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Philip K. Dick Speaks (Sorta)
futileboy writes "Erik Davis put together this posthumous interview of Philip K. Dick from some tapes he found (he explains how it came together in his introduction to the interview). It comes off pretty clean."
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Also here's the skepdic entry for electronic voice phenomenon.
If anyone is really interested in PKD (on of my favorite authors) they can check out this great PKD fan site.
If you like what you see, get a copy of "A Scanner Darkly," you won't regret it.
Personally, I'm not offended by the obviously fictional framing device (lame though it may be), but it would only be fair to have references to all the interviews that these replies have been lifted from. After all, "fair use" implies that you're using the materially fairly. Not providing credit where credit is due isn't fair at all.
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Finally, the "spirit voices" tap shtick is especially lame considering the very sophisticated Gnostic sources and theories Dick turned to after his mystical "pink light" experience in 1974. Dick may have been wrong in the later mystical leanings that informed works like Valis, but he was never a believer in the type of fraudulent spiritual hucksterism that continues to rip off "new age" believers even today.
Suggested reading: Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, Time Out of Joint, and (after you've read the rest) Valis and In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
That was just the authors funny (ha, ha, joke, jest jape) way of introducing his fictional interview made up of real PKD quotes.
Or was your comment meant to be humour and it's gone over my head?
"Don't forget the prunes." L. Francis Herreshoff
Do a google search on the author and you'll find he's pretty serious about mysticism. Hell, his bio on frontwheeldrive decribes him as practicing alchemy. I'm afraid this is not a joke.
(ties in nicely with the whole humans only use 10 percent of their brain thing.)
Nice indeed, unless you account for the fact that the "10% of the brain" shtick is completely false. It's a popular myth that has been propagated endlessly in science fiction.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
It is PKD and it's called "Faith of Our Fathers." It's available only in the anthology Dangerous Visions.
e rs
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_of_our_Fath
This is the guy who at one point used the phrase "negative ions" in a story.
If anything, Dick is a writer of speculative fiction. Science never figures prominently in his stories in the same way it does in the hard SF works of Clarke, Niven, Bear etc., and for good reason; while Dick was keenly interested in technology (his works are littered with characters strangely ranting about the inner workings of radios, cars, etc.), he did not have the mind of a visionary technologist, and at heart he was always a philosopher. Dick wrote incessantly about the nature of reality, but it was almost never about atoms and quarks, and almost always about the human experience.
In this Dick has much in common with Vonnegut, Brunner, Disch, Sturgeon, Lem, Bester, Orwell, the Strugatsky brothers, and many others who sits on the thin, mostly political line between mainstream literature and science fiction. Some, like Vonnegut and Lem, have long been embraced by the literati, and Dick would have been amazed and thrilled about the extent to which he has, in later years, been critiqued and accepted by the mainstream as a genuinely visionary thinker.
One of my many favourite PKD quotes, one that illustrates how well he uses future technology as commentary on the so-called human condition, follows.
- The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
(From Ubik, 1969).He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."
"I think otherwise," the door said, "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this [apartment]."
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to this door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
Actually, it's also available in Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. That's where I first read it.
The title is available at the Science Fiction Book Club, as well. If you like Philip K. Dick, pick up William Tenn's Immodest Proposals and Dimensions of Sheckley while you're there.
On the other hand, "Faith of our Fathers" was published in 1967, while "8 O'Clock in the Morning" was published in 1963.
On the third hand, Nelson's first novel, "The Ganymede Takeover," was co-written by PKD.
--In this life, or the next, I will have my vengeance.
As the other poster points out, the quote has nothing to do with bitterness. For more information about Dick's trash sensibilities, see Alexander Star's The God In The Trash: The Fantastic Life and Oracular Work of Philip K. Dick (The New Republic, 1993-12-06), the finest essay-length biography of Dick I have had the pleasure of reading.
If you want to know about dick in his own words read The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick and/or the essayHow To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.
Dick was a one of a kind crazy literary genius who is totally underrated. I wish he had lived longer.
I highly recommend any PKD book to anyone who wants to get an open mind and science fiction like no other. Don't make a judgement on him based on the movies you have seen that are based on his writings, namely Blade Runner, Total Recall, & Minority Report. The only one that came close to doing him justice was Blade Runner, but it fell far short in my opinion but is a good movie in its own right.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout