Philip K. Dick

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“In 1972…He Called The Police To Confess Being An Android”

September 8, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In a Literary Review piece about Kyle Arnold’s new title, The Divine Madness Of Philip K. Dick, Mike Jay, who knows a thing or two about the delusions that bedevil us, writes about the insane inner world of the speed-typing, speed-taking visionary who lived during the latter stages of his life, quite appropriately, near the quasi-totalitarian theme park Disneyland, a land where mice talk and corporate propaganda is endlessly broadcast. Dick was a hypochondriac about the contents of his head, and it’s no surprise his life was littered with amphetamines, anorexia and anxiety, which drove his brilliance and abbreviated it.

The opening:

Across dozens of novels and well over a hundred short stories, Philip K Dick worried away at one theme above all others: the world is not as it seems. He worked through every imaginable scenario: consensus reality was variously a set of implanted memories, a drug-induced hallucination, a time slip, a covert military simulation, an illusion projected by mega-corporations or extraterrestrials, or a test set by God. His typical protagonist was conspired against, drugged, hypnotised, paranoid, schizophrenic – or, possibly, the only person in possession of the truth.

The preoccupation all too clearly reflected the author’s life. Dick was a chronic doubter, tormented, like René Descartes, by the suspicion that the world was the creation of an evil demon ‘who has directed his entire effort to misleading me’. But cogito ergo sum was not enough to rescue someone who in 1972, during one of his frequent bouts of persecution mania, called the police to confess to being an android. Dick took scepticism to a level that he made his own. It became his brand, and since his death it has been franchised across popular culture. He isn’t credited on Hollywood blockbusters such as The Matrix (in which reality is a simulation created by machines from the future) or The Truman Show (about a reality TV programme in which all but the protagonist are complicit), but their mind-bending plot twists are his in all but name.

As Kyle Arnold acknowledges early in his lucid and accessible study, it would be impossible to investigate the roots of Dick’s cosmic doubt more doggedly than he did himself. He was ‘his own best psychobiographer”…•

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“He Loves Fakes And Simulacra As Much As He Fears Them”

August 29, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Speaking of Disneyland, it is kind of perfect that Philip K. Dick spent the last leg of his life in Orange County in close proximity to the surreal theme park. From Scott Timberg’s 2010 Los Angeles Times article about the scanner in suburbia:

While in Orange County, Dick often fell back on the reflexes of Bay Area types who move to Southern California. He joked often about the artificiality of it all, the local slang. “He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland,” remembered wife Tessa Dick, “and said it was plastic, wasn’t real. He was used to real cities like Berkeley and San Francisco and Vancouver.”

To a writer whose primary subject was the slippage between the real and constructed, the place surely also fascinated him as well. ‘He loves fakes and simulacra as much as he fears them,’ novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote in the introduction to Dick’s selected stories. He calls Dick very much a man of the 1950s, holding “a perfectly typical 1950s obsession with the images, the consumer, the bureaucrat, and with the plight of small men struggling under the imperatives of capitalism.” …

Of course, being far from any urban center or major attraction suited Dick just fine during this last decade. ‘He was home 24/7,’ Tessa said. “He didn’t go out very much.” Besides Big John’s, his favorite pizza place, the nearest spot of interest was the Cal State Fullerton campus, where the author’s papers were held. (Some of them have recently been relocated, perhaps temporarily, to San Francisco.) Today the area is dominated by low-slung, pale stucco buildings and fast food chains, and back then it wasn’t much different.

The couple wasn’t lonely, though. “People came to us,” Tessa recalled. “Nearly every day we had visitors. One night for dinner we had two men from France, one from Germany, and one woman from Sweden. One of them was writing a PhD thesis on Phil.” Dick flirted with the Swede, saying, “You are a pretty lady” in rough German.

