too like one of the reasons for example that brian evansson was one of my first ideas for a guest of honor for a california fest is because he's been i believe riding the pink wave pink bean wave since probably since you read philip k dick right because he he gets into your head and and and and he's such an influential writer and you just once you once you've ridden that beam as a reader it's very easy to like want to ride that

beam as a writer right and so like a lot of um and so with great america for very specific reasons like i just i remember saying that to keith like even before i wrote great america when i I was pitching the idea that Keith that I wanted to write it. Like a lot of it was like, this is going to be the most pink bean shit ever. You know? And then, you know, so I think, you know, we've been talking about it for a long time. But, and Keith is the person to do it because I feel like part of Keith's superpower in this, too,

is that Keith lived in Orange County for a long time. and, you know, and close to where it all happened. And, you know, we both have special connections. I was actually born March 19th, 1974. And that was exactly March 18th through the 20th is when he claimed the pink beam was happening. So that's a flex, I know. That's it. That's just something there.

Yeah. Well, Phil's White. Phil's wife at the time, Tessa, when I told her that I was born at that time, she said, oh, so you were born in the sign of Valus. And, like, as a joke, but, but it's kind of true. And I, one of the reasons why I feel like kind of spiritually connected to Phil is that weird synchronicity of it. Yeah. I haven't seen birthday as Eminem.

That's, like, the only thing I can claim. That's pretty cool. You know, it's pretty cool. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. So it sounds like, obviously, there's something about sci-fine speculative fiction that all of you enjoy as readers, but also as writers. Is there something that draws you?

I mean, it sounds like it's kind of being on the same wavelength, but is there something about the genre that you really love? So we should hear from Brian, Andrew, and Gordon now. Yeah. Absolutely. I was drawn to Speculative Fiction since I was a kid. One of my first reading experiences that really stuck, and that I still remember, is reading Madeline Langell's A Rinkle in Time. And I always loved the way with speculative fiction,

it's set more or less in the real world, but you're changing the rules. and that rule bending has always fascinated me because I've always been interested in how people make sense of their own reality. You look around and we're only, you know, the neurosciences, we're only experiencing a very small piece of what we are sitting in right now. Yes. And we all make sense of it a slightly different way. And so if I were to see something or experience something that was outside of my usual worldview, how would I make sense of it? would I be, you know, how would I know if I was hallucinating? How would I know if it was real? And that sort of thing is always absolutely fascinating. It's kind of the crypto theme of all

of my novels. It always works its way in somehow. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I guess for me, I grew up with, I grew up with my mom reading me science fiction, fantasy novels. Like, for example, for example, she read me a wrinkle in time. We've actually, actually read quite a few Madeline Langla books. She read me Lord of the Rings. She read me, she read me Harry Potter having all of the different voices for different characters, which was really funny when you're actually, because when I was a kid, that makes sense when you're 10. She continued that till I was 18. Because we'd already started it. And I know nowadays there's a lot of problems with Harry Potter. But back then, we didn't know about any of that.

We didn't know. We didn't know how she felt. And we also grew up watching a lot of, my mom watched a lot of science fiction shows. And so I kind of, I kind of followed it in that direction. And you'll notice how I talk, I really have to be careful on, I really have to be careful on being scatterbrain because I take things from here and here and here. And science fiction is the best way to consolidate all of these weird thoughts into one, into one stream with a lot of into one narrative with a lot of weird bright colors you can put a lot of fun colors into science fiction for example this is named pink beam and so it has a nice science fiction just has a lot of cool colors to it and so does so does fantasy i don't know if any of that makes sense um yeah but actually yeah for example cinematically like you're making anything like blade runner oh yeah like the tech coloring that we see

Yeah, and that's, that's, I'll be honest, that's one of the main things that I wrote a cyberpunk novella. That's one of the main things that draws me towards cyberpunk is you get to use a lot of bright colors and splashy things and rain and have fun with that. While also going through whatever strange idea you happen to have that is, that is brought into the future. For example, like the book I just showed, Electric Forest, I mean, you don't get to use that much indigo very often. I know this is, This sounds very surface level, but the colors you have in a book bleeds into the writing of how you, how you put a book together. And there's, there's Philip K. Dick, you associate Philip K. Dick with like, you know, kind of bright colors. And he's like, I think it's, I think it's relevant that he saw a pink beam, if that makes sense. a bright. As I said, a lot of things I say, I have a lot of trouble putting things in and now I got onto this branch in colors and I'm having trouble dragging it back to the main plot.

It was interesting that you brought, that you lifted up Electric Forest because I literally just read that this summer. It's a good one. It's a very good one. Yeah, she's a great writer. That was my first Tanneth. Oh, sorry. Yeah.

What did you say? That was my first Tanneth Lee, believe it or not. Yeah. That was a mistake. It's mine, too. It's a, I, I got to hearing about it because, oh gosh, another, okay, I don't want to bring up two writers who have problems. I read a lot of, I read Neil Gaiman and then I learned, oh, crap. And so then this, this, it kind of branched into Tanith Lee.

