Superior Studio: Writing

The Strange Case of Philip K. Dick

I was introduced to the work of Philip Kindred Dick- hereafter referred to as "Phil," since that (or "PKD") is the way his fans usually refer to him- by my friend David Teare while I was living in London, Ontario a few years ago. I had just hired him to work at the store I managed and, both of us being chatty types, we traded fandom stories. I was very much into MST3K at the time and lent him some tapes, which he loved; he in turn lent me a few of Phil's more notable novels, and I was hooked. We started to talk about him all the time, and it seems to me now that Phil is one of those rare authors who you could talk about over a beer or in a literary salon. Perhaps that is because Phil's life was often stranger than his fiction, and that is saying something. Phil was born in Chicago in 1928, with his twin sister Jane. His mother, not really prepared to care for children, didn't feed them properly. Jane died of malnutrition in infancy; Phil was saved from the same fate by the intervention of a nurse, but remained with his parents, who moved to Colorado and then Southern California, landing for a while in Berkeley. An avid reader and writer, he published a dittoed newsletter called THE DAILY DICK- really- at the age of 10. In ‘41, at the age of 13, he became a fan of Science Fiction, and wrote his first novel (not extant today) the following year.

He got a job in his teens at a record store, where he fostered a love for classical music and jazz. He was a nervous, introverted young man who saw a psychotherapist for anxiety and agoraphobia; he was excused from military service for high blood pressure. He was thrown out of college at Berkeley for refusing to take ROTC, and by 22 had married his first wife; he also made his first sale to a publisher that year, a short story called "Roog." He continued to write short stories for the pulp magazines, barely making ends meet despite a lot of sales, and turned to writing novels as well, since the money would supposedly be better.

Phil is generally regarded as an SF writer; he is certainly best known for novels like DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, which was the inspiration for the film BLADE RUNNER; but in the 50's, he put most of his energy into a series of "mainstream" novels which he hoped would propel him to greater literary respect (and income) than that which SF authors received. All of them were returned by his agent unsold, while his early SF novels paid the rent. Unlike today, when an SF author could actually make a good living, the pay scale was not so good in the 50s, or indeed, nearly any time in Phil's life. It was a lucky thing that he could hack out books in a matter of months, if not less. More remarkable still was the fact that many of them turned out well.

It is hard to talk about Phil without playing forensic psychologist. He is recalled by many as a gentle, kind, inquisitive person. He could also be very sarcastic and was given to foul moods and tempers, though I don't know of any actual violence that he might have engaged in. He seemed to want the sort of happy home life which he had never had as a child, but was not an attentive father or husband. Ultimately, despite several marriages and close friendships, he was married to his vision and the work from which it sprang.

A commonly-discussed topic among Phil's fans involves the concept of a "dark-haired girl" who he searched for both in life and in his writing. There are Freudian speculations that Phil suffered from the loss of his twin, Jane, and that he could never form a permanent bond with a woman. Many of his male characters are misfits, loners, or unhappily married men, much as Phil was at different times during his life; many of his female characters are controlling, driven, or deceptive. As a result, Phil could be described as a sexist, and he undoubtedly was to an extent; but his portrayals of the opposite sex, despite the negative aura, tend to be very sympathetic and often take a tone of admiration.

Phil once tried to quit writing and lead a normal life. His second wife, Anne, had her own jewelry business which he attempted to work in. He was despondent at the total lack of success he had had with his mainstream novels, and the meager returns from successful SF material was not helping his spirits. He had his third nervous breakdown, and turned to writing for solace; a short time later, he won a Hugo award for his 1962 novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. While his marriage and other aspects of his life fell apart, Phil entered the most productive period of his career, writing over 20 more novels by 1970!

All of the novels were SF, and he received very little money for them; enough to finance a modest living and pay support to his ex-wives and children. Partially due to the success of the alternate-history novel HIGH CASTLE, Phil gained notoriety as an author who speculated about the natures of reality and humanity. Nearly all of his novels and short stories touch on these themes in one way or another. EYE IN THE SKY, one of his first great SF novels, shows us a group of people who travel through a series of alternate realities; directly after it came MARY AND THE GIANT, a mainstream novel which explores complex human emotions and particularly the uneasy atmosphere of America in the 50s: race relations, disaffected youth, marriage under stress, and so on. Needless to say, these themes still resonate well today.

