(W) Ben H. Winters (A) Leomacs (CA) Christian Ward IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM, A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT TO BEGIN . . . 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