philip k dick essay

Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light – Originally published in paperback in 1975, Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light by Angus Taylor was one of the first extended critical examinations of Philip K. Dick’s work. This reformatted digital version features Cora Lee Healy‘s illustrations from the original edition. The essay is made available here with the author’s permission. Patrick Clark has been kind enough to contribute these three articles to philipkdickfans.com. Be sure to check out his excellent PKD web zine PKD OTAKU The Tangled History of The Unteleported Man Compiled by Patrick Clark Afterword to Valis by Kim Stanley Robinson. From Thrust 1998, contributed by Frank Bertrand. Philip K. Dick by 1975: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said – by George Turner, contributed by Frank Bertrand. Reprinted with permission from Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. Four Levels of Reality in Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint – An essay originally published in Extrapolation, Summer 1998. Translated from French and used with permission. Is The Eye In Sky The Author’s?: An examination of Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth by Steve Sneyd. Originally published in UK’s Terrible Work, 1, Spring 1993. Philip K. Dick: The Real Thing– by Bruce Gillespie. This article first appeared in SF Commentary 9 from Feb. of 1970 and was reprinted in Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd edited by Bruce. Here you will find some great insights into PKD’s fiction. The Non-Science Fiction Novels Of Philip K. Dick (1928–82) – The transcription of a talk by Bruce Gillespie about some of Phil’s overlooked fiction. Who Are The Toymakers?: An essay on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – An essay on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner by Hrafnhildur Blöndal The Relationship Between Humans and Machines: Through the Eyes of Philip K. Dick – An analyis by Eli Eisenberger (May, 2005) The “postface” — “afterword” we’d say.
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  The Psychedelic Shakespeare Solution presents :  I UNDERSTAND PHILIP K. DICK Terence Mckenna 1991 Afterword which appeared in the book : In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis edited by Lawrence Sutin ____________ True stories have no beginnings and neither does the tale of PKD’s encounters with the Overmind. But we writers understand narrative economy, and for purposes of narrative economy his story seemed to him to begin with the mysterious break in and riffling of his papers that was made notorious by an article in Rolling Stone, which brought Phil long-delayed and much-deserved fame. The break-in date was 11/17/71. It was a date and a style of referring to time that Phil used frequently. I turned twenty-five the day before. It was no casual birthday either. I met my natal day by sifting down and sincerely preparing myself for an Apocatastasis, the final Apocalyptic ingression of novelty, the implosion really, of the entire multidimensional continuum of space and time. I imagined the megamacrocosmos was going to go down the drain like water out of a bathtub as the hyperspatial vacuum fluctuation of paired particles that is our universe collided with its own ghost image after billions of years of separation. The Logos assured me that parity would be conserved, all sub-atomic particles except photons would cancel each other, and our entire universe would quietly disappear. The only particles that would remain, according to my fantastic expectation, would be photons, the universe of light would be exposed at last, set free from the iron prison of matter, freed from the awful physics that adhered to less unitary states of being. All mankind would march into the promised garden. I felt I was well situated for the event as I, quite consciously and deliberately, and to the concern of my friends, had placed myself in the teeming, hallucinogen saturated center.
Why our July meeting’s postponed Our schedule’s out of joint. Our July reading meeting will be postponed until August as the core members of the PKD Reading Group will be presenting at an international conference at the University of Sydney. This allows us to spend twice as long on pages 312-444 of The Exegesis, which, as we dig deeper into the tome, seems to require these postponements, doublings, and prolongations of time. The reading group will be presenting a three-paper panel at this conference, a novel-centered four-day affair titled “The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000.” Reassessing the novel as “portable property” after John Plotz’s 2008 book, the conference will take up the term “prosaic” in new ways, addressing the practice of novel reading as an ‘everyday’ activity, and considering novels as texts uniquely given to an authors’ (and readers’) study of that which is ‘prosaic’ and imaginary in the material world (and their interrelations). More information about the conference, and registration for attendance to it, is best accessed through the conference’s novelnetwork.org website. We’d love to see you there. I’ll embed our (pdf) abstract below for those interested: Doing ‘things’ with Dick’s novels As our abstract suggests, we’ll be sketching out a broad relation between Dick’s novels and their depiction or relation to material ‘things.’ More generally, our papers will give attending scholars and participants an overview of this reading group, Philip K. Dick’s life and career, and Dick’s own obsession with objects of all kinds. Our panel’s engagement with Dick’s psychological and ontological responses to objects is signalled by our abstract’s title: ‘Novel Objects: The Unsettling Life of Things in the Novels of Philip K. Dick.’ Dick’s obsession with his filing cabinet, which hosted a vast collection of SF magazines, and his fixation on.
In his essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (written in 1978 but not published until 1985, as an introduction to the story collection I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon), Philip K. Dick outlined the principal themes of his fiction: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. Philosophers, it is sometimes said, are people who sit around asking “Is this table real?” The point of the caricature is to suggest that philosophy is too esoteric, divorced from the problems of everyday life. After all, except for the mentally ill, everyone knows what reality is, so why ask? Dick was a writer of fiction, however, not a philosopher, and his concern with the nature of reality was anything but abstract. His stories and novels explore collisions between multiple realities. Dick was particularly interested in the interplay between subjective and objective reality. As he noted in a letter written in 1970,I have been very much influenced by the thinking of the European existential psychologists, who posit this: for each person there are two worlds, the idios kosmos, which is a unique private world, and the koinos kosmos, which literally means shared world (just as idios means private). To function as an “authentic human being,” one must have these two worlds in balance, according to Dick. When the shared vision of the koinos kosmos ruthlessly dominates the private vision of the idios kosmos, the result is loss of identity, mindless conformity—a popular fear when Dick began publishing in the 1950’s, the decade that produced Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Vance Packard’s early study of the coercive power of advertising.