The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

Dick, Philip

The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

Edited and with an Introduction by Lawrence Sutin

Copyright 1995 - First Vintage Books Edition

ISBN 0-679-42644-2

"A wide-ranging selection of free-wheeling philosophical essays and journal entries; humorous, thoughtful speeches; and plot scenarios... . For both casual and serious Dick fans, The Shifting Realities unearths some gems." -- Boston Phoenix

Philip K. Dick was both our most brilliant science fiction writer and a visionary philosopher who chose to couch his speculations in fiction. For, as he wrote about androids and virtual reality, schizophrenic prophets and amnesiac gods, Dick was also posing fundamental questions: What is reality? What is sanity? And what is human? This unprecedented collection of Dick's literary and philosophical writings acquaints us with the astonishing range and eloquence of his lifelong inquiry.

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick includes autobiography, critiques of science fiction, and dizzyingly provocative essays such as "The Android and the Human" and "It You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." Readers will also find two chapters of a proposed sequel to Dick's award-wi

Witty, erudite, and exploding with intellectual shrapnel, this is the last testament of an American original. This collection confirms Dick's reputation as one of the foremost imaginative thinkers of the twentieth century.

To Mab, for her ceaseless fascination and patience with Philip K. Dick, and to Henry, always the most attentive reader of the Exegesis.

The editor would also like to thank Douglas A. Mackey for his kind assistance in tracing prior publication data for certain of the writings inluded herein.

Introduction

BY LAWRENCE SUTIN

This is a first-time collection, in book form, of significant nonfiction writings -- essays, journals, plot scenarios, speeches, and interviews -- by Philip K. Dick from throughout his career. These writings establish, I believe, that Dick was not only a visionary creator of speculative fiction but also an illuminating and original thinker on issues ranging from the merging of quantum physics and metaphysics; to the potential scope of virtual reality and its unforeseen personal and political consequences; to the discomforting relation between schizophrenia (and other psychiatric diagnoses) and societal "joint hallucinations"; to, not least, the challenge to primary human values posed in an age of technological distance and spiritual despair.

The bulk of these writings have either never before been published, or have appeared only in obscure and out-of-print publications. Dick saw himself first and foremost as a fiction writer, and there can be no question that it is in his stories and his novels -- both science fiction (SF) and mainstream -- that Dick's most permanent legacy resides. As for his nonfiction writings, those few essays and speeches that he published in his lifetime attracted scant attention. In certain cases, this was justified -- their style and quality were markedly uneven; indeed, the same may be said with respect to the contents of this volume, many of which -- the Exegesis entries -- Dick had no intention of publishing in his lifetime and hence no reason to revise and polish. (He may -- there is no direct evidence in his private writings to support the supposition -- have hoped that they be discovered and published after his death.)

But the lack of attention paid to Dick's nonfictional works is due to factors that go beyond uneve

Philip K. Dick (1928-82), author of more than fifty volumes of novels and stories, has become, since his death, the focus of one of the most remarkable literary reappraisals of modern times. From his longtime status as a patronized "pulp" writer of "trashy" science fiction, Dick has now emerged -- in the minds of a broad range of critics and fellow artists -- as one of the most unique and visionary talents in the history of American literature.

This astonishing turnabout in recognition of Dick is evidenced both by the intensity of the praise bestowed on him and the range of voices that concur in it. Art Spiegelman, author/illustrator of Maus, has written: "What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half." Ursula Le Guin, who has acknowledged Dick's strong influence on her own acclaimed SF novels, points to him as "our own homegrown Borges." Timothy Leary hails Dick as "a major twenty-first-century writer, a 'fictional philosopher' of the quantum age." Jean Baudrillard, a leader of the postmodernist critical movement in France, cites Dick as one of the greatest experimental writers of our era. New Age thinker Terrence McKe

What makes this posthumous triumph all the more wrenching is the knowledge that, during his lifetime, Dick could succeed in reaching a wide readership only within the "ghetto" of the (SF) genre -- a critically derided "ghetto" that effectively prevented serious consideration of his works from without. Dick wrote a number of mainstream literary novels (including the above-mentioned Confessions of a Crap-Artist), most of which have been published posthumously. But the greatest of his fictional works fall within the SF genre, which allowed Dick a conceptual and imaginative freedom that was severely crimped by the strictures of consensual reality favored by the mainstream. Even within the SF genre, Dick was considered something of an odd figure, with his penchant for plots that emphasized metaphysical speculations as opposed to "hard" science predictions. Still, the sheer vividness, dark humor, and textured detail with which Dick rendered his spiraling alternate universes and the oh so human characters who inhabited them won over a sizable number of SF readers. In a writing career that spa