So I've been looking more into Taneth Lee. And I've heard she writes really good stuff. So I actually just started it with Electric Forest. Nice. Cool. So, oh, go ahead. No, no, Brian. Go ahead.

Yeah, go. You're good. You're good. Okay. No, I was just going to say, I mean, I like a lot of people here, it's like I, as a kid, I was reading a lot of fantasy and science fiction. There's things like Andre Norton, Madeline Langel, to some degree, there's Lou Gehne. And then when I kind of would just go to the library and just pick things off the shelf and those Da editions or something I really, you know, remember really vividly.

It's like I knew that if I picked one of those, it would probably be at least in the range of something I would like. And then, you know, I think when I got to be like 14 or 15, I decided I was like, I was going to be serious and so kind of stopped reading a lot of that stuff and didn't read it for a while until I was in my 20s and kind of went back to it. And then it wasn't really until even maybe a decade after that, but I came across Philip K. Dick. And I came across him because I was reading Jonathan Latham's book, Gone with Occasional Music, which is a book I love.

And I think one of the blurbs mentioned Philip K. Dick, and I'd heard about him a lot and thought about him. And so it just made me think, okay, I should go look at this writer. started reading him and just really got into him, so read everything very, very quickly. And I think, you know, as David said, it's like, I feel like my own work has real sympathy with what he does, partly because it's so much of the work is about the way in which reality is contingent or things kind of shift or change. That's, that's for me, one of the things that's really exciting about speculative fiction in general is, is that, you know, the speculation

can be connected to the real world in a way that's intriguing, but also it can be something that makes you really rethink the way the real world works entirely. Yeah. And I'll second what he just said. Sorry, I was, that's a, yeah. I don't want my entire thing to just be about me talking about colors. You're like, can I piggyback on that?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is the, I like the color stuff. It's really cool, too, Brian, that you, just what's that oh do we lose you David we can't hear oh yeah we lost him he's oh I'm sorry I'm muted I'm sorry about that it's cool um Brian that you found PKD through Jonathan Letham because letham is just a glorious dickhead um in many ways and and I think he would be really excited to learn that that was part of your path yeah yeah I think he knows that I've talked a lot with him about just how much that

God what occasional music meant to me, but also about Philip K. Dick. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting the way in which, I mean, that's one of the great things about reading communities is just the way in which reading a writer leads to another writer. And, you know, and so I, for me,

that's my whole reading path has been just really eccentric where I kind of move in one direction. And then something kind of, you know, someone else's work keys me to something and kind of brings me, you know, to someone else. Yeah. You guys kind of have all mentioned how you can, you can kind of observe reality in a different way by changing reality is kind of like somewhat of a theme. And I think the other thing is like when you mentioned Stephen Graham Jones earlier, I loved Buffalo Hunter Hunter so

much because it uses a vampire as such a great abstract to talk about social issues that some people may never like think about if they didn't read it in fiction. So that's something I really have enjoyed lately myself with kind of both speculative, sci-fi and horror. But what do you guys kind of or how did you approach with your books being able to kind of abstract some stuff? about life or mortality or our reality essentially. Well, one thing that was really interesting, and I think I did a kind of terrible job selling SimCop the last time we did an interview. But what, yeah, so I got a second chance here.

Playing with reality was very much like what I wanted to do with this one. And I joked that it was influenced by the fact that I watched lethal weapon. And I was like, well, there's a cosmic core version of this story. And if you recall with lethal weapon, part of the whole thing is that he's a suicidal cop, right? And so I had this idea of, well, what if the reason he was suicidal is because he found out he was a robot, right? That he found out basically he was a robocop. And but really what I wanted to do, it became like a much larger thing, like once I started writing. because the thing that was horrifying to me was this idea that your entire reality could be boiled down to programming and that everything that you know.

And so a lot of what this character is going through is discovering that the universe may be, that the entire cosmos may be just something constructed to make him believe. And then once he kind of goes through this journey, then he starts to question everything about like the whole universe and where it all comes from. And what's funny is that because I started this idea because I told Keith I wanted to write a novella, right? And then I actually ended up outlining eight novellas like, yeah, that start with this one. and I probably will never write them, to be honest with you. But I outline them because I have fun. I have like 10,000 outlines I will never write. You're in James Patterson.

Yeah, me, well, yeah, I also don't have an army of writers I can hire to write books for me. But the thing about it is is that I like to outline. I really enjoy that process. And the books that I end up writing are the ones that don't go away after I write the outline. that continue to percolate with me. And sometimes it'll be years later that I'm like, now's the time that I have to write. Or now is when my everything works together.

And what was funny is that like seeing this, and I guess your question is like how are we dealing with or, you know, it became this thing of like it's funny. It started with this funny prompt of me watching this, you know, 80s action movie. And then. But, you know, some of the greatest novels started that way.

