Here’s a collection of the reviews I’ve found for my new dreampunk SF novella Dreck. It’s all five stars so far on Amazon and Goodreads. Great reception, just not enough readers. Please help me change that!
Jeff Noon
Dreck takes the reader on a journey through layers of narrative, each chapter having its own exciting logic, but be prepared for slippage and landslides along the way. Cliff Jones Jr. revels in a fragile world, where ghosts haunt your smart lenses, virtual reality intersects with dreams, and even life and death are more states of mind than physical processes. A brilliant exploration of technology’s strange new borderlands.
Jim Hardison
Reality-Melting Sci-Fi
This was a great read—thought-provoking and off-kilter, but with a disturbingly close-to-home imminence. Sometimes stories with dreamlike twists and turns can create a sense of disconnection and distance, but Jones pulled it off expertly with a narrative that kept me invested. Great characters, great concepts, and a fast-paced, inventive plot that pulls it all together. A highly satisfying read.
Sonya Deulina Williams
Mind-Bending Read
I honestly really enjoyed this book. It’s a fast-paced, quick read that leaves you wondering what is going on and what will happen next. This book brought up so many questions about technology, the nature of dreams, interconnectedness, and reality as a whole. I really enjoyed how things came together at the end and it definitely left me deep in thought long after the story was through. I highly recommend!!
Matt Watters
Dreck is a “trip” where multiple layers of complexity are peeled away to reveal the core. I enjoyed the formatting of Dreck, where storylines and characters are blurred, and you’re not entirely sure what’s going on. As you put the future tech puzzle together, you gain a deeper understanding of characters and situations. The journey is fascinating.
Well written, entertaining, and always intriguing.
Dreampunk at its best!
Keith Giles
Surreal Sci-Fi for Serious Thinkers
This novel from Cliff Jones Jr. is my kind of science fiction novel: It’s unpredictable, profound, philosophical, and filled with insightful social commentary and brilliant satire on ever page.
Honestly, there are enough great ideas in this book to fill three other sci-fi novels, but somehow Jones manages to cram one ingenious concept after the other into every single chapter.
Once I started, I couldn't stop thinking about it until I reached the ending.
Looking forward to more great writing from this author. He’s definitely a talent to watch!
Kelly Showker on Amazon
I LOVED THIS
This book is still giving me chills! Very unsettling. Will appeal to fans of Black Mirror and later PKD. I’m still thinking about one of the thought experiments in the book. Don’t want to leave spoilers, but… it was a page-turner. I read it in one evening, in basically one sitting. Couldn’t put it down.
B.R. on Amazon
PKD for the social media age
I saw Cliff Jones Jr. speak at San Diego Comic-Con on a panel discussion about Philip K. Dick. His knowledge of Dick’s oeuvre is extensive, and you can see Dick’s fingerprints all over this work. Jones sprinkles in some overt Easter eggs, but what he really nails is the disorientation and paranoia. In fact, I’d say this is the most Dickian book I’ve read since China Miéville’s The City & the City.
Dreck is a quick read, but one that I’m eager to revisit. It progresses straightforwardly at first—starting as the story of a hacker who sets his sights on a social media site called MeFirst. But from there, it gets a lot weirder, with multiple story lines that intersect and echo each other with a dreamlike logic. As I was reading the last chapters, I wished that I had been taking notes so I could pick up on more of these connections.
Torusbrane on Goodreads
Dreck is a journey from beginning to end; in an interweaving of dreams, technology, romance, and comedy. It keeps you on your toes, not fully ready for what’s truly around the bend. Full of ideas and concepts that humans have contemplated for millennia, in present times, and even novel ideas of our future that have yet to come. Getting lost in this book is sort of a “norm,” so you get comfortable with it eventually as the book reads on. But you’re meant to get lost and find yourself, as you follow along the growing list of colorful characters that, oftentimes, personally surprise me. The conclusion of this book, at the end of its winding yet defined path, is something that you need to read, and experience, for yourself. The intellectual play is like the ancient game Go, it’s something anyone can read, but even masters will contemplate its concepts.