My friend Dave pointed out to me that many of Phil's novels can be grouped into trilogies, with each of the three approaching one concept from a different angle. Some of the concepts are common to all of his writing: it is said that he always asks "what is real?" and "what is human?" In novels like TIME OUT OF JOINT, where a man finds concrete objects suddenly replaced by slips of paper, Phil concentrates on the first question; in WE CAN BUILD YOU or DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, he concentrates on the second.

His writing, often described as infused with paranoia, does give that impression sometimes because Phil does not allow the reader to accept much at face value. Is a character hallucinating when he glimpses another world, or is his own world the illusion? He answered this question many ways over the years: collective hallucination, near-death experience, optical scrambling, alternate dimensions, government conspiracies. Perhaps the most moving and disturbing answers are presented in the mainstream novels, where characters who live in "our" world dissociate themselves due to emotional detachment, echoing the restlessness and anxiety which Phil himself felt.

Things started to get really weird for Phil in 1970- and again, that is saying something. His third wife Nancy left him, taking their child Isolde; during the next year he opened his door to discover that his home had been broken into, papers rifled and stolen, a locked filing cabinet opened with explosives. This break-in was treated indifferently by the police and Phil spun into some deep paranoia trying to figure it out. The following year he attended an SF convention in Vancouver and loved the area, resolving to move there; but his depression drove him to a suicide attempt shortly afterward. Returning to California after a stint in a rehab centre, Phil met his fourth wife Tessa; they soon had a son, Christopher.

In early 1974, Phil had a series of strange experiences which would become the focus of his attention for the rest of his life. While flying home one day from a trip, he saw a brilliant pink light which gave him a splitting headache- and more importantly, Phil suddenly had an intuition that his son Chris was very ill and needed to be taken to the doctor. He and Tessa rushed him there in time for treatment for a previously undetected ailment that might have been fatal. For nearly a year afterward, he saw a "stereographic covering" over the real world: he saw the world in the days of the Christian Apocalypse, as a transparent overlay on top of the present day.

Was Phil crazy? I don't think so. Did he actually experience the sort of bizarre occurrences that he wrote about? I don't know. I don't think Phil really knew either; he spent the last years of his life writing a huge document he called the "Exegesis," trying to figure out those experiences. Had they been real? And if so, how did they fit into the very fluid reality that Phil already knew? Some skeptics see "the experience" as a byproduct of lifelong stress, filtered through a mind which had proven itself capable of envisioning all manner of weirdness. Not only had Phil endured nervous breakdowns, numerous divorces, and chronic poverty despite being an award-winning author: genuinely weird things happened to him and those around him.

Interestingly, most of the novels he wrote after "the experience" reach back toward a mainstream approach. His final SF trilogy- RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH, VALIS, and THE DIVINE INVASION- incorporate elements of the experience, each one approaching the questions it raises from a different perspective. Is there an extraterrestrial intelligence, a la 2001, orbiting the Earth and providing some of us with flashes of insight? Are we walking through an illusory world of our own creation? In the end, Phil did not have any concrete answers; he would form and discard theories in rapid succession.

Although his publishing was reduced to a relative trickle in the ‘70s, he did a great deal of work on his Exegesis and enjoyed a certain amount of success in his latter years; his best mainstream novel from the ‘50s, CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST, was published in 1975. It is somewhat ironic that that novel, about a maladjusted nerd whose neuroses contrast with the "happy" home of his sister, should appear in print before a series of novels which I refer to as "hybrid"- not quite SF, not quite mainstream. One of the best from that period, A SCANNER DARKLY, follows the progress of a narcotics officer who, for his own protection, wears a device that "scrambles" his physical appearance when he visits his superiors; the narc is given the assignment of observing and gathering evidence against himself. The resulting schizoid existence bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Phil's real life in the early 70's, from the break-in to the divine contact; he recounts the stories of many actual drug users he knew, and in a sobering epilogue, reports that most of them died before the novel's publication.