I Am Legend started because Richard Matheson was watching Dracula and said, well, if one of these guys is scary, what if what if the whole world was vampires, right? And then he wrote I am legend. So I don't, if it's good enough for Richard Matheson to get a novel that way, it's, I'm okay with it. But, but, you know, this whole thing of being able to, you know, just with one. character, like having their entire universe, basically crushed. It really sets up a situation where you can examine, like, all the things we take for granted and we think our reality. And I had a lot of fun with this novella because, you know, after six years of immersed,

six or seven years of immersing myself in PKD, like, I want to challenge myself. I know he's the master, right? but I want to challenge myself to be like, you know, can I, can I go a step further having learned from him? And I'm not saying I did a better job, but I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to expand these things. Yeah. And you can definitely see there's definitely, I'm a dickhead and you can definitely see that in SimCop. There's parts in the second half of it where I'm sure people could point to and go like, oh, Martian Time Slip.

Oh, time out of joint. Like, you know. And I'm cool with that because I wear my influences on my sleeve. And, you know, you mentioned Stephen Graham Jones. He's an author who does that too. And, you know, Stephen had a, we had them on to cover UBIC on Dickheads. And one of the most hilarious things I had talking about PKK with Stephen Graham Jones is one time he told me, like, what an influence radio for.

Albumuth, the PKD novel was on him because he was like, oh, he did this and he did that. And he was so bold to like change up the narrative, you know, from second person to first person. And I was like, well, you know that was a draft. And he never edited it. It was never edited. And Stephen was like, what? And I'm like, yeah, he might not have kept any of that stuff. It's just it was never edited.

And then, and he was like, whoa, that was such an influence. me and I'm like, well, the fact that he wasn't edited, you're seeing a clean draft of like just what his brain did. And actually, that's a gift. Yeah. You know, in my opinion. Yeah. I think it's challenging.

I've only published one. So the rest of the panel here, probably can answer this much more in depth. But I think there's a challenge. Like I feel like when you're a writer, when you're writing fiction, obviously as an author, there are things you want to say. You have a perspective. You have a, you know, the challenges, I think, you know, if you lead with that too often, it becomes really preachy and really obvious and clunky. Like, oh, this, you know, I'm going to, you know, teach you about whatever, you know, climate change, whatever. And versus just sort of like having a really great idea for a story, like a germ of an idea for a story and writing it.

And that's what I discovered is as I was writing the story and the characters, those things came out, those things that I wanted to say. emerged naturally in the telling of the story. And some things I didn't even intend in the beginning sort of surprised me like, oh, actually, yeah, these characters would also be concerned about this, or this question would come up, or this would challenge them, right? And I think, at least for me,

I mean, I think when I'm reading, as a reader, I really appreciate reading books that make me think and they do challenge me. And I think maybe one of the ways to do that is, is you have, maybe you have characters where two characters have two different opinions of something. So it's not one person who knows everything telling you, you know, preaching to you. But you maybe have two characters that are debating it. And they don't resolve the debate necessarily.

So the reader kind of has to decide for themselves what they think about some of these things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the ambiguity can be just as useful. Exactly. Yeah. I love it when those moments happen where the story surprises you. I've had that happen a couple of times.

One of my novels, a character that was supposed to be kind of this background character basically took over. And to me, that's when it's like that's when the magic happens. It's like when that happens, something's going very right with the story. And for shadow boxing, I drew on my background. I've spent 32 years as a classroom high school biology teacher. And so I drew on my experience with teenagers. And during, for me, I'm always interested in characters. So it's for the books I've written, the characters always seem to come first almost sometimes before the story.

It's like I meet these characters and then have to decide why are they introducing themselves to make. Yeah. And, you know, during your teenage years, you're developing your sense of personality. You're developing your sense of identity. And to me, having something interfere with that was just a really poignant idea. So looking at someone who is just at that stage where they're figuring themselves out, and all of a sudden there's just this enormous impediment because somebody else is now hearing every thought you have. Yeah.

And how destabilizing would that be? I mean, that would be horrible for a mature adult, but for a teenager, that would just be impossible. And so watching my character of Zach Davidson going through this and trying to figure out, how do I even make sense of this was really, it was a very interesting, he was a very interesting character to get to know. I'll put it that way. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I got absorbed in this and I forgot what's the question. Well, yours is very abstract. Like you kind of talked about how you, what did you say? conceptualized the whole universe. Okay. So, so this whole story basically has, there is, I've been working on

this basically on and off for two years. It was, it was, I make sense of things by writing a story about it in a way. If I have something that I'm working on, I make sense of it by writing a story. And actually in the process of writing a book, which will one day,

be done. I kind of this story is my way of making sense of because I had a whole belief system that kind of collapsed a couple of years ago not a couple years ago back in

2019 and so this was kind of my way of making sense with it of it with hurricanes, lasers and fun splashy colors. I keep going back to colors. I guess that's my thing today.

