A Philip K. Dick prank

 The above is the back cover of a British reprint of Philip K. Dick's classic, Hugo-winning novel, The Man in the High Castle. There's an author photo on the back cover of a bearded author. Except it's not Dick -- it's Ted White, the science fiction editor, author and fan who recently died. 

White tells the story in The Amazing Editorials, a collection of the editorials White wrote while editor of Amazing, a science fiction magazine. I bought the book and began reading it after I heard of White's death.

White explains that in a 1965 visit to see Dick,  he showed Dick a photo of himself that made him look a little like Dick. Dick asked for a copy of the photo, explaining that as a joke, he wanted to send it to his agent to fulfill a request for an author photo for the British Penguin edition of High Castle. 

Both authors then forgot about the matter, but in 1966, White thought to bring it up, and Dick said that yes, the photo had been used, and he gave White a copy of the book.

There is other Dick material in White's book, including a plug for Confessions of a Crap Artist, the first publication of a mainstream Dick novel. It was published by David Hartwell, the famous science fiction editor who went on to edit some of Robert Anton Wilson's work.  (And if you follow that link, here is part two of that interview.)

Ansible Editions is the catchall name for all books published by David Langford; some are free as ebook downloads, some (like the Ted White book) cost money, at least some are available as paperbacks. The titles are worth a look if you are into fandom or science fiction. 

Scott Apel discusses his Philip K. Dick book

D. Scott Apel's book Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection is a key document for Dick fans. The anthology includes a very long interview with Dick and pieces by Robert Anton Wilson, R. Faraday Nelson and Dick himself. Lawrence Sutin, author of Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, says Apel's book is "Hands down the most joyous and entertaining book on Philip K. Dick."

For some useful background on the book, see below for an interview with Scott conducted by his friend, ej "Jami" Morgan. 

This interview first ran in PKD OTAKU #22, 14 May 2011. 

ej Morgan is a writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Among other books she is the author of the novel A Kindred Spirit. Scott describes it as "A brilliant novel about a woman who believes she's getting post-mortem messages from PKD." You can visit her official website. 

Here is Ms. Morgan's original introduction to the interview:

Never underestimate the “Phil factor.” And if you wonder what that means, D. Scott Apel’s Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection is as good a place as any to dive in for a big dose. For instance, just as Editor Gregg Lee and I were discussing pulling the 1987 book out of mothballs and taking another look at it, Scott announced he is re-releasing the book as a trade paperback this spring. That’s synchronicity.

Who among us has not thought of a favorite PKD book, and had it turn up at a used book store? But, the more you dig in and learn about Phil’s real-life experiences, the freakier the Phil factor gets. Synchronicity becomes deeper and more Dickian. Scott found out first hand – with both real Phil and post-Phil encounters – and those accounts are the essence of The Dream Connection.

Morgan further reports (in 2026) " I did a lengthy telephone interview with Scott in the late 1990s that was supposed to  appear in Issue #8 of Radio Free PKD. Sadly, there was no Issue #8.  Greg Lee stopped printing the ‘zine after Issue #7." But OTAKU editor Patrick Clark agreed to run it, she says. 

This interview is reprinted here by kind permission of ej Morgan. 

JAMI MORGAN: Some RFPKD [Radio Free PKD] subscribers read your book when it first came out, and serious Dickheads may recall that you were a contributor to the original PKDS newsletter. Others will discover you and TDC in this second release. So, let’s start by going back to those early days in 1977 when you first met Phil. You were just a kid then, right? 

SCOTT APEL: Well, I was 25, just out of college and my friend Kevin Briggs and I had been working on a book project called Approaching Sci Fi Authors for a couple of years. To put the time frame in perspective, this was pre-Star Wars; a time when sci-fi was still pretty much a cult interest. We were sending out letters and lining up interviews with several authors who lived in or near the California Bay area. So, one day I come home and my Mom (I was living at my parents’ house at this time) said your friend Phil called. I said, “Who? I don’t have a friend Phil.” Mom said, “He just said, ‘Tell Scott his friend Phil Dick called.’” Of course, I was blown away. We still had some trouble getting the interview set up, because he tried to back out a couple of times. But his girlfriend at the time, Joan Simpson, helped convince him. I remember she told us it would be the best thing for him right now, since he had been brooding and melancholy and was having trouble writing at the time. Anyway, he finally agreed to let us come to his home in Sonoma and do the interview. It turned into a 2-day session with us staying overnight at his house. I described the whole experience in detail in the book. 

JM:  You intended to just ask basic questions about how he wrote his science fiction, but this led into an entirely different area when Phil began talking about his experiences with psychic phenomenon, something you didn’t anticipate when you set up the meeting, right? 

