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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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I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Sci Fi writer Philip K. Dick was found dead in his Berkeley home. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
sulli
RTFJ.
Funny, because "pretty clean" isn't really something I'd ever describe PKD as having been.
Abrubtly cut short when he was asked about the marked improvement in his writing style and ability since his death.
Interesting application of Ghostscript
At least now because of Mr. Hubbard, when movie critics die, they known for sure what movie is going to be playing on a continious loop in Hell's Metroplex. Poor Gene Siskel...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Oh wow, "Electronic Voice phenomenon?" Spare me. All this page needed was a midi playing "Age of Aquarius."
PKD's writing are strongly rationalist with an intelligent approach to figuring out the strange phenomenon in his life. I think its insulting to turn him into a new age "John Edwards" bullshit spiritual medium commodity.
> Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick's fiction, letters, or essays.
No shit. Maybe because the "voice" he heard on the tape was nothing more than the subconscious projecting quotes hes read elsewhere onto nothing more than tape static and other ambigious sounds from the original recording.
Maybe next week slashdot can expose how Ozzy put all those satanic messages into his albums.
There are times, however, when we need to revisit the past, to get a better perception of the present.
The man had an incredible insight into the social development of mankind as a whole.
He was the fictional equivalent of Alvin Toffler, (i.e. Future Shock), and Desmond Morris, (i.e. The Naked Ape).
It never fails to amaze me how often we lose sight of our collective image. It's things like this that make me slow down, and look around.
"psthumous"?
What's that mean - he's whispering from beyond the grave?
<Rimshot> Sorry.
=TKK
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
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/
It kind of goes to prove that old adage (variously attributed to C.S Lewis or Aurthur C. Clarke) science fiction is the only genuine consciousness expanding drug. (Trust me, I have checked).
Mind you, I think someone should have told P. K. Dick that before 1982.
Favourite Quote: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Can we plz change the picture that is associated with sci fi? Everytime I see that weird looking face, I get a little freaked out.
I still remember one of the first PKD things I read.
Some guy meets a chick at a party who gives him some drugs. Then he watches the president on tv and sees a monster with writhing tentacles. But everything else looks normal.
Comes to find out, the drug he was given was an anti-hallucinogen. Everyone who gets it sees some hideous thing when lookig at the President because there are already drugs in the water. But everyone sees a different hideous thing when on the anti-hallucinogen, but everyone sees the same thing on the hallucinogen....
I'm pretty sure this is PKD. Something in my head says there's a slight chance it was Phillip Jose Farmer, but I don't think so.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
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.
Actually the original script apparently had a (slightly) more plausible explanation - the machines used humans as components in a sort of huge neural network, and the point of the matrix was to keep the conscious parts of the brain occupied while they use the rest as needed (ties in nicely with the whole humans only use 10 percent of their brain thing.) But apparently that was too complicated for the average Joe Moviegoer so they dumbed it down to the stupid batteries thing. Blah.
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.
as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does
Yeah, cause when I walked out of the theatre after seeing it everyone was talking about it's obvious flaw and whether or not the Second Law of Thermodynamics could be circumvented by machines with greater intellect.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
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."
With that said, however, there's a little bit of an (unconscious?) agenda in this "interview" I think. He turns some of PKD's ideas about the world and religion and spirituality into ideas about technology, which really isn't fair or reasonable. Short example:
NO! This isn't PKD talking about technology emerging into consciousness, a la Terminator's SkyNet. For PKD, the prototype of living information was the Torah and the Dead Sea Scrolls, not some piece of technology. It's a very Hegelian view of consciousness and history here, that there's a sort of transcendent and fundamentally spiritual consciousness consisting only of ideas which forms the true substance of the Universe and the medium of history, but the information there isn't bit and bytes in computers; it's ancient Gnostic explanations of the spiritual relationship between God and man and the world.So that's my one gripe about the article. By trying to make PKD's usually incoherent ramblings coherent, he turned some really strange ideas about God and universe into easier-to-digest ideas about technological development. Aside from that, it was pretty clever.