Yeah. But the, the, uh, with cyberpunk, it was my way of, actually, I forget what, what was the question? I'm going to answer a completely different question. You're kind of answering it. Yeah, truly. But yeah, like, like abstracting it into something else to, to explore something. You can't really, well, you can.

Uh, I take that back. But sci-fi seemed to be the best way to address. address, I'll just go through some of the concepts I address. I go through quantum mechanics. I go through Buddhist rainbow bodies. I go through lasers. I studied. There was a book on electrical engineering that I studied because I made the mistake of making my main character an electrical engineer. So I actually had to learn how that worked. So fortunately, there was a book that actually really helped and I had to figure out kind of how some of the equations worked. And then I, As a side note, he also needed to learn some mechanical engineering.

So I also went through a book regarding mechanical engineering. There are very few genres that could put all of these together in a way where the entire thing functions as an action sequence. Right. But it was against the antagonist is a building. That's right. Yes, I'll say that right now. I'll say it might change later. in the story, but I won't, I won't go into detail.

But science fiction, I find, is the way where you can, best is the wrong word, because you can do a lot of crazy things with a lot of other genres. But I'll say, like, tentatively is the most clear way to string together a lot of interesting ideas into a narrative structure. and someone was talking about characters. I actually have in my, as I as I do things throughout the day, I come up with little like characters in my head that just kind of develop in the background. And then in stories, they kind of suddenly show up like in high school I had actually,

this is a terrible example. I'll skip that example. Should I say the terrible example? I was I was studying history and I had, I had this little idea of, because I saw something in either Albertsons, because I lived in North Dakota or something like that. And then we were studying history and is like, it would be kind of interesting to have a character who was an Auschwitzguard who wanted to be employee of the month. But like just just kind of weird, like just just sometimes awful ideas. Sometimes, uh, sometimes good ideas.

There are several, there are a couple characters in this one that I, never mind. I'll throw that out. Never mind. I can't say that one. But because that gives something away. Yeah, don't give it away. Forget I ever said anything. I will say that, Andrew, I just love the way your brain works. And it's a miracle to me that you crammed so many just incredible ideas and the depth of research and things that I know you did that you did for this book. And you cramped it into this little novella. It's a miracle this book isn't 500 pages. You know what I mean? But you did a wonderful job of condescending.

it and making it work in the story. It didn't feel bloated or anything at all like that. It was really, it's so fast. It's such a kinetic story. And yeah, I really appreciate it. I wish I could write the way you do. I'll check yours out. Hey, I've read some of your books. They're pretty good. Yeah, but not my fiction. But for example, with like idea, for example, with with a lot of things I found to be really helpful. This is a side note with, for example, I have, I have with quantum mechanics, I had to actually figure out how to explain quantum mechanics in the, in the, in the context of a children's game. And so in order to, in order to do that, I had to, I read like three books on quantum mechanics because I had, I had no, I, when I say this took me two years, I mean, it took me two

years. But I read three books just to know what the heck quantum mechanics was. And so I finally got, I finally got something where I could explain it really simply. And that is another thing that science fiction allows you to do in a way is incorporate just a lot of weird things together. And I said that twice already. So we'll call it good for that answer. It makes sense. So for, for me, I mean, one of the things that draws me to science fiction is that I feel like it's, it's very open in terms of how you can approach things. It's a great, there's a reason that it's referred to as speculative fiction. It's like it allows you to speculate in a way that can be really exciting and interesting.

And then for me, I feel like the novella is the most philosophical of genres in terms of it's a great place in which you can kind of explore ideas and people aren't going to get too bored. with it, but you also have enough space that you can do that. And you're doing it in an embodied way in terms of, you know, you're kind of, if you have an interest or you have something you're going into, it's like as soon as you start to have characters, then it ends up, you know, moving it from being a kind of dry theoretical thing to being a kind of just living exploration of what these ideas are. And so when often with my work and with this novella in particular,

When I start, I just have kind of a couple of things I'm interested in that I'm intrigued about exploring. I don't tend to outline too thoroughly. I can outline a little bit, but if I did what David did, I think I would just never write any of those books. And so there's something for me about the exploration of it. It's like I have an interest in artificial intelligence or I have an interest in thinking about what it means to, you know, if you're still human, even if you don't have a physical body. And then once I have those things and I have characters and I have a kind of world that starts to develop around it, then that's where the exploration comes. And I don't usually know exactly where it's going to go. I know I have opinions on these things.

But I also am, you know, I think, as Gordon said, it's like once the characters are there, they kind of have the mind of their own and they're going to take you in directions that you don't know necessarily you're going to go. Well, Brian, I have a question for you as far as, because like your short story, I consider Brian to be one of the best working short story writers. And of course, the airblower is going right next to my window right as I start talking. But I think you're one of the one of the best science, best short story writers like working on the planet right now. And your collection like sleep, sleep tight, good night. I'm going to say, good night, sleep tight. It's very obviously influenced by the fact that you were telling a lot of stories to your young son at the time. At least it seems to me.