During his last few years, when he became financially stable for one of the rare times in his life, his daughters visited him at the Santa Ana apartment he moved to after the implosion of his marriage. Dick’s oldest child, daughter Laura, born in 1960, recalls his place full of Bibles, encyclopedias – Dick was a ferocious autodidact – and recordings of Wagner operas.

Phil’s second daughter Isolde, now 42, visited enough during this period to get to know her father for the first time. She recalls him as working hard to be a good father and struggling to overcome his limitations, both with and without success.

During one visit, he got Isa excited about a trip to Disneyland, then open past midnight. He said, “We’re gonna go and stay ’til it closes!” But in my mind we were there for only 20 or 30 minutes before he said, ‘Honey, my back’s really hurting.’ I think he was just overwhelmed by all the crowds. I knew him, and knew he was uncomfortable moving outside his comfort zone.”

He spent more of his time walking from the apartment to a nearby Trader Joe’s to get sandwiches, a park where he and Isa tried awkwardly to play kickball, and an Episcopalian church where he had running theological discussions with the clergy.•

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“The Mood Organ Is A Device That Allows The User To Dial A Code To Instantly Be In A Certain Mood”

January 29, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oh, I have trouble reading science fiction. The ideas are interesting, but the actual writing usually leaves me cold. There are some exceptions, of course, as there always are in life, but I doubt I’ll even have a period in which I dive deeply into the genre. Rebecca J. Rosen of the Atlantic has an interview with Dan Novy and Sophia Bruckner of MIT who are going to be teaching a course “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication.” A passage from the Q&A about one of the exceptions, Philip K. Dick:

“Rebecca J. Rosen:

What are some specific examples you’ll be looking at?

Sophia Bruckner:

For example, we will be reading the classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, who is one of my favorite authors and is a master of crazy gadget ideas. The devices he describes in his writings can be very humorous and satirical but are truly profound. People have probably seen Blade Runner, an excellent movie based on this book, but the book is very different! Many of the most compelling devices from the book did not make it into the movie.

For example, the Mood Organ is a device that allows the user to dial a code to instantly be in a certain mood. The book contains multiple funny instances of people using this device, such as when one character plugs in the code 888 to feel ‘the desire to watch TV no matter what is on,’ but Dick also points out some disturbing implications resulting from the existence of such a technology. ‘How much time do you set aside each month for specific moods?’ asks one character. Should you be happy and energized to work all the time? This character eventually concludes that two days a month is a reasonable amount for feeling despair. Today, we are hoping science and technology will find the secret to forever happiness, but what will happen if we actually succeed?

Another one of my favorite gadgets from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the Empathy Box. A person holds the handles on the Empathy Box and is connected with all other people using it at the same time by sharing the feelings of a spiritual figure named William Mercer. Amazingly, even in 1968, Dick saw the potential for technology to not only connect people across long distances but to do so with emotional depth. Dick writes that the Empathy Box is ‘the most personal possession you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone.’

Actually, I just realized while answering this question that I’ve been attempting to build a version of the Empathy Box as part of my thesis! I believe people crave for their computers and phones to fulfill this need for connection, but they manage to do so only superficially. As a result, people feel increasingly estranged and alone despite being connected all the time. Like Dick, I also am intrigued by how to use technology to promote empathy and a greater sense of genuine interconnectedness with one another, and I am currently working on designing wearable devices to do this. Some of my best ideas stem from reading science fiction, and I often don’t realize it until later!'”

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“Recently, The Academic Community Has Discovered Us”

October 10, 2013 in Books, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Philip K. Dick wasn’t widely thought of as an important novelist during his brief life, even though he was speaking as profoundly about the human condition as any of his contemporaries. And he was saying things about consciousness that most of us hadn’t even begun considering. What great things in the culture are we missing right now? Who is being undervalued?

A 1977 interview in France with the author.