Phil's life and friends make their most vivid appearance in VALIS, a beautifully confusing and remarkable novel which I read at the peak of my initial enthusiasm for his work. Narrated by the fictional Horselover Fat ("Philip" means "Horse lover," and "Dick" is German for "Fat"), it tells the story of the divine contact, meeting the messiah (a dark-haired girl-child), and confronting God with the questions that really bothered Phil: what happened to Jim Pike? Why did his friends and loved ones die or leave? What happened to his cats? Why did evil men seem to succeed in life while good men died of cancer? It is PKD in his most freewheeling, dizzying, idea-spinning form. VALIS was preceded by a novel called RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH, which was published posthumously and covered much of the same ground from a different perspective; and followed by THE DIVINE INVASION, where divine communication is linked with the return of the Christian Messiah.

By 1980, Phil was enjoying some financial success and literary respect. In the ‘70s, Harlan Ellison had anthologized one of Phil's stories in the seminal collection DANGEROUS VISIONS (though Phil was annoyed by Harlan's introduction, which gave some the impression that Phil did a lot of experimenting with drugs); Paul Williams' article on Phil for ROLLING STONE declared him a major talent of the time; and his papers were being collected by a local university for future study. He was a guest of honour at an SF convention in France, where his work has always been held in great esteem; he was confronted with beautiful French hardcover editions of his books, including the early SF, for which he had never received royalties. It was both a beautiful and heartbreaking sight; how those royalties could have helped over the years! How much stress might have been avoided had the accolades and prosperity arrived earlier?

Phil was offered a tidy sum to write a "novelization" of the BLADE RUNNER script- and he could afford to turn it down. At the time, he wrote to a friend that he finally felt he had a chance to steer his life and career in one of two directions: commercial or literary. He took pride in his final decade of writing, perhaps because most of it appeared in a time when the SF potboiler was on the decline; perhaps because most of it infused his explorations of humanity and reality with a deeper spiritual thread.

Even in a mainstream novel, Phil could impart the impression that there are unseen elements to our world which are there for us to see, if only we would open our minds. In the late ‘60s, Phil's friend Jim Pike (a Bishop in the Episcopelean church, and Archbishop of California) wrote a book documenting his own strange experiences: he claimed to speak, via seance and other means, with the ghost of his dead son. Pike was excommunicated from the church for suggesting such a thing; not long afterward he died wandering around the Dead Sea desert. Pike's story would eventually serve as the basis for Phil's final published novel, THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER. Although published under an SF imprint, it was perhaps the bridge "back" to mainstream writing that Phil had hoped to create for decades.

Unfortunately, just as Phil was finally getting the world by the tail, he was struck by a final cosmic irony: he suffered a stroke in early 1982 which left him paralyzed in hospital. He never woke afterward, dying of heart failure a few weeks later.

Since then, several small press publishers have quietly unveiled his excellent mainstream novels, plus compilations of his short stories, interviews, essays, correspondence, and parts of the Exegesis. There is a memorial award in his name presented annually to SF authors, with past winners including William Gibson. Vintage, an imprint of Random House, has reprinted the best of his SF novels in a series of fine trade paperback editions. What was once referred to as "the cult of Philip K. Dick" has become broad critical notice unlike anything Phil witnessed during his life. Even in the short time that I have been reading and collecting his work, it has become increasingly difficult to find and nearly all of it has been optioned for films. PKD is a hot property in our time- and I like to think that somewhere, in some other world or time that might prove to be the real one after all, he is laughing his head off.

THE PKD BIBLIOGRAPHY

Particularly recommended titles have an asterisk (*). Some titles may be hard to find. Lost manuscripts are not included in this list.

