Pink Beam Awards
As part of the 4th International Philip K. Dick Festival, we held the first-ever Pink Beam Awards, voted on by attendees to the Global Time-Slip online conference and the festival. Community members could nominate PKD-related books, articles, and presentations. A third category, Best in Show presentation, is voted on by the folks at the conference based on the best presentation given during the fest itself.
Votes were done by an online ballot, with a voting booth at the awards so voters could consider the presentations they saw over the two days before.
The 2024–26 Pink Beam Awards
Lord Running Clam
Lord Running Clam with his Pink Beam Awards
Lord Running Clam, who currently lives in the Colorado mountains, is a longtime and one of the most famous and active fans of Philip K. Dick. He joined the Philip K. Dick Society (PKDS) in 1985, where he contributed to the content of its newsletter. When the PKDS was discontinued, he created “For Dickheads Only” in 1993, a zine that was active until 1997. Since then, his activities have included many contributions to the fanzine “PKD OTAKU,” researching and writing the Pink Beam Companion, and recently a novella, In Time’s Rabbit Hole. He is, with Henri Wintz, a founder of Wide Books, committed to publishing books about Philip K. Dick.
- —“Encounters with Reality: Critical Reflections on the Novels and Short Stories of Philip K. Dick” by Frank C. Bertrand (2026, Wide Books)
- —The Esoteric Theology of Philip K. Dick, edited by George J. Sieg and Michael C. Barros (2026, Bloomsbury Publishing)
- —Great America in Dead World by David Agranoff (2025, Quoir Publishing)
- —Pink Beam Companion (2nd Edition) by Lord Running Clam (2024, Wide Books)
- —Precious Artifacts 5: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography — German Editions by Henri Wintz, Lord Running Clam, & Jens-Christoph Nolte (2026, Wide Books)
- —Worlds Built to Fall Apart by David Lapoujade (2024, University of Minnesota Press)
Pink Beam Companion (2nd Edition) by Lord Running Clam (2024, Wide Books)
- —Automation Surprise by Chris Danta (Global Time-Slip)
- —“The Conquest of Death and the Divine Afterlife: Philip K. Dick’s Life and Fiction of the 1960s” by M. Blake Wilson (published in The Esoteric Theology of Philip K. Dick; presented at PKD Hangout & PKD Fest 2026)
- —Do Androids Dream of Racialization? Techno-Orientalism and the Android Imaginary in the Work of PKD by Leslie Fernandez (presented on the PKD Hangout)
- —Confessions of a Crap Artist Community-Read presentation by David Gill (presented at Point Reyes Library)
“The Conquest of Death and the Divine Afterlife: Philip K. Dick’s Life and Fiction of the 1960s” by M. Blake Wilson
M. Blake Wilson accepts his award
M. Blake Wilson majored in philosophy and minored in pre-law at San Francisco State University. After graduating from McGeorge School of Law, he apprenticed with legendary criminal lawyer J. Tony Serra in San Francisco for eight years before returning to his hometown of San Diego, where he represented the indigent as a court-appointed attorney. He obtained a Master of Arts degree in philosophy at San Diego State University. In 2010 he started teaching philosophy at Front Range Community College in Boulder, Colorado. After doing his Ph.D. in the Social, Political, Ethical, and Legal philosophy program at Binghamton University (The State University of New York), M. Blake Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Cal State Stanislaus, where he teaches courses in law, procedure, and ethics.
Delicious Garbage: Language, Neologisms, and Reality in Philip K. Dick — paper presented by Cat Celebrezze
Cat Celebrezze presenting “Delicious Garbage”
Cat Celebrezze works in New York and Los Angeles as enigmatic principal for Supercargo Consulting LLC and lives in Joshua Tree. Makes weird difficult think thing music, loves all things PKD / Sci-Fi, and reads a shit ton of philosophy. Instruments of choice (besides pink beams) include: saxophone, bass, noise boards, keyboards, and various percussion oddities. Current bands: Alien Probe — unhinged punk ufology; Yvonne Champagne — Mojave fuzz all-female art rock trio; SCUMS — experimental noise and loops guaranteeing hyperobject consciousness; TCB — West Coast Doom Jazz scoring soundtracks to unmade films about occult detectives. Recent publications include “Somnambulating the Singularity” at Metapsychosis.com. Currently working on a book entitled “Specters of Screens: The Ghosts and Cthulhuscapes of Television” that tracks the shifts and superpositions of time, space, and reality oozing through the three ages of electricity during the last 150 years: Representational Electricity, Presentational Electricity, and Quantizing Electricity.
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