Orson Scott Card's novel Enders Game

Lavie Tidhar explores one of those realities in his new novel from PS Publishing, Osama. Tidhar is not a writer to mess around with half measures when confronting a ticklish subject. The Israeli born novelist's short story collection Hebrew Punk features thrilling tales of Jewish vampires, while Jesus and the Eightfold Path argues that Christ was actually a Buddhist. His recent short story The School, a satire of Orson Scott Card's novel Enders Game, started a minor internet meme when it called out a number of Tidhar's fellow SF writers for their militaristic and homophobic attitudes.

And now Tidhar gives us an evil-eyed, turbaned silhouette, standing behind the smoking name of the world's most hated terrorist, as the cover of a novel featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante, even if only in an off-stage role. If this brief introduction to Osama brings to mind Philip K Dick's seminal science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle, that is because Tidhar has deliberately co-opted a number of trademark Dickian techniques in his latest work. PKD's most accomplished literary novel describes a world where the German and Japanese Axis Powers won the second world war, and dominate the North American continent between them. The novel's central characters are fascinated by and slowly drawn into the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel within a novel which describes an alternative history in which America and her allies won the war.

One common problem for all science fiction writers is reconciling the wondrous world we could have with the one we have negligently stumbled into. At this exact moment in time, in an alternate reality governed by the Grandmasters of Sci-Fi, there is a version of you living a life of luxury in a post-scarcity paradise where your every whim is met by your own robo-butler. Of course, that may already be your daily reality if you are a hedge-fund manager or MP on expenses, while the rest of us are simply grateful to avoid stacking shelves in Tesci. There are certainly worse realities, but there are also so many better ones.

PKD was at his best when happily tinkering with the constructed nature of modern reality, in which he believed "spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups and political groups" and "we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms". Today, the sophisticated people manufacturing our reality have more sophisticated ways to do it than ever, through the television and computer screens, smartphones, the internet and social media. The collapse of our financial system is exposing just how spurious and manufactured, even fictional, much of our reality is. From banks using mathematical algorithms to extract vast sums of non-existent money from an automated stock market, to a presidential candidate whose main claim to power is his ability to execute wrongdoers, little of our contemporary history would seem out of place in the fiction of a paranoid, acid-tripping, hack SF novelist.