Voices From The Street (mainstream, ca. 1952)
The Cosmic Puppets (SF,'53)
Gather Yourselves Together (mainstream, ca. ‘53)
Solar Lottery (SF; 1st published novel, ‘55; British title: World of Chance)
The World Jones Made (SF, ‘56)
Eye In The Sky* (SF, ‘57)
Mary And The Giant* (mainstream, ca. ‘55)
The Man Who Japed (SF, ‘56)
The Broken Bubble [Of Thisbe Holt]* (mainstream, ‘56)
Puttering About In A Small Land* (mainstream, ‘57)
Time Out Of Joint* (SF, ‘59; Phil's 1st hardcover sale)
In Milton Lumky Territory (mainstream, ‘58)
Dr. Futurity (SF, ‘60)
Confessions of a Crap Artist* (mainstream, ‘59; 1st mainstream novel published, in 1975; filmed in France under title BARJO)
Vulcan's Hammer (SF, ‘60)
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (mainstream, ‘60)
Humpty Dumpty In Oakland (mainstream, ‘60)
The Man In The High Castle* (SF, ‘62; ‘63 Hugo Award winner for best novel)
We Can Build You* (SF, written ‘62; novel published ‘72)
The Game-Players of Titan (SF, ‘63)
Martian Time-Slip* (SF, ‘64)
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After The Bomb (SF, ‘65)
The Simulacra (SF, ‘64)
Now Wait For Last Year (SF, ‘66)
Clans Of The Alphane Moon (SF, ‘64)
The Crack in Space (SF, ‘66)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch* (SF, ‘65; title character is believed to be partial inspiration for Freddy Krueger(!); novel's film rights allegedly optioned once by John Lennon (!!))
The Zap Gun (SF, ‘67)
The Penultimate Truth (SF, ‘64)
The Unteleported Man* (SF, original version published ‘66; “uncensored” version published ‘83; British title: Lies, Inc.)
Counter-Clock World (SF,‘67)
The Ganymede Takeover (SF, ‘67, cowritten with Ray Nelson)
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?* (SF, ‘68; filmed as BLADE RUNNER)
Nick And The Glimmung (Children's SF novel, ca. ‘66; alternate title The Glimmung of Plowman's Planet; probably related to later novel Galactic Pot-Healer)
Ubik* (SF, ‘69; developed as a film script but never shot)
Galactic Pot-Healer* (SF,‘69)
A Maze of Death (SF, ‘70)
Our Friends From Frolix 8 (SF, ‘70)
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said* (SF, ‘74; winner of John W. Campbell memorial award for best SF novel)
The Dark-Haired Girl* (collection of essays & short pieces compiled in early ‘70s by Phil, published by small press in ‘88)
A Scanner Darkly* (hybrid, ‘77)
UBIK Screenplay (SF, written ‘74, published by small press in ‘85)
Deus Irae (SF, ‘76; cowritten with Roger Zelazny)
Radio Free Albemuth* (hybrid, written ‘76, published ‘85)
VALIS* (hybrid, ‘81)
The Divine Invasion* (SF, ‘81)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer* (mainstream, ‘82; last novel Phil completed before his death)
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (over 100 short fictions by Phil, most originally published in pulps; consists of 5 volumes published after his death; includes “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (filmed as TOTAL RECALL) and “Second Variety” (filmed as SCREAMERS).)

Other Short Story/Novella collections you might encounter:

A Handful of Darkness
The Best of Philip K. Dick
The Book of Philip K. Dick
The Preserving Machine
The Variable Man & Other Stories
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
The Golden Man
The Philip K. Dick Omnibus (British ed. featuring 3 SF novels from the ‘50s)

Other essential Phildickiana:

Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick by Paul Williams (‘86; Williams, the same who publishes CRAWDADDY!, is Phil's literary executor and was a friend; he also published over 30 issues of the Philip K. Dick Society newsletter)

Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words by Gregg Rickman

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb

The Secret Ascension by Michael Bishop (novel inspired by Phil's writing; British title was Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas)

Divine Invasions: A Life Of Philip K. Dick and The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, by Lawrence Sutin (first book is a biography; second collects essays and articles)

The Other Side by Bishop James A. Pike (Pike's account of the events inspired Phil's last novel, Timothy Archer)

Dr. Adder by K.W. [Kevin] Jeter (apocalyptic novel by Phil's friend Jeter, who appears in Phil's novel VALIS; Jeter casts Phil as the voice of a radio station, KCID. Jeter got the contract to write sequels to the BLADE RUNNER film, two of which- The Edge of Human and Replicant Night- have been published).

Links:

My friend Jason wrote a PKD essay of his own; you can find it at his website.
Paul Williams sells his back issues of the Philip K. Dick Society newsletter at his website.

