Dissociation Delirium review (and Phil Stitelmann interview)

Dissociation Delirium

Phil Stitelmann (@Phil_Stit)

Reviewed by Matt Adcock (@cleric20)

There’s a particular flavour of cyberpunk that doesn’t care about neon cool, trench coats, or whether your katana glows in the dark. It just wants to drag you face-first through a poison corporate sewer and leave your nervous system twitching in an alley somewhere behind a biotech nightclub. Phil Stitelmann’s Dissociation Delirium is very much that.

Be warned: This is mean little fiction. Lean, poisoned, angry and excitingly - just the start of a series!!

Stitelmann takes the well-worn cyberpunk staples, including augmentation, burnout, corporate ownership of the soul and strips away the romanticism until all that’s left is panic sweat and malfunctioning meat. Think cybernetic psychosis and identity fracture with a kind of grim conviction that feels spiritually descended from early Neuromancer alleyways, filtered through the body-horror migraines of David or Brendan Cronenberg.

What really works is the nastiness of it all. Every page feels like somebody trying jam an infected neural link directly into the skull.

Cyberpunk often disappears up its own augmented backside with endless lore dumps and fetishistic worldbuilding. Dissociation Delirium instead behaves like a panic attack in prose form. Fast. Claustrophobic. Ugly in a deliberate way. The brevity makes it hit harder because there’s no escape hatch, no comfortable distance from the collapse.

This is a drunk 3am after too much tequila and caffeine, where your thoughts are sponsored by a pharmaceutical company.

Delightful I AM A PIG stuff.

Stitelmann GETS that the best cyberpunk isn’t really about technology GETTING inside the nervous system.

DO YOU COMMIT?

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

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(5 - Cyberpunk necessity for burnouts everywhere!)

I got the chance to interview Phil and here's what he said >>>

Matt: Dissociation Delirium feels like it’s broadcasting from a future where identity itself has become corrupted software. Do you think cyberpunk’s greatest horror is no longer the machine… but the collapse of the self?

Phil: Consciousness and self are at the core of Cyberpunk. Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell have shown us that replicants or cyborgs could be more human than humans. Which logically leaves the human part in decay.

Today’s society has already dissolved part of the self: you’re who you voted for, what brand you buy, what side of the culture war you stand on. You take jobs that don’t match your values or skills because you need to pay for a life dictated by a system hellbent on crushing you.

This, more than anything, resonates the strongest with me: corporate culture – a soulless, spirit-crushing, mean-spirited and greedy monster. Imagine that the “hen and pig” pep talk from Dissociation Delirium is actually taken from a REAL workplace anecdote I actually lived through 13 years ago!

As Angie NightFire, my rockstar character, would say in one of her songs:

“You're wired up, and they pull the strings,

Caught in the contract, trapped in their schemes.

Goddamn cybernetic chains, they’ve taken it all,

Once you were human, now you're bound to fall.“

Now, buckle up, for DD is only the beginning. There’s so much more coming on this topic in the upcoming short stories, but most of all the novels!

Matt: Your story has that grimy, late-night neon dread that recalls classic cyberpunk, but it also feels painfully modern. Which version of the future scares you more: the corporate dystopias of the ’80s, or the algorithmic soft-control world we’re drifting into now?

Phil: You’re right: I’m trying to bring Cyberpunk into the modern era, with themes that are very contemporary and technology that comes from today’s paradigm, tuned up to eleven.

Now, there’s a lot of neon and readers will find the classic Cyberpunk tropes in my stories, but it all feels rotten to the core, dirty and toxic. Neo Los Angeles, a character in itself in my universe, is the place where dreams – and dreamers – come to die, where the weak perish and the strong struggle. No one leaves this universe intact. I strongly believe we need such a wakeup call today.

To me, the 80s’ dystopia has, in part, come true. Corporate control, fall of governments’ ability to manage societies, technological predominance in every aspect of our lives. I’ve actually written a thesis on this topic via a series of articles: we’re already living in a cyberpunk world.

But one thing’s missing: the actual popular rebellion. Which brings me to the answer to your question: we’ve come from Gibson’s or Pondsmith’s hard science dystopia to some soft, algorithmically-controlled world where people consume social media and struggle through a life that’s no longer really their own. As a friend of mine said to me the other day: “The future was better before.”