And one of the things I love is that you get in these cycles where I can tell with your short stories where there's ideas you're trying to work one after another. And, you know, so I feel like is Glitch represent something that we're going to start seeing some cycles on? Yeah, it does. So I have another story I wrote actually right after Glitch that has some of the similar ideas in it. I mean, it's this kind of struggle in terms of figuring out what it means to be human, which is something I talk about a lot and that I'm always intrigued by. And then also thinking about, you know, machine intelligence or, you know, what it means to kind of not have a physical body. So yeah, I mean, I feel like the way I think about writing fiction, and it may be the reason I write short stories much more often than novels, you know, because Andrew says it's like if you're writing a novel, sometimes you're, you know, you research a lot, even for a novella you do. But I kind of am interested in an idea and I kind of take a run at it.

And then I feel like the next story is often like taking the idea and turning it so you see another aspect or facet of it. And then hopefully you're doing something that feels different enough, but also you're getting somewhere more interesting for you. So that for me is the interesting thing is it's like I want to write work that teaches me something about my understanding of the world, but also that will hopefully linger with readers once you're done. Yeah. So, Brian, I love the way you phrased that, that you're writing these books to teach yourself something so that you could learn something.

That's different than writing a book to teach somebody else something. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is, I do a lot of work that gets called horror or literary horror. And I think that the thing that people don't understand, is that if you're writing horror, it's not that you're trying to scare people. It's that you're trying to scare yourself. You have to be kind of vulnerable there. It's not that you're this person who's like with the acts who's reaching out to the reader.

It's that you're kind of, you know, it has to affect you in the same way as it does them or it doesn't work. Right. Yeah, well, this leads well into my other question. So I edit a lot for social media. and sometimes we'll have clients that are like, I just need like a 20 second reel. Like it just has to be 20 seconds. So that should be really cheap, right? Like that's less work.

Often no, it's actually a lot harder to condense everything you want to say about something into a shorter form. But like you guys are starting to touch on, it can make it more poignant and maybe even more accessible. So for those of you who have written like different variations, and lengths of stories, what do you enjoy about the novella or what is also difficult about the novella? I was just smiling when you were talking because I entered and actually got into

two queer flash fiction, science fiction, anthologies. And for me, the hardest thing I could write the story, I got to get the idea of the story and wrote the story in a couple of hours and then whittling it down to 300 words took me weeks. Yes, I bet.

Trying to figure out what words can I cut and still not spoil the whole idea. And it worked twice at least because I got into the anthologies. But it was really hard. I mean, because my most comfortable place is a novelist. I mean, I've written mostly novels. And so the shorter form, I find that it almost has, you have to crystallize the idea. You've got to bring them together in such a way that you're telling a whole story and every word absolutely has to count. And so, I mean, novella, you have a little bit more room to play with.

But my hat is off to people who can do short stories and flash really effectively because it's hard. It being shorter doesn't make it easier. No. What's the quote? There's a famous quote that says I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have It's a, it's a, yeah, it's Pascal, Blaise Pascal, I said, yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I wanted to write, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And yeah, and that's, you know, for me, it's like, I like, I like, I like, but, but so many novels feel to me like they could be edited more. I agree. I know.

And really, there's a lot of work doing that. And sometimes, I mean, what you end up with is a novella is, you know, has, the best novellas have a lot of the qualities of a good novel. But they're, you know, as Gordon says, they're very concise. You know, you're taking out a lot of the fat. People, all, every word potentially has to matter, you know, partly because people can read it in one sitting. So they can remember the beginning by the time they reach the end with the novel. It's not, you know, I think people. give you a little more leeway to kind of be furry or fuzzy or something.

Yeah. Probably the nicest compliment I ever got from an editor, Christoph from Clash, when I turned in the last night to kill Nazis, he said, he told me, he's like, wow, you never waste a word. And like, that was like one of the greatest compliments because like to me, I try to keep things moving. And I have a novel Ring of Fire that I feel like in most author's hands, would be like an 800 pager because it has like 9 million characters in the end of the world

and all this stuff. And I'm very proud of the fact that I got that one at 320, you know. And it is, I think what Gordon's saying about, you know, writing these short pieces, it can be really challenging. And I know for me, I wrote SimCop right after writing the last night to Kill Nazi sequel. And I had to do so much research for. for writing a novel that took place in 1945 to do with World War II. And there was so much research involved in how U-Boats work,

you know, what highways were like in Egypt, you know, maps of Cairo, like all this stuff that when I wrote SimCop, I was like, hell yeah, I get to make everything up. Exactly. I just make all this shit up. And that was very exciting for me. as a part of it, you know. Yeah.