PHILIP K. DICK IS DEAD, ALAS;
LET'S ALL QUEUE UP AND KICK GOD'S ASS!

Michael Bishop.


The Strange Case of Philip K. Dick I was introduced to the work of Philip Kindred Dick- hereafter referred to as "Phil," since that (or "PKD") is the way his fans usually refer to him- by my friend David Teare while I was living in London, Ontario a few years ago. I had just hired him to work at the store I managed and, both of us being chatty types, we traded fandom stories. I was very much into MST3K at the time and lent him some tapes, which he loved; he in turn lent me a few of Phil's more notable novels, and I was hooked. We started to talk about him all the time, and it seems to me now that Phil is one of those rare authors who you could talk about over a beer or in a literary salon. Perhaps that is because Phil's life was often stranger than his fiction, and that is saying something. Phil was born in Chicago in 1928, with his twin sister Jane. His mother, not really prepared to care for children, didn't feed them properly. Jane died of malnutrition in infancy; Phil was saved from the same fate by the intervention of a nurse, but remained with his parents, who moved to Colorado and then Southern California, landing for a while in Berkeley. An avid reader and writer, he published a dittoed newsletter called THE DAILY DICK- really- at the age of 10. In ‘41, at the age of 13, he became a fan of Science Fiction, and wrote his first novel (not extant today) the following year. He got a job in his teens at a record store, where he fostered a love for classical music and jazz. He was a nervous, introverted young man who saw a psychotherapist for anxiety and agoraphobia; he was excused from military service for high blood pressure. He was thrown out of college at Berkeley for refusing to take ROTC, and by 22 had married his first wife; he also made his first sale to a publisher that year, a short story called "Roog." He continued to write short stories for the pulp magazines, barely making ends meet despite a lot of sales, and turned to writing novels as well, since the money would supposedly be better. Phil is generally regarded as an SF writer; he is certainly best known for novels like DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, which was the inspiration for the film BLADE RUNNER; but in the 50's, he put most of his energy into a series of "mainstream" novels which he hoped would propel him to greater literary respect (and income) than that which SF authors received. All of them were returned by his agent unsold, while his early SF novels paid the rent. Unlike today, when an SF author could actually make a good living, the pay scale was not so good in the 50s, or indeed, nearly any time in Phil's life. It was a lucky thing that he could hack out books in a matter of months, if not less. More remarkable still was the fact that many of them turned out well. It is hard to talk about Phil without playing forensic psychologist. He is recalled by many as a gentle, kind, inquisitive person. He could also be very sarcastic and was given to foul moods and tempers, though I don't know of any actual violence that he might have engaged in. He seemed to want the sort of happy home life which he had never had as a child, but was not an attentive father or husband. Ultimately, despite several marriages and close friendships, he was married to his vision and the work from which it sprang. A commonly-discussed topic among Phil's fans involves the concept of a "dark-haired girl" who he searched for both in life and in his writing. There are Freudian speculations that Phil suffered from the loss of his twin, Jane, and that he could never form a permanent bond with a woman. Many of his male characters are misfits, loners, or unhappily married men, much as Phil was at different times during his life; many of his female characters are controlling, driven, or deceptive. As a result, Phil could be described as a sexist, and he undoubtedly was to an extent; but his portrayals of the opposite sex, despite the negative aura, tend to be very sympathetic and often take a tone of admiration. Phil once tried to quit writing and lead a normal life. His second wife, Anne, had her own jewelry business which he attempted to work in. He was despondent at the total lack of success he had had with his mainstream novels, and the meager returns from successful SF material was not helping his spirits. He had his third nervous breakdown, and turned to writing for solace; a short time later, he won a Hugo award for his 1962 novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. While his marriage and other aspects of his life fell apart, Phil entered the most productive period of his career, writing over 20 more novels by 1970! All of the novels were SF, and he received very little money for them; enough to finance a modest living and pay support to his ex-wives and children. Partially due to the success of the alternate-history novel HIGH CASTLE, Phil gained notoriety as an