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“His Books, Which Are Hilarious, Are Popular In France”

September 30, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

From a 1975 “Talk of the Town” piece in the New Yorker by Anthony Hiss about a trip to Los Angeles, a passage detailing his audience with Philip K. Dick, who wasn’t fully appreciated during his abbreviated lifetime (or in this brief article):

In the afternoon, we drove over to Fullerton to see Philip K. Dick, my favorite science-fiction writer, author of 33 novels and 170 short stories. Past the House of Egg Roll, past Moy’s Coffee Shop (Chop Suey, Hot Cakes), past Bowser Beautiful, through Bel Air. We drove to the end of Sunset Boulevard, where we saw seagulls, 18 surfers in wet suits, a blue suggestion of Catalina to the southwest, and an Indian girl in a green-and-gold sari on the beach. Then south, past a concrete wall painted ‘TOMMY SURKO SAYS FOR MY KIND OF GIRL THERE’S ONLY ONE! TOMMY SURKO!’ Behind the tall palms on Venice we could see snow on the mountains. Kids were skateboarding down a hill on Lincoln. Past Woody’s Smorgasburger, onto a freeway to Fullerton.

Philip K. Dick lives in an apartment full of books and records and photographs with his wife, Tessa; his small son, Christopher; and two cats, Harvey Wallbanger and Sasha. He is jolly and tubby and bearded. His books, which are hilarious, are popular in France, because the French think they are about how grim everything is. Dick showed us a French newspaper piece about him—the subtitles were “Le Chaos,” “L’Acide,” “Le Suicide,” “Les Machines” “La Société Totalitaire,” “La Paranoïa.” Dick has just finished a book about Tim Leary and the LSD crowd, and what happened to them.

We had stopped in to make a short call of homage, and wound up talking along for hours, drinking wine, and Tessa going out for some Chinese food, and then talking about cosmologies until it was almost time for our plane back to N.Y. The apartment also contains a two-foot-high metal rocket ship on a wooden base—this is his Hugo Award, the highest award in science fiction. The plaque is missing, though, because Dick once used the award to break up a fight. ‘It grabs good,’ he says. As for the cosmologies, this is what emerged from our discussions: cosmologies all seem to be based on repetition—you know, first the universe expands, then it contracts, then it expands again, etc.—but maybe that’s not so. Maybe this whole expansion business that the universe is currently embarked upon is going to happen only once. That would mean that every day really is a new day, right? Also, maybe it’s not true that Einstein was smarter than Newton. Maybe Newton’s laws accurately described the universe as it then existed. But since then it’s expanded and got more complicated, and can be accurately described only by Einstein physics. Which will eventually become outdated, maybe.”•

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“Friends, This Is Clean-Up Time”

August 1, 2012 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Some sort of Italian promotional trailer for Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel, Ubik.

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“I’ve Seen Many Fine Brains Burned Out On Hard Narcotics”

June 28, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Funny and sad, this 1972 letter published at philipkdick.com was an insane attempt by the speeded-up sci-fi author to offer his knowledge about drugs (which was considerable) to the Orange County Drug Information Service.

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“He Was Uncomfortable Moving Outside His Comfort Zone”

March 1, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"I’m too excited to drive." (Image by Niki Sublime.)

From “An Uneasy Spy Inside 1970s Suburbia,” one of a series of retrospective 2010 articles in the Los Angeles Times about Philip K. Dick, who speeded to his death with the help of amphetamines, but not before decoding our future:

“During his last few years, when he became financially stable for one of the rare times in his life, his daughters visited him at the Santa Ana apartment he moved to after the implosion of his marriage. Dick’s oldest child, daughter Laura, born in 1960, recalls his place full of Bibles, encyclopedias – Dick was a ferocious autodidact – and recordings of Wagner operas.

Phil’s second daughter Isolde, now 42, visited enough during this period to get to know her father for the first time. She recalls him as working hard to be a good father and struggling to overcome his limitations, both with and without success.