I was going to say, I was just going to say talking about this whole idea about writing shorter things. So I was a creative writing major in college. And my instructor, well, my fiction instructor and film screenwriting instructor was a guy named Kent Anderson, which most people don't know who he is. He wrote a fantastic book called Sympathy for the Devil and a follow-up called Night Dogs. Just he's a really great writer. And but he had, I just remember this exercise he had us do in the class. So he had us all write a four page scene.

And so we, you know, we had to write the scene, four pages. We brought it in. And it was a workshop class. We would read them to each other. And so then after we did that, he said, okay, I want you to go home and turn that four pages into two pages. Don't, you can't take any of the action out. You can't take any of the kind of dialogue. It has to be the same.

Like the same thing has to happen in two pages. that you wrote in four. And I'm thinking, he's insane. We can't do that. That's crazy. But I went home and I did it. And I turned four pages into two. And I realized, oh, man, I'm cutting out all this crap, all this fat, all this stuff I didn't have to ramble on about.

And wow, it was great. So we brought in our two pagers. We read our two pages. We workshopped and was great. And he said, okay, final assignment. Go back and turn that into one page. And the same thing, I thought, no way. But we did it.

And I did it on my scene. And that was the best scene I think I've ever written up to that point in my life. And it was going to just taught me like, wow, you know, maybe in some ways great writing is writing less. It's trimming back. It's learning how to condense what you're doing instead of trying to show off, you know, with your descriptors and metaphors and all that. One of the best writing workshops I ever went to was at Stoker Khan in 2005. I went to a workshop by David Morel who wrote First Blood. Yeah.

And one of the things he said in there was, yeah, I always try to write short chapters because I know my readers are sitting there thinking, well, I guess I got time for one more. They flip ahead and see how long a chapter is. And he's like, I'm always, he's like, if I can get them to just say, okay, I'm going to read one more. I'm going to read one more. And then it's funny because it was. was one of the first times I had, I was in a workshop where the person was thinking about the psychology of reading, right? And I thought that was really informative because like I started

to think about and I don't, you're writing for yourself, but when you're editing, that's when you can think about the reader. So the way I always do it and the way I write is that I always warm up on yesterday's work. So whatever I wrote yesterday, I edit to warm up. And that's the first time I start to think about. And I won't ever make a decision entirely for the reader. But if I think to myself at that time, like, something like, oh, okay, well, this will hook, this could hook the reader.

This could, you know, do that. I do think that that's, that's a valid thing. especially if you're writing more commercial books. Like, right. And I wrote, you know, next night to kill Nazis differently than I wrote SimCop. Because SimCop, I just, I was like, I want to write the weird fucked up sci-fi novel, a novella that I've wanted to. And next night, I'm writing a sequel and I have expectations for the readers from the first book

and so on and so forth. So, you know, those can be different. And I would imagine, too, if you're. like, you know, most writers, like, you know, you have to, you're going to eventually balance those things when you're doing it. I, one of the things I appreciate you about Brian as a writer, too, is like, you know, I know he's, he's never thinking about the comfort of his readers. That would be my guess. Yeah. I don't think so. And I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, I feel like at a certain point, like, and I'm gushing a lot on Brian.

He's here. It's his birthday and I'm doing that for him. Yeah, there you know. But, you know, Brian wrote a novel immobility that Keith and I are really big fans of. Love that. And one of the things about immobility is that just from the concept alone that this guy who's like a pack mule, like basically carrying people across the apocalypse, like, I knew what I was getting into when I strapped into that book, right?

That it was going to be a harsh thing and this character was going to be going through some harsh stuff. And then there's this weird, scientific, experimental stuff that's going on to. And there's some THX-1138 shit in there. And I'm on for the journey, right? But at the same time, like, and this is one of the things that science fiction can do, right? is put you into these like just crazy weird scenarios. And I think one of the neat things about, and what Brian said about the novella is,

is that, you know, you really do get this, you have this ability where it can be read in one, one chunk when you can sit down. And I do recommend that people like sit down with enough time to, to read a novella, you know? You, you do you boo on reading. But like, for me, like, if I'm going to read a novella, I like to, I set aside time like this evening. I'm watching this,

you know, or I'm reading this. And I think that's one of those special things about it as a form. Yeah. I guess, I guess with the, with this, I kind of come to it from a, from a different perspective, because I've written, because I worked as a journalist for eight years. So that's a lot of articles, a lot of, oddly enough, only the third time I've ever been interviewed. I've interviewed a bunch of people. It's a lot stranger being on the other on the other end of being interviewed. That's actually, that's part of the reason why when I interviewed, I was always very charitable. Because I knew if I were the one being interviewed, I would have a lot of difficulty. But you see I asked Brian questions too.

