Benjamin (2025)

I'm saying all of that was never real in the first place. It is not that you will cease to exist, Marcus, it is that you never really existed in the first place. That life was always an illusion. Your dreams were always temporary. Your memories were always an invention. But you know, let's be honest, that's how it is for most people, when you get right down to it. You think you have this future. You think you have this past. But everything is always going away. Everything is always in the process of coming to nothing. But what I'm telling you, Marcus, is that I am different. For some cosmic reasons impossible to understand, I matter. I have a chance to save the universe . . . and you have a chance to save me. That is more-so much more-than most people ever get.' -Benjamin J. Carp, novelist (Deceased. Robot? Ghost? Alien?) From Philip K. Award-winning writer Ben H. Winters (EC's Cruel Universe) and extraordinary artist Leomacs (Basketful of Heads), the prestige-format examination of a dead science-fiction icon's unexpected return to Earth concludes with a mind-bending meditation of existence itself.

Legendary science-fiction novelist Benjamin J. Carp has just been resurrected 40 years after his death . . . and that's not even the strangest thing that's going to happen to him today. In an effort to unravel the mystery of author Benjamin J. Carp's unexpected reappearance, Benjamin and his newfound companion, Marcus, travel to the arid Joshua Tree desert, where they discover the secret lair of a cabal of scientists eager to revive the minds of some of history's greatest thinkers in an effort to save humanity from its greatest weakness: lack of imagination. Are they to be believed . . . or is this just more sci-fi hokum torn from a chapter in one of Carp's beloved novels? Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award-winning novelist Ben H. Winters (EC's Cruel Universe, The Last Policeman Trilogy) teams with rising star Leomacs (EC's Epitaphs from the Abyss, Basketful of Heads) to recite the next haunting chapter of 2025's mesmerizing science-fiction daydream with profound implications for the fate of the universe, as delivered in a prestige, ad-free format.