Blue Lard opens with an epistolary section that reads like Alexander de Large living the plot of one of the less coherent PKD novels. Boris, our first protagonist, is a “biophilologist” working on Business Trip BL-3, deep in Siberia. The purpose of the business trip? To encourage faulty clones of great Russian authors to engage in the “script process,” which produces as a byproduct the titular “blue lard.” The “blue lard” is some sort of anti-entropic substance useful as a superconductor for a reactor on the moon or something but who cares. That’s not even important.

Boris writes in a fucked-up “neorussian” tinged with Chinese phrases and confusing vernacular. There’s a glossary but it’s mostly a joke. The scripts written by the clones would simply be destroyed, but Boris preserves them, sending them to his “little bastard” of a lover via genetically modified super pigeons. The scripts themselves are parodies, usually with plots that are almost regular with certain uncanny elements or bizarre writing quirks inserted. This probably works better in the original Russian— here Max Lawton seems to parody the Garner translation for Dostoevsky, and then I can’t catch the rest of the intended targets. Some of the stories are funny, some are disturbing nightmares (my favorite was the Platonov and the Dostoevsky).

And then just like that the blue lard changes hands to the Earth Fuckers, a religious cult who speak regular Russian, thankfully. There’s a Brazil-esque comedy where the blue lard changes hands up the chain of Earth Fuckers, each recipient delving deeper to meet his superiors and then getting chastised and maybe killed, and so it goes. Finally it lands in the hands of a “babe” with an enormous cock that drags along the floor who’s dropped into a Zoroastrian Time Machine back to 1951.