author who speculated about the natures of reality and humanity. Nearly all of his novels and short stories touch on these themes in one way or another. EYE IN THE SKY, one of his first great SF novels, shows us a group of people who travel through a series of alternate realities; directly after it came MARY AND THE GIANT, a mainstream novel which explores complex human emotions and particularly the uneasy atmosphere of America in the 50s: race relations, disaffected youth, marriage under stress, and so on. Needless to say, these themes still resonate well today. My friend Dave pointed out to me that many of Phil's novels can be grouped into trilogies, with each of the three approaching one concept from a different angle. Some of the concepts are common to all of his writing: it is said that he always asks "what is real?" and "what is human?" In novels like TIME OUT OF JOINT, where a man finds concrete objects suddenly replaced by slips of paper, Phil concentrates on the first question; in WE CAN BUILD YOU or DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, he concentrates on the second. His writing, often described as infused with paranoia, does give that impression sometimes because Phil does not allow the reader to accept much at face value. Is a character hallucinating when he glimpses another world, or is his own world the illusion? He answered this question many ways over the years: collective hallucination, near-death experience, optical scrambling, alternate dimensions, government conspiracies. Perhaps the most moving and disturbing answers are presented in the mainstream novels, where characters who live in "our" world dissociate themselves due to emotional detachment, echoing the restlessness and anxiety which Phil himself felt. Things started to get really weird for Phil in 1970- and again, that is saying something. His third wife Nancy left him, taking their child Isolde; during the next year he opened his door to discover that his home had been broken into, papers rifled and stolen, a locked filing cabinet opened with explosives. This break-in was treated indifferently by the police and Phil spun into some deep paranoia trying to figure it out. The following year he attended an SF convention in Vancouver and loved the area, resolving to move there; but his depression drove him to a suicide attempt shortly afterward. Returning to California after a stint in a rehab centre, Phil met his fourth wife Tessa; they soon had a son, Christopher. In early 1974, Phil had a series of strange experiences which would become the focus of his attention for the rest of his life. While flying home one day from a trip, he saw a brilliant pink light which gave him a splitting headache- and more importantly, Phil suddenly had an intuition that his son Chris was very ill and needed to be taken to the doctor. He and Tessa rushed him there in time for treatment for a previously undetected ailment that might have been fatal. For nearly a year afterward, he saw a "stereographic covering" over the real world: he saw the world in the days of the Christian Apocalypse, as a transparent overlay on top of the present day. Was Phil crazy? I don't think so. Did he actually experience the sort of bizarre occurrences that he wrote about? I don't know. I don't think Phil really knew either; he spent the last years of his life writing a huge document he called the "Exegesis," trying to figure out those experiences. Had they been real? And if so, how did they fit into the very fluid reality that Phil already knew? Some skeptics see "the experience" as a byproduct of lifelong stress, filtered through a mind which had proven itself capable of envisioning all manner of weirdness. Not only had Phil endured nervous breakdowns, numerous divorces, and chronic poverty despite being an award-winning author: genuinely weird things happened to him and those around him. Interestingly, most of the novels he wrote after "the experience" reach back toward a mainstream approach. His final SF trilogy- RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH, VALIS, and THE DIVINE INVASION- incorporate elements of the experience, each one approaching the questions it raises from a different perspective. Is there an extraterrestrial intelligence, a la 2001, orbiting the Earth and providing some of us with flashes of insight? Are we walking through an illusory world of our own creation? In the end, Phil did not have any concrete answers; he would form and discard theories in rapid succession. Although his publishing was reduced to a relative trickle in the ‘70s, he did a great deal of work on his Exegesis and enjoyed a certain amount of success in his latter years; his best mainstream novel from the ‘50s, CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST, was published in 1975. It is somewhat ironic that that novel, about a maladjusted nerd whose neuroses contrast with the "happy" home of his sister, should appear in print before a series of novels which I refer to as "hybrid"- not quite SF, not quite mainstream. One of the best from that period, A SCANNER DARKLY, follows the progress of a narcotics officer who, for his own protection, wears a device that "scrambles" his physical appearance when he visits his superiors; the narc is given the assignment of observing and gathering evidence against himself. The resulting schizoid existence bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Phil's real life in the early 70's, from the break-in to the divine contact; he recounts the stories of many actual drug users he knew, and in a sobering epilogue, reports that most of them died before the novel's publication. Phil's life and friends make their most vivid appearance in VALIS, a beautifully confusing and remarkable novel which I read at the peak of my initial enthusiasm for his work. Narrated by the fictional Horselover Fat ("Philip" means "Horse lover," and "Dick" is German for "Fat"), it tells the story of the divine contact, meeting the messiah (a dark-haired girl-child), and confronting God with the questions that really bothered Phil: what happened to Jim Pike? Why did his friends and loved ones die or leave? What happened to his cats? Why did evil men seem to succeed in life while good men died of cancer? It is PKD in his most freewheeling, dizzying, idea-spinning form. VALIS was preceded by a novel called RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH, which was published posthumously and covered much of the same ground from a different perspective; and followed by THE DIVINE INVASION, where divine communication is linked with the return of the Christian Messiah. By 1980, Phil was enjoying some financial success and literary respect. In the ‘70s, Harlan Ellison had anthologized one of Phil's stories in the seminal collection DANGEROUS VISIONS (though Phil was annoyed by Harlan's introduction, which gave some the impression that Phil did a lot of experimenting with drugs); Paul Williams' article on Phil for ROLLING STONE declared him a major talent of the time; and his papers were being collected by a local university for future study. He was a guest of honour at an SF convention in France, where his work has always been held in great esteem; he was confronted with beautiful French hardcover editions of his books, including the early SF, for which he had never received royalties. It was both a beautiful and heartbreaking sight; how those royalties could have helped over the years! How much stress might have been avoided had the accolades and prosperity arrived earlier? Phil was offered a tidy sum to write a "novelization" of the BLADE RUNNER script- and he could afford to turn it down. At the time, he wrote to a friend that he finally felt he had a chance to steer his life and career in one of two directions: commercial or literary. He took pride in his final decade of writing, perhaps because most of it appeared in a time when the SF potboiler was on the decline; perhaps because most of it infused his explorations of humanity and reality with a deeper spiritual thread. Even in a mainstream novel, Phil could impart the impression that there are unseen elements to our world which are there for us to see, if only we would open our minds. In the late ‘60s, Phil's friend Jim Pike (a Bishop in the Episcopelean church, and Archbishop of California) wrote a book documenting his own strange experiences: he claimed to speak, via seance and other means, with the ghost of his dead son. Pike was excommunicated from the church for suggesting such a thing; not long afterward he died wandering around the Dead Sea desert. Pike's story would eventually serve as the basis for Phil's final published novel, THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER. Although published under an SF imprint, it was perhaps the bridge "back" to mainstream writing that Phil had hoped to create for decades. Unfortunately, just as Phil was finally getting the world by the tail, he was struck by a final cosmic irony: he suffered a stroke in early 1982 which left him paralyzed in hospital. He never woke afterward, dying of heart failure a few weeks later. Since then, several small press publishers have quietly unveiled his excellent mainstream novels, plus compilations of his short stories, interviews, essays, correspondence, and parts of the Exegesis. There is a memorial award in his name presented annually to SF authors, with past winners including William Gibson. Vintage, an imprint of Random House, has reprinted the best of his SF novels in a series of fine trade paperback editions. What was once referred to as "the cult of Philip K. Dick" has become broad critical notice unlike anything Phil witnessed during his life. Even in the short time that I have been reading and collecting his work, it has become increasingly difficult to find and nearly all of it has been optioned for films. PKD is a hot property in our time- and I like to think that somewhere, in some other world or time that might prove to be the real