During one visit, he got Isa excited about a trip to Disneyland, then open past midnight. ‘He said, ‘We’re gonna go and stay ‘til it closes!’ But in my mind we were there for only 20 or 30 minutes before he said, ‘Honey, my back’s really hurting.’ I think he was just overwhelmed by all the crowds. I knew him, and knew he was uncomfortable moving outside his comfort zone.’

He spent more of his time walking from the apartment to a nearby Trader Joe’s to get sandwiches, a park where he and Isa tried awkwardly to play kickball, and an Episcopalian church where he had running theological discussions with the clergy.

He’d bought himself a Fiat sports car, but almost never drove, telling Isa, ‘Honey, I’m just so excited to see you, I’m too excited to drive.’ She learned quickly to read her father’s code, which seemed designed to protect her from ugly realities.

Sometimes he’d stay up all night, leaving his visitors laughing for hours as he spun idea after idea, or wrote, in a blaze, until dawn. ‘He could go from that really engaging personality to being withdrawn and closed off,’ Isa remembered, explaining that he would sometimes cancel visits at the last minute. ‘I could tell when we spoke on the phone his voice would go really low and flat. When he had that tone he was depressed. He’d say something like he had the flu. ‘The flu’ was usually his code.'”

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“There Was One Of The Greatest Teachers, Poets, And Leaders That Ever Lived”

December 4, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a 1979 Philip K. Dick interview in Science Fiction Review, in which the author inexplicably shows great love for Chairman Mao and makes an interesting point about the human capacity for blocking out the truth:

Question:

Right now, the first reports are coming back from our probes on Mars. What effect, if any, would news of life on Mars have on humanity?

Philip K. Dick:

You mean the average person?

Question:

Yes. What would it do to their thoughts of themselves, and their place in the universe?

Philip K. Dick: 

All right. Yesterday, Chairman Mao died. To me, it was as if a piece of my body had been torn out and thrown away, and I’m not a Communist. There was one of the greatest teachers, poets, and leaders that ever lived. And I don’t see anybody walking around with any particularly unhappy expression. There have been some shots of people in China crying piteously, but I woke my girlfriend up at 7:00 in the morning. I was crying. I said, ‘Chairman Mao has died.’ She said, ‘Oh my God, I thought you said ‘Sharon was dead” — some girl she knows. I think I would be like that. I think there would be little, if any, real reaction. If they can stand to hear that Chairman–that that great poet and teacher, that great man, that–one guy on TV — one Sinologist — said ‘The American public would have to imagine as if, on a single day, both Kennedys, Dr. King, and Franklin D. Rossevelt were all killed simultaneously,’ and even then they wouldn’t get the full impact of it. So I don’t really think that to find life on Mars is going to affect people. One time I was watching TV, and a guy comes on, and he says, ‘I have discovered a 3,000,000-year-old humanoid skull with one eye and two noses.’ And he showed it — he had twenty-five of them, they were obviously fake. And it had one eye, like a cyclops, and had two noses. And the network and everybody took the guy seriously. He says, ‘Man originated in San Diego, and he had one eye and two noses.’ We were laughing, and I said, ‘I wonder if he has a moustache under each nose?

People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things. I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really effect people. I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don’t think they would react to anything. ‘Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD — the bus strike is still on.’ And some guy says, ‘Damnit! I’ll have to walk to work!’ So? You know, 800,000 Chinese are lying dead under the rubble. Really. It cannot be burlesqued.

I think people would have been pleased if there was life on Mars, but I think they would have soon wearied of the novelty of it, and said, ‘But what is there on Jupiter? What can the life do?’ And, ‘My pet dog can do the same thing.’ It’s sad, and it’s also very frightening in a way, to think that you could come on the air, and you could say, ‘The ozone layer has been completely destroyed, and we’re all going to die of cancer in ten years.’ And you might get a reaction. And then, on the other hand, you might not get a reaction from people. So many incredible things have happened.

I talked to a black soldier from World War II who had entered the concentration camp — he had been part of an American battalion that had seized a German death camp — it wasn’t even a concentration camp, it was one of the death camps, and had liberated it. And he said he saw those inmates with his own eyes, and he said, ‘I don’t believe it. I saw it, but I have never believed what I saw. I think that there was something we don’t know. I don’t think they were being killed.’ They were obviously starving, but he says, ‘Even though I saw the camp, and I was one of the first people to get there, I don’t really believe that those people were being killed by millions. For some reason, even though I myself was one of the first human’ — notice the words ‘human beings’ — ‘human beings to see this terrible sight, I just don’t believe what I saw.’ And I guess that’s it, you know. I think that may have been the moment when this began, was the extermination of the gypsies, and Jews, and Bible students in the death camps, people making lampshades out of people’s skins. After that, there wasn’t much to believe or disbelieve, and it didn’t really matter what you believed or disbelieved.•

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“Thank God! I Guess I’m Not Crazy After All”

August 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “The True Stories of Philip K. Dick,” a 1975 Paul Williams Rolling Stone article about the visionary sci-fi writer, who lived on speed and saw the future, died young and mostly a cult figure, and posthumously became the king of Hollywood:

“November 17, 1971. Philip K. Dick, a brilliant novelist well known in science fiction circles, unlocked the front door of his house in San Rafael, California, and turned on the living-room lights. His stereo was gone. The floor was covered with water and pieces of asbestos. The fireproof, 1100-pound asbestos-and-steel file cabinet that protected his precious manuscripts had been blown apart by powerful explosives.

‘Thank God,’ he thought to himself. ‘Thank God! I guess I’m not crazy after all.’

There’s something about ordinary reality that causes it to go all shimmery in the presence of Philip K. Dick. Phil Dick is a science fiction writer, has been for 24 years, and the common theme that runs through all his stories is, ‘Things are seldom what they seem’–a line Phil repeated several times during my three-day stay at his house last year. His lives in Fullerton, Orange County, California, obviously the natural place for a brilliant writer to go after being driven out of semi-suburban San Rafael by forces beyond his comprehension. The new house is less than ten miles from Disneyland.

Philip K. Dick is unknown in America outside the science fiction subculture, but in Europe and especially France, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest living American novelists. Most of his 36 books are constantly in print in Germany, France and Britain, and Jean-Pierre Gorin, a respected French film director, is trying to raise money for a major Hollywood movie of a Phil Dick novel titled Ubik.

Perhaps Phil’s vision of America is just too accurate to be fully appreciated here. But Dick fans believe it’s a matter of timing. Most of them think Dick is now on the edge of a popularity surge similar to what happened to Kurt Vonnegut in the late Sixties. If so, a whirlwind of doubt, horror and laughter is stalking America, ready to blow off the pages of some of the most peculiar and loving books ever written in this country.”

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“What Is It, In Our Behavior, That We Can Call Specifically Human?”

July 26, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Philip K. Dick’s too-bleak 1972 essay, “The Android and the Human,” there is, unsurprisingly, some truth:

“I would like then to ask this: what is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human? That is special to us as a living species? And what is it that, at least up to now, we can consign as merely machine behavior, or, by extension, insect behavior, or reflex behavior? And I would include, in this, the kind of pseudo-human behavior exhibited by what were once living men — creatures who have, in ways I wish to discuss next, become instruments, means, rather than ends, and hence to me analogs of machines in the bad sense, in the sense that although biological life continues, metabolism goes on, the soul — for lack of a better term — is no longer there or at least no longer active. And such does exist in our world — it always did, but the production of such inauthentic human activity has become a science of government and such-like agencies, now. The reduction of humans to mere use — men made into machines, serving a purpose which although ‘good’ in an abstract sense has, for its accomplishment, employed what I regard as the greatest evil imaginable: the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to the fulfilling of an aim outside of his own personal — however puny — destiny. As if, so to speak, history has made him into its instrument. History, and men skilled in — and trained in — the use of manipulative techniques, equipped with devices, ideologically oriented, themselves, in such as way that the use of these devices strikes them as a necessary or at least desirable method of bringing about some ultimately desired goal.