I really liked this book all the way through, I couldn’t put it down. It’s something that could be read in a weekend, but could also easily be read again and again. I just started to get into Cliff Jones Jr’s work; he will send you on a journey through time, space, and dreams. Cliff being a multitalented individual, also did the cover artwork for this book, so his talents run beyond just being a prolific author. Highly recommend this if you’re just getting into dreampunk or sci-fi, or even if you’re a sci-fi veteran (like me), this book stands out against the monotony of stories that are in our current landscape. There’s also a mystery in this book that I haven't quite cracked yet…
David Agranoff
One of the best things about punk rock fandom is that punk rockers have always felt that they were one step from their favorite bands. The fans and the creators have very little separation. Cyberpunk happened in part because creators like John Shirley were wearing dog collars to the punk shows he was playing at and at the science fiction conventions he read at.
Philip K. Dick barely saw punk in his life, but many of his fans think of punk. Cyberpunk, hopepunk, as an actual punk rocker my whole life I generally roll my eyes when yet another genre picks up the “punk” tag. As the author of punk-rock-themed horror I have to point out that my books have actual punks, I know I may be a hypocrite here. Anyhoo here we have an author who defines his work as dreampunk/surrealist.
Cliff Jones Jr. is an author whose inspiration comes straight off the pink beam as like many of us one of his favorite writers is one Philly K. Dick. That is how we met each other. I really enjoy Cliff’s company and talking with him. I was nervous I might not like the book, but my pet peeve about “punk” as genre tag aside I loved this book.
Dreck has enough weird concepts in the slim 131 pages to out-idea science fiction novels with triple the page count. For those of us looking for modern works of SF that have that pink beam feeling of a story just a few beats away from reality, this is a great novel to dig into. Smart glasses that learn you and create ghostly algorithms, virtual hyperrealities, intense dreams, and higher realms of thought to combine modern technology with surrealist spiritual musings. The narrative is carefully crafted to give a neurodivergent view of the spectrum, at least that is the sense I got.
There is a sense that Flip and the characters in this novel are constantly slipping inches from everyone else’s reality and the technology that is weaponized to learn us and exploit us through capitalism is ever-present. I wondered if the insect on the cover represented tiny things crawling on us leaving little bites. There is a trade-off to all the knowledge the internet puts at our touch, the Faustian deal is that the vast knowledge we have access to is used against us.
Was this the mission statement of Dreck? At least it seemed so to me. If I made it sound preachy or depressing, it is not. The book is fun, routinely hilarious, and made me laugh multiple times. Each chapter has little pieces of art that I believe are meant to represent the big data system learning about the characters. That of course is at the heart of the concept.
Lots of companies pay MeFirst, but not for that. And not just private companies but political groups, government agencies… They pay for your information.
Wayne frowned. He felt more comfortable ignoring this obvious downside of Big Data. He’d have to tamp down his enthusiasm around Flip, ever the idealistic hacktivist. The guy knew his stuff, but he was kind of a buzzkill.
MeFirst is a fictional technology, but it works like most of the real stuff. Data collection, meant to figure out what we need to buy, is the abyss staring back at us. It could be played for horror, but you are having fun, so much of this zooms past without a thought to consequences. I love that about effective sci-fi satire.
In the second half of the book, the technology is escalated with Second Sight lenses/glasses that project data in ghost memories. Is it the technology or are people losing their minds?
“Second Sight is a scam,” Laila snapped back at her. “There are no ghosts! It’s all in the lenses. They show you shadows, and then they give you a shock just to keep you scared. Well, I’m not falling for it, not anymore.”
Dreck blurs the lines. “Dreck: part drug, part nanotech, part biological material… all with the taste and appearance of blackstrap molasses.” It may be that I know Cliff is a PKD fan, but there are sly Easter-egg-ish references to a fictional Phil. I am not complaining, this is a feature, not a bug. I would say Dreck: part surreal, part humor, part science fictional material… all the taste and appearance of a PKD nightmare all wrapped into a unique and modern voice. Is it dreampunk? If Cliff says so, I can live with the label because I was a big fan of this novel.
Are you convinced yet? Read it for yourself!