APEL: First of all, we didn’t anticipate the enormous length at which he wanted to talk about these things. Secondly, we never anticipated the enormous depth at which he wanted to approach some of these subjects. Science fiction and literature became just a jumping off point to talk about religion and philosophy. With most of the other writers [interviewed for the project] we were lucky to get an hour interview. With the really good ones, like Ted Sturgeon and Norman Spinrad, we were doing 2 hour interviews just because they had so much to say. But Phil, by comparison, had four times as much to say. Sturgeon was pretty well tapped out after the two hours, but with Phil we had over eight hours on tape. And we just decided that was the place to stop because it became obvious we could do a whole damn book just on Phil. So, yes, we certainly were taken by surprise by the depth at which he wanted to discuss the material. 

JM: You were interviewing him in 1977 and Phil’s life-altering event occurred in February/March 1974. The incident he called the “2-3-74” event. So, all of this was pretty fresh at the time, right?

APEL:  Exactly. In fact, the interview in The Dream Connection is THE most complete and most in depth description of those experiences that has ever been published anywhere. He may have had longer conversations with closer friends of his, like Paul Williams, but as far as what’s lasted on paper and anyone who wants to understand those experiences and doesn’t read TDC isn’t getting the full story. I’m very proud of that fact. That this most controversial part of the man’s life is the part we took most seriously, seriously enough to print it in its entirety. 

JM: And it certainly is controversial, because many of his original hard-core fans are really uncomfortable with his later works and believe he had some kind of physical or biological episode or that he was even insane. There’s the whole gamut of how people react to that part of his life. But, in TDC you came away feeling he was quite sane.

APEL: Oh yeah. There is no question about it in my mind. And, I can make a claim like that if only because I have a degree in psychology and I’ve worked in mental asylums. They train you to tell the difference between people who are sane, people who are insane and people who are acting insane. Phil was not in any way crazy. There may be some biological explanation for some of his experiences; you know a brain embolism or over-medication. I’m not a medical doctor. But, I do know the man was absolutely sincere in his belief that he had an experience that was in some way outside the realm of normality. He did his best to describe it and devoted most of the rest of his life of his life trying to put it in some kind of perspective and context. 

Now, if you turn to a book like Cosmic Consciousness by [Richard] Bucke, I believe his name is, a classic in the field, he writes descriptions of any number of people who claim to have had some kind of unusual experiences. They’re pretty much all the same and they’re very much like Phil’s. They all feel they’ve had some type of revelations. Now whether they’re medical or chemical, physical or spiritual, or all of the above – nobody knows exactly what that stuff is, yet the experiences all have similar characteristics. I’d say Phil is just another one. He had the gates of perception open, given whatever cause and for whatever reason. But, it certainly was not something that should be considered insane. It may be the next step in human evolution to get people of their minds and into the cosmic consciousness.

JM: Phil ranged all over the place, not only in his conversations with you but also in the Exegesis and in VALIS, trying to decide if his experiences were extra-terrestrial or contact with some disembodied entity. 

APEL: Yes, was it a disembodied spirit, was it his own reincarnation memories, was it totally drug-induced, was it aliens contacting him – this was a man with an enormous imagination. So, when he came up with a theory he tried to match it to the facts, because he did have some kind of scientific training. He would think of a theory and then he’d compare it to the facts and eventually discard most of it, which I think maybe a lot of people who read about Phil’s later life fail to understand. He was approaching all this stuff in a very scientific manner by applying his theories to the data and then discarding most of it as irrational. I like to think of it as entertaining an idea. He wasn’t convinced that aliens were affecting his mind or that Russians were transmitting works of art into his head. That was a theory. The way he tested a theory was to try it out – wear it like a suit of clothes for awhile and see how comfortable it was. Eventually the flaws would appear. In fact, he used the clothing metaphor. He would find a loose thread and pull on it until the entire suit came apart. Then he’d discard that and get a new set of clothes.

JM: You devote about 75 pages to the interview that took place and then conclude with an Afterward on the conspiracy-cloaked Russian Xerox Missive. In it Phil, or actually Joan (his then-girlfriend) referred to that particular theory as the “really important part.” Can you explain what that was all about? 

APEL: (pause) No, I really couldn’t. (long laughter from both of us.) That was just another piece of data in the hopper. Who knows what that was all about? I couldn’t even begin to explain it. [NOTE: Paul Williams does delve into the Xerox Missive extensively in his book Only Apparently Real for anyone who wants to further explore that point.] 

JM: And, what state was VALIS in at the time of your interview with Phil?

APEL: Well, that’s a complicated subject, but it is all spelled out in great detail in TDC. He had written a book called Valisystem A which I believe became, in part, Radio Free Albemuth. By the time he released VALIS, his thinking had changed so radically that the two books appeared to be completely different. At the time we interviewed him, he had finished Valisystem A, but wasn’t happy with it. He knew there was more to it, but didn’t know what and he wanted to take it in a different direction, but wasn’t sure where.

According to Russ Galen, Phil’s agent for many years, Phil told Russ that it was our interview that helped unlock his creativity and made him think in different directions, and actually enabled him to throw it aside and start from scratch and rewrite VALIS. 

JM:  Wow, now that’s heavy. (