one after all, he is laughing his head off. THE PKD BIBLIOGRAPHY Particularly recommended titles have an asterisk (). Some titles may be hard to find. Lost manuscripts are not included in this list. Voices From The Street* (mainstream, ca. 1952) The Cosmic Puppets (SF,'53) Gather Yourselves Together (mainstream, ca. ‘53) Solar Lottery (SF; 1st published novel, ‘55; British title: World of Chance) The World Jones Made (SF, ‘56) Eye In The Sky* (SF, ‘57) Mary And The Giant* (mainstream, ca. ‘55) The Man Who Japed (SF, ‘56) The Broken Bubble [Of Thisbe Holt]* (mainstream, ‘56) Puttering About In A Small Land* (mainstream, ‘57) Time Out Of Joint* (SF, ‘59; Phil's 1st hardcover sale) In Milton Lumky Territory (mainstream, ‘58) Dr. Futurity (SF, ‘60) Confessions of a Crap Artist* (mainstream, ‘59; 1st mainstream novel published, in 1975; filmed in France under title BARJO) Vulcan's Hammer (SF, ‘60) The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (mainstream, ‘60) Humpty Dumpty In Oakland (mainstream, ‘60) The Man In The High Castle* (SF, ‘62; ‘63 Hugo Award winner for best novel) We Can Build You* (SF, written ‘62; novel published ‘72) The Game-Players of Titan (SF, ‘63) Martian Time-Slip* (SF, ‘64) Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After The Bomb (SF, ‘65) The Simulacra (SF, ‘64) Now Wait For Last Year (SF, ‘66) Clans Of The Alphane Moon (SF, ‘64) The Crack in Space (SF, ‘66) The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch* (SF, ‘65; title character is believed to be partial inspiration for Freddy Krueger(!); novel's film rights allegedly optioned once by John Lennon (!!)) The Zap Gun (SF, ‘67) The Penultimate Truth (SF, ‘64) The Unteleported Man* (SF, original version published ‘66; “uncensored” version published ‘83; British title: Lies, Inc.) Counter-Clock World (SF,‘67) The Ganymede Takeover (SF, ‘67, cowritten with Ray Nelson) Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?* (SF, ‘68; filmed as BLADE RUNNER) Nick And The Glimmung (Children's SF novel, ca. ‘66; alternate title The Glimmung of Plowman's Planet; probably related to later novel Galactic Pot-Healer) Ubik* (SF, ‘69; developed as a film script but never shot) Galactic Pot-Healer* (SF,‘69) A Maze of Death (SF, ‘70) Our Friends From Frolix 8 (SF, ‘70) Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said* (SF, ‘74; winner of John W. Campbell memorial award for best SF novel) The Dark-Haired Girl* (collection of essays & short pieces compiled in early ‘70s by Phil, published by small press in ‘88) A Scanner Darkly* (hybrid, ‘77) UBIK Screenplay (SF, written ‘74, published by small press in ‘85) Deus Irae (SF, ‘76; cowritten with Roger Zelazny) Radio Free Albemuth* (hybrid, written ‘76, published ‘85) VALIS* (hybrid, ‘81) The Divine Invasion* (SF, ‘81) The Transmigration of Timothy Archer* (mainstream, ‘82; last novel Phil completed before his death) The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (over 100 short fictions by Phil, most originally published in pulps; consists of 5 volumes published after his death; includes “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (filmed as TOTAL RECALL) and “Second Variety” (filmed as SCREAMERS).) Other Short Story/Novella collections you might encounter: A Handful of Darkness The Best of Philip K. Dick The Book of Philip K. Dick The Preserving Machine The Variable Man & Other Stories I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon The Golden Man The Philip K. Dick Omnibus (British ed. featuring 3 SF novels from the ‘50s) Other essential Phildickiana: Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick by Paul Williams (‘86; Williams, the same who publishes CRAWDADDY!, is Phil's literary executor and was a friend; he also published over 30 issues of the Philip K. Dick Society newsletter) Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words by Gregg Rickman The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb The Secret Ascension by Michael Bishop (novel inspired by Phil's writing; British title was Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas) Divine Invasions: A Life Of Philip K. Dick and The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, by Lawrence Sutin (first book is a biography; second collects essays and articles) The Other Side by Bishop James A. Pike (Pike's account of the events inspired Phil's last novel, Timothy Archer) Dr. Adder by K.W. [Kevin] Jeter (apocalyptic novel by Phil's friend Jeter, who appears in Phil's novel VALIS; Jeter casts Phil as the voice of a radio station, KCID. Jeter got the contract to write sequels to the BLADE RUNNER film, two of which- The Edge of Human and Replicant Night- have been published). Links: My friend Jason wrote a PKD essay of his own; you can find it at his website. Paul Williams sells his back issues of the Philip K. Dick Society newsletter at his website. PHILIP K. DICK IS DEAD, ALAS; LET'S ALL QUEUE UP AND KICK GOD'S ASS! Michael Bishop.

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