I can feel the public anger rise, year after year, as tech progress exponentially and leaves more and more people behind (Pondsmith’s Techno Shock concept), but the actual Fall isn’t yet in sight.

Again, as my Angie would scream during one of her main songs: “WHERE’S YOUR FUCKING RAGE?”

Matt: If you could jack one piece of fictional cyberpunk tech directly into your own nervous system tomorrow what would you get?

Phil: That’s a tough one. Working in tech, I know damn well that any piece of connected software can and will be hacked, and/or turned into a software subscription service to keep working. Real Black Mirror stuff right there. But that aside, I think a cognition enhancement implant would be my absolute go to. Anything to make me think better and faster, and keep focus. I can’t help but feel limited by my meat brain!

Matt: There’s a great kind of emotional decay running underneath the violence in your writing. Do you see cyberpunk as fundamentally nihilistic, or secretly one of the most human genres around?

Phil: Cyberpunk started as nihilistic, following the Latin and Anglo-Saxon trend of focusing on the self, on the microcosm. How can you save the world if you can’t even save yourself?

That’s pretty much the basis of Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk Roleplaying Game. Trust no one. Save yourself.

I’m more of the Germanic school of thought: save yourself so you can then save the world. In this paradigm, sacrificing oneself for the macrocosm means succeeding in life (pun intended). Hence my saga’s subtitle:

“An Epic Cyberpunk Story of Love, Rebellion and Sacrifice”.

Answering the question: I strongly believe that, at the heart of all this darkness, cold tech and neo-ultra-capitalism, lies the heart of the true human soul. Love. Loyalty. Friendship. Sacrifice.

In DD, Bob falls victim to the rotten, decaying system he adores. The protagonists of Digital Gods and Fallen Angels choose a different path. They fight back. Not only for themselves, but for each other, and ultimately for the future of humanity itself.

It’s that humanity that transcends the genre.

Matt: Which writers or films first infected you with the cyberpunk virus?

Phil: Being born in 1979, Blade Runner, of course. Then Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

I discovered the classic authors later, mainly Philip K Dick. He’s my main inspiration for DD – hence the quote at the beginning of the novella.

Matt: What are your top 3 cyberpunk media?

Phil:

Number 1: The Cyberpunk 2077 video game comes first. No contest. The storytelling in the game is, to me, an absolute masterpiece. It is what prompted me to drop everything and write my own story.

I also adore the transmedia concept. Visuals and music contribute to total immersion. I’m trying to do something similar with my books by adding actual music I compose to the stories! For DD, the Angie NightFire song is available on my Patreon!

Number 2: The Matrix. Where to start there? More than twenty years ago now, I wrote a research paper on Lacan’s Real and its Veil. The Matrix was part of my corpus of study. I adore this movie, the philosophy and human element wrapped in eye candy and cool kung fu. What can I say? I’m a geek through and through.

Number 3: Both Blade Runners. Consciousness and what it means to be human became prevalent themes for me after watching the first one. Then Villeneuve’s 2049 released and I must confess I really enjoyed the underlying theme of loneliness and quest for meaning for a character ultimately condemned to irrelevance. Hard. Bleak. Heartbreaking. Loved it.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners would come number 4, if allowed. The narrative structure (a group of mercs navigating their dystopian city) comes close to my own universe. Plus, you get your heart broken at the end!

If DD owes a lot to Philip K. Dick, then Digital Gods and Fallen Angels probably owes more to Blade Runner, The Matrix and Cyberpunk 2077.

Matt: Your prose has that sharp “too much caffeine and existential terror at 3am” energy. What does your actual writing environment look like / ambient synths and glowing monitors, or is every wall just a filled with the word COMMIT?

Phil: I do COMMIT to my craft, I’ll give you that! My office at home is filled with neon (screens, keyboard, mouse, gaming pc, colors everywhere!) and Cyberpunk 2077 figurines, along with a cool thermal katana and Skippy gun replica! I listen to atmospheric, ambient music while writing to get me in the zone.