I couldn't help it. Yeah. I can't help it. Yeah. So one of the one of the things I've learned in the process of writing articles is to, there's always you can always go deeper to a real to something really interesting at the core of an article if that makes sense um for example i'll just i'll just do this example really quickly uh i work near a reservation and the crow tribe was was opening up a a uh an apartment complex for

for homeless veterans so to house 15 veterans and uh the tribal the tribal officials they did a lot for it They were, they, and you could very easily write a thing where you would talk to the, do a surface level article where like you talk to the officials and everything who were, who were involved in its opening. You get the story of the, one of the people had injured his hand in combat or I forget if it was his hand or it's been about it. That was back in 2015. Anyway, but the, the further you got into the story, the more you realize that, there was someone who is the front desk person for the pro-tribal housing authority who uh during the election this isn't this isn't the best thing i i wouldn't suggest uh but whenever a new whenever a new tribal administration comes in they take a lot of the people off of the the top from the executive things and put their people in uh that isn't what i would suggest but um

but in the process she said the this front desk person and suddenly found herself as, because the U.S. military was building the complex, she suddenly, as part of a training exercise, she found herself as the main point of contact between the Crow tribe and the U.S. military. And just as someone who was just supposed to greet people when they came through the door. And she somehow managed to make it work. She figured out how to coordinate between the U.S. military and the Crow tribe to get this main thing together. together and she also managed to fill in the executive director and then the executive director

after that in order to get this complex done. And that was just a, that to me was just a much more interesting way of telling the story than just talking to officials who were involved in it. Because with the story, as you, as you write it, you find something kind of cool at the center that usually you didn't notice when you were beginning to write it. And there are, there are aspects of every, like, mind you, this is the, this is the second thing I've published, but I write a lot of little stories. Well, actually, now that I think about it, actually, now that I think about it, I did this with a lot of journalistic pieces. So I'll go, I'll go more into the journalistic pieces.

You kind of find if you're willing to look at different angles and kind of easier way through, it's also the same with photography. I've taken a lot of photos. You can find just the right lighting. You can find just the right angle. The difference between a, you know, an okay shot and a shot that will win a Pulitzer is probably a couple degrees. Right. And there, where was I going with this? And also just knowing that every person has an interesting story.

One of my favorite stories I wrote was someone who went to American Idol insane for 30 seconds and got kicked off the stage. But she was so excited about doing this that that was just like it was just infectious. And it was just such a fun article to write basically about someone who just went on stage and got kicked off after 30 seconds. That was honestly one of my favorite articles I've ever written. And then also, for example, sports articles. Oh, this will be my last thing. I'm rambling. But sports articles, when one of the things I covered was, one of the things I covered

was because my, my boss covered mostly the guy's sports. I covered the women's sports except for the college. I covered boys and girls basketball. But, well, men's and women's in this case because it was college. but with volleyball oh gosh there was a grammatical anyway with volleyball

I knew like nothing about volleyball going in but the coach did an interesting thing where I'd get to talk where she'd come out with a couple players and I'd talk to so I could bounce off different perspectives on everything and I could learn all the little like strategies they were using in

volleyball and so you could make the articles a lot more interesting and that was one of the things I leaned into even in sports articles was figuring out particular amounts of specificity and figuring out where where there were interesting i tried to do that with pretty much every article i wrote but like finding out interesting little things like yeah i mean even in murd even in in in situations where there was a murder figuring out in the in the uh court documents where there was some like humanity in it or something like that it was it's just uh it's all about looking at particular

angles looking at unique, unique things and just finding the best way through it, if that makes sense. Even if you're the one creating all of that, finding unique angles, even if you're the one creating all of the scenarios. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, I feel like we could probably talk forever about all of these concepts. But I think everyone probably has a good gist of the kind of like speculative fiction they can expect from these stories. Where is the best place for people to kind of follow you guys and stay up to date with what you're working on? I'll jump in. So, well, you can find Pink Beam Press at Pinkbeampress.com, all of our books, all the novellas. We have seven novellas that I'll publish together. And they were available anywhere

you buy books. So wherever you buy your books, you can get them there. And of course, we'll be at the, most of us here will be at the Philpatic Festival, August 20th to the 23rd in Cal State, Fullerton, in Southern California. It's free. So if you're there, if you're in the area, please drop by. We'd love to see you there. And you can follow me at keepchaols.com and I'm on the socials and all that. Yeah. Do you want to just generally keep it there? Does anyone else want to share. Well, I barely use social media. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have been here. Yeah. No, I, um, yeah, I'm David Agronoff and, um, uh, people can if I do, uh, the Dickheads podcast and I have my personal podcast called Postcards from a Dying World, um, where I talk about

these things and I'm doing a series on the science fiction, Hall of Fame slowly, but surely every story in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, both Keith and Brian have been on it before. And but Dickheads, we do, every Tuesday night, the PKD scholars do a live hangout on Zoom, six o'clock Pacific time to eight o'clock. And the first hour is almost always a guest, although we're taking off until September. But when we come back in September, we have three. three great episodes in a row. So I'm really excited about that,

including Betsy Wollheim, who currently runs Daught, who is the big inspiration for Pink Beam on this. And then, so we do that every Tuesday. And I would recommend that people, if you're free on a Tuesday night, the guests, it's almost like a free science fiction class every week. We've had Ken Liu. We've had,

we've had a bunch of really big name authors like that have come on Ray Naylor like everybody Sarah Langan from this series and I don't I haven't had Brian on because I knew I was saving him for PKD Fest but eventually he also came on Global Times Flip when we did our whole day

of it but but the thing about the the PKD hangouts is that if you're enjoying this conversation you can be a part of these conversations one of the things about these interviews I run the interviews but anybody can raise their hand at any point and ask a question. And so, and then the last hour, we usually just talk about whatever new things. You know, we spent 30 minutes talking about Waymo's last night.

