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Kipple

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Post Sun Jun 05, 2005 3:25 am

I Am Alive and You Are Dead.

Science Fiction | Philip K Dick

Crazy like a fox

Emmanuel Carr?re examines Philip K Dick in I Am Alive and You Are Dead. Michael Moorcock on one of science fiction's strangest sons

Saturday June 4, 2005
The Guardian

I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick
by Emmanuel Carr?re, translated by Timothy Bent
336pp, Bloomsbury ?17.99

Like Hammett, Chandler, Faulkner and Eudora Welty, US writer Philip K Dick was first taken seriously in England and France. New Worlds magazine serialised his "breakthrough" novel Time Out of Joint in 1959 and I believe mine was the first published essay on Dick to suggest that he was something more than a good genre writer. People such as Maxim Jakubowski began to publicise him in France. New Worlds commissioned the late John Brunner to write the first appreciation of Dick to run in a national magazine.

In 1965, after The Man in the High Castle won Dick his only Hugo award, I contacted his agent on behalf of the publisher I was advising. The agent said we could have any four Dick titles for ?600, and an option to buy the next four at the same price. The publisher, perhaps believing books that cheap couldn't be any good, passed. I wrote to Dick saying he was being undersold. Dick, notoriously his own worst enemy, did not, as I suggested, change his agent. Had it not been for Tom Maschler, impressed by the enthusiasm of other writers, Dick might have been as indistinguishably published in the UK as he was in the US. At Cape, Maschler presented Dick, like Ballard, as non-generic, bringing him to a wider if not more lucrative audience. Younger writers such as Fay Weldon and Martin Amis became fans. And Dick's legend as the Acid Sage of Berkeley (though he only ever took one trip, a bad one) was established. Initially, he did nothing to dispel it. Already a mythomane to rival SF writer L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, he discovered the reputation passingly useful as he enjoyed guru-status with the Berkeley young.

In 1952, Anthony Boucher, founding editor of Fantasy & SF, serial mentor and customer of the classical record store where Dick worked, had published his first story. After that, Dick's chief inspiration, when he began turning out fiction for the dwindling magazine market, was his need to pay the rent. He wasn't the only SF writer of his generation to make wholehearted use of dexadrine and valium but for a while he allowed readers to think inspiration came from acid, far more chic in the 60s. Mostly, he was running, as prolific writers generally do, on adrenaline and caffeine.

Emmanuel Carr?re thinks the posthumously published social novels Dick produced were done to please snobbish friends and lovers. However, Dick was continually looking for the form which would best suit his ideas. No great stylist, his problem was that he had a hard time putting a story together without the conventions of genre fiction. His best work uses the methods developed in the pages of Galaxy by a group of writers including Pohl, Kornbluth, Bester, Sheckley and Harlan Ellison. What we today recognise as the "PKD future" is actually a collaboration between these socially conscious writers responding to Eisenhower's and J Edgar Hoover's America and specifically to McCarthyism. Unlike the conservative techno-SF writers, they actually predicted the world we know today.

Dick began to produce twists on conventional dystopias. He lacked Bester's sophistication, Pohl's Marxism, Sheckley's irony or Ellison's eloquence, but he captured the readers' imagination as previously only HP Lovecraft (Carr?re's other literary hero) had done. Educated by Quakers, raised in radical Berkeley, a born-again Episcopalian by 1964, he accepted the malignity of the consumer state, but questioned the nature of its reality.

By the early 60s he had written The Man in the High Castle, Dr Bloodmoney and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and was consistently exploring the themes which would make his wider reputation. Not all his contemporaries found his obsessions stimulating; they saw, in fact, the ruination of a talent. Ellison expressed it with his usual laconicism: "Took drugs, saw God. BFD." But Dick was on a roll, helped by God and the I-Ching. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (on which the film Blade Runner was based), Ubik and A Maze of Death led steadily away from his generic roots. Meanwhile he divorced his third wife, left the relative isolation of Marin County, returned to the city and married again, increasingly losing his grip on reality, eventually coming to believe that a spirit guide had saved him and his new-born son from madness and death. After a short spell in a Canadian rehab clinic, he left admirers and hangers-on behind, and wound up in Fullerton, outside LA.

When Dick finally began to make money from foreign sales and film rights, he credited his spirit guide with helping release a secret store of cash. Living off this money, struggling with mental instability and an imagination no longer reined by genre demands, Dick produced little publishable work in the last years of his life. He devoted himself to a kind of sequel to The Man in the High Castle, called Exegesis, in which he tried to develop the notion that his world where Hitler and Hirohito had won the second world war was no more the real world than was this one. He became so strange that when I was living in southern California in 1979/80 I felt no desire to visit him. Some paranoiacs seem touched by divinity but equally they can be touched by banality. As with William Burroughs, listening to conspiracy theories could be exhausting.

Never leaving his home for weeks, sitting in the dark, playing Dowland and the Grateful Dead, he became increasingly absorbed in his own myth, fed back to him by fans who, like Tolkien's crankier readers, could fairly be called disciples. Yet at an SF convention in Metz, he seriously disappointed fans who had expected a divine junkie and got a Christian missionary. He died in 1982, leaving hundreds of thousands of unpublished words, many of which have yet to see the light.

It's a shame this book contains no index and does not refer to the half-a-dozen or so other critiques and biographies of PKD, nor to interviews, such as Charles Platt's, which was done towards the end of Dick's life and is a rather better journey into his mind. In his excellent Who Writes Science Fiction? Platt spoke respectfully of his subject, revealing a courteous, self-mocking man and recording a classic piece of monologue. Off-tape, Platt wanted to know if Dick was discussing his fiction or whether he really believed all he had talked about in his interview.

Fairly typically, Dick switched to ironic mode: "Why, no, of course not. You'd have to be crazy to believe in something like that."

Another friend, Tom Disch, had his own interview terminated by the intervention of Dick's spirit guide who said it was time for Disch to leave. A courteous soul, he complied.

"Do you think he's crazy?" I asked later.

Disch smiled tolerantly. "Like a fox," he said.

? Michael Moorcock's Mother London is published by Scribner
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BR796164

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Post Sun Jun 05, 2005 11:26 pm

Good reading, thanks!
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Nexus Frog

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Post Thu Nov 30, 2006 9:14 pm

Have any of you actually read that book? I have heard it described as a "French hitjob on an American SF writer". They say it has tons of speculation and zero references. Thus I have avoided it and stuck with the "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick".

Are there any other Biographies that you know of?

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings
Hardcover: 350 pages
Publisher: Pantheon; 1st ed edition (January 24, 1995)
ISBN: 0679426442

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Centauro

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Post Fri Dec 01, 2006 2:46 am

I've read it. While it isn't a normal biography book, and you are right in that it has no references, it shows that the author must have done a not-so-light research. The way he choose to translate what he researched into this book, and the amount of licenses he took in doing so, are of course a matter of discussion, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I'd like to read the Shifting Realilies and compare the two.
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