divine transmutation: substance pkd

Jan 30th 2009
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Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane. —Philip K Dick, Valis

I’m 38 days late in reminding myself to remember to write a memorial post for Philip K. Dick on his posthumous birthday. More accurately, I forgot to remember to remind myself. It wasn’t until trolling through mp3blogs a few nights ago that I was reminded by 47 minutes worth of informal interviews I’d never heard at Kick to Kill.

Though many preceding Sci Fi authors encrypted subversive or otherwise atypical messages in the cloak of the genre, PKD was among the first to break from the stereotypical mold almost completely. Abandoning cowboys with lazer guns for a predominately contemporary setting far more like our own than a galaxy far, far away, the majority of his novels swapped outer space for an interpersonal inner space that mirrored his own.

By transmuting a life rife with amphetamine-fueled schizophrenic paranoia, alternate histories and alternating overlaps of conflicting reality into his work, he altered the landscape of Sci Fi and effectively laid the foundation for cyberpunk — inspiring such notable authors as William Gibson, Mark Leyner, Johnathan Lethem, Ursula K. Le Guin and won the praise of his contemporaries including, Robert Heinlein and Stanislaw Lem.

Here is a subtle but startling irony: in several of his best novels, Philip K. Dick - world-famous as a science-fiction writer and hence, by definition, a creator of futuristic worlds - set his narratives in the late twentieth century, an epoch we left behind with great pomp in the celebration of the New Millennium. And yet the novels, and the stories, and the essays of Dick seem as futuristic as ever, which is to say - as vitally relevant to our own time as only great literature can be. —Lawrence Sutin

It should also be noted that the novels and short stories which were later adapted for cinema (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly) arguably stand among the best and most challenging Sci Fi films of our time.

Rather than rant on about PKD, and the impact his work had on me at the right place and time, I’ll close with another quote and a stack of links for you to either dig deeper, or start unfolding the complex and altering experience to be found in the works of Philip K. Dick.

“I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,” Dick wrote of these stories. “In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.” —PKD

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