So, you know, it can be really weird and interesting. And then we also talked a lot of Roger Corman last night, for some reason. We were talking a lot about Roger Corman. But those are really fun and I really highly recommend people check those out and and if you really like getting on the wavelength with with the pink beam stuff this is a really great place to start but there but all these authors have you know other work that that is in the same vein and and it's it's really cool to see that Keith is like put together this great starting point for Pink Beam. And, you know, I know he and I both like really have, you know, talked about his vision for where he's going with this. And I can say this because I'm not him,

but he's got really great authors coming down the pike too from John Shirley and, and others that are just going to read. Richard Cadre. We're going to have really amazing stuff coming in the future. so and then hopefully rebranding some of the science fiction books under pink beam too yes that that's a plan also yes there's some of the some of the choir sci-fi books that we published that i mentioned um they kind of got lost under the choir banner will be republished under the pink beam banner so look for that which is which is fun and really cool and and just the fest is going to be a really good time i'm kind of pulling my eyeballs out right now in the organizing phase of it.

But it seems to be really coming together. And we have some really great guests of honor from Brian, Sarah Langan, Tim Powers, James Blaylock is going to be there. Jonathan Leitham's going to be there. Hart Rodman is going to be there, who's the president of the writers go for a long time. And we're giving a lifetime achievement award to a guy named Lorber Running Clam.

And if you don't know who Lord of Arne Calam is, then you should find out. about coming to the fest because LRC is the guy he's awesome and we're going to have a lot of fun at the fest so perfect

Brian Gordon's chair any on you can find me on you know on the typical socials I also blog daily at on substack under Gordon

Bonnet author just picking interesting topics and writing about them. So if you want to get to know me better, check me out on Substack. Just search my name on Substack. You'll find me. And my books can be found anywhere you buy your books, basically.

Perfect. I'm on Facebook and Blue Sky. And then, you know, you can just Google my name and either you get me or get someone who sells heavy equipment to lumber industry. Hey, Brian, tell everybody about Phantom Lim, because you got a book I'm really excited about coming out. Yeah. I have a book that's coming out in October, October 13th, which is called Phantom Lim.

It's a sequel to another book I wrote called Last Days, which is about a, it's a detective story about someone who loses a hand and gets involved with a very weird group as a result of that. So, and then Phantom Lim is, he gets worse and worse for him. Last Days was my first Brian Evanson book that I read. And when I read it, it was interesting at the time I was reading while walking on a high school track, it's a long story, but I would go for walks and read. And I was reading last days walking on a track in Portland. And literally there was at least two or three scenes where I'm like,

what the hell is happening in this book? Yeah. And I was like, beautifully strange and weird. Yeah. Yeah. Last days is incredible. So I'm so excited for Phantom Lim. I can't.

I can't. And you threatened this book for years. So I have. Yeah. It's like a good sequel. very long after the first book was published. Yeah. It happened.

Very excited for it. Cool. Yeah. Andrew, you say you're not. I guess I'm on Facebook and that's pretty much it. This entire thing is a completely new thing to me. Yeah.

I'll say Andrew, Andrew wrote a short story for, we did an anthology called Augmented Volume 1. And that's when I first figured out that Andrew was a fantastic writer. And the short story he did. in that anthology is probably one of my favorite short stories ever by anybody it's so great so i highly encourage people to go and check out uh his story in that anthology yeah it was a standout in that collection for sure yes the premise because i i like the premise um the premise is basically

a guy it's another cyberpunk thing in the same in the same kind of universe thing i like anyway uh but a guy gets his leg injured and uh there's an automatic ambival that is chasing him and he has to run away from it because he can't afford the medical bills. Oh my God. Yes. He can't, yes. He's terrified that the ambulance is going to pick him up because then he'll be in debt for the rest of his life. Yeah. I have a book club and one of the girls is from Spain and when we were talking about like, I don't know if I should go to the doctor yet. She was like, what are doctor bills? I was like, oh, well, you see America. So I'm going to have to read that one. Yes.

It's a great one. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I will put all the links you guys just discussed in the show notes. Everybody can find everyone and buy this collection, basically, from Pink Beam. But thank you guys for coming on. Thank you so much, Kate. Thanks for having us. Thanks for obvious.