I think, at this point, of Tom Paine’s comment about or another party of the Europe of his time: ‘They admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird.’ And it is the ‘dying bird’ that I am concerned with. The dying — and yet, I think, beginning once again to revive in the hearts of the new generation of kids coming into maturity — the dying bird of authentic humanness.”

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“I Began To Think, Maybe Each Human Being Lives In A Unique World, A Private World”

April 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his 1978 essay, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” Philip K. Dick recalls the first short story he ever wrote:

The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.•

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“He Was Financially And Emotionally Dependent On His Mother, He Also Deeply Resented Her… And Was Convinced She Wanted To Kill Him”

March 18, 2011 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

"As an adolescent, not only was Dick asthmatic and overweight, he suffered from eczema and heart palpitations." (Image by Pete Welsch.)

The opening of  Joshua Glenn’s 2000 Hermenaut piece about Philip K. Dick:

“Philip Kindred Dick and his twin sister Jane were born in Chicago-six weeks prematurely, on December 16, 1928-to Edgar Dick, a livestock inspector for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his wife Dorothy. Jane died a few weeks later. Edgar was transferred to San Francisco the following year, but when he was transferred again in 1933, his wife Dorothy—a feminist and pacifist who felt at home in Berkeley—divorced him. Dick rarely saw his father (who went on to host a radio show in Los Angeles called This Is Your Government) again, and although throughout his life he was financially and emotionally dependent on his mother, he also deeply resented her… and was convinced she wanted to kill him.

As an adolescent, not only was Dick asthmatic and overweight, he suffered from eczema and heart palpitations. His physical condition may help account for his early discovery within himself—while torturing a beetle, in the third grade—of a powerful capacity for empathy: with insects and animals at first, and eventually with weak and powerless human beings, too. He also immersed himself in the fantasy worlds of opera music, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and science fiction. (Although pseudo-scientific adventure stories had existed at least since Verne and Wells, the term ‘science fiction’ was coined shortly before Dick was born by Hugo Gernsback, founder of Amazing Stories, the first sf pulp magazine.) Determined to be a writer, at nine Dick wrote, edited, published, and drew cartoons for a short-lived broadside entitled The Daily Dick; at twelve he taught himself to type (he was eventually able to output 120 words per minute); and at fifteen he got his hands on a printing press and published a newspaper called The Truth. But he did not do well in high school: a self-diagnosed agoraphobic and ‘schizoid personality,’ Dick suffered attacks of vertigo, and dropped out in 1947.”

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“Philip K. Dick Typed 120 Words A Minute Even When He Wasn’t On Speed”

February 21, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

pkd89

Long Form pointed me to a great 1993 New Republic article by Alexander Star about Philip K. Dick. An excerpt:

A heavy man with an absent smile and an intent gaze, Philip Dick typed 120 words a minute even when he wasn’t on speed, drank prodigious quantities of scotch and completed five marriages and over fifty novels before the pills and the liquor conspired to kill him at 54. His busy life has been ably narrated by Lawrence Sutin in his biography, Divine Invasions, which appeared a few years ago. Born in 1928, Dick witnessed the Depression from inside a broken home. His father, an employee of the Department of Agriculture, left the family in 1931 and went on to host a radio show in Los Angeles called This is Your Government. Dick grew up with his mother on the fringes of Berkeley’s fledgling bohemia. A troubled student, he was often “hypochondriacal about his mental condition,” as one of his wives later put it. And like many troubled boys of the time, he became a voracious reader of the science fiction pulp magazines that were then at their peak. In Confessions of a Crap Artist, a novel written in 1959, he wryly portrayed himself as an awkward kid spouting oddball ideas from Popular Mechanics and adventure stores: “Even to look at me you’d recognize that my main energies are in the mind.”•

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