I also have an electric guitar (Ibanez Joe Satriani edition), a digital piano and a synth keyboard for compositions nearby. They helped me record themes for Angie NightFire’s songs!

As for coffee… I really should try and cut down a little. Really, I should.

Matt: Cyberpunk often predicts technology frighteningly well, but it rarely predicts hope. Do you think the genre still has room for redemption, spirituality, or genuine human connection?

Phil: That’s PRECISELY what makes this genre so powerful in my eyes. Also, on a side note, it’s one of the many reasons why Arcane worked so well: because the characters struggle against hardship and injustice in a seemingly hopeless world that we, the audience, root for them, love them and cry for them.

It’s the struggle and injustice that triggers something deep and raw within us humans and that’s what I’m bringing with Digital Gods and Fallen Angels.

To quote one of my most mysterious characters in my upcoming saga of novels:

"It is only in the most pitch black of darkness that the faintest light shines brightest."

As for spirituality, there’s plenty to discover and delve into in my books. Technology and digitization are redefining spirituality like never before. Can an AI reach sentience? And if yes, can it understand and know love? Can it believe in something greater than itself? Could it become a guardian for humanity? An Angel of sorts?

What place do humans still retain in such an equation? Will we worship an ASI like a god when it’s done taking everything from us? That’s the very premise of my books with – spoiler alert – the Church of the Singularity and the rise of the Digital Gods.

These questions eventually become the central conflict of Digital Gods and Fallen Angels.

On human connection: we’re already on a downward spiral with social media. I push this even further with the Ether, a fully haptic metaverse sensorium – built upon the legacy OSI network structure with an added haptic-feedback layer – where people waste their lives feeling as much as they can while avoiding the real world. In such a world, my characters long for actual human contact and will fight to the bitter end to preserve whatever little they have.

Matt: In a world of AI-generated everything, deepfakes, neural feeds and collapsing attention spans, do you think reality itself is becoming cyberpunk faster than fiction can keep up?

Phil: My postulate is that we’re already living in a Cyberpunk world. In this regard, we authors are now describing current events rather than warning about a possible future. Yes, reality is now moving faster, things are getting crazier and I feel like authors struggle to keep up. I started writing Digital Gods and Fallen Angels more than 4 years ago and already had to update several key technological items due to current progress.

Also, the rise of AI-generated content and deepfakes has made us enter what anthropologists call the Post-Truth era. This is a disaster of gigantic proportions. If everything you hear, read or watch can be unrecognizably faked, then you simply can’t trust anything anymore. This smells like societal collapse to me.

Matt: If Dissociation Delirium existed as a lost VHS adaptation from 1994, who directs it, who scores it, and which exhausted actor plays the lead antihero?

Phil: Easy!

Actor: Difficult to imagine a cyberpunk movie adaptation without Keanu Reeves as actor!

Director: Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Strange Days, Point Break… No brainer.

Score: Nine Inch Nails. What else? Something raw, nasty, saturated.

As for Angie NightFire herself: Courtney Love at her most dangerous, in her twenties and with mohawk blue punk hair! (today’s pick would be Taylor Momsen, from the Pretty Reckless).

Funny you should ask this question. I cultivate a furious nostalgia for the 80s and 90s hard rock bands and media. Van Halen, Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Cradle of Filth, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai… I miss this energy and passion. So I put it in the books! Angie’s music is inspired by this era.

Matt: Final question: ARE YOU A PIG? If readers walk away from Disassociation Delirium with one lingering psychological splinter lodged in their brain, what do you hope it is?

Phil: I’m the one who knocks, who screams against the system from within. Not a pig, even though I’ve known a lot of those during those last 20 years who happily sacrificed their lives for their job and a corporation who didn’t give two shits about them. In this regard, DD is almost autobiographical.

My main hope is that readers will close this novella shaken to their core, wondering what they’ve just read, then stop and think about the world they live in today and where the future’s taking us, their lives and commitment to something that will consume us all if we let it.

After that… I pray that they’ll stick around for what comes next. They’ll gasp and laugh and cry and finish reading with broken hearts in pure Greek-tragedy-catharsis fashion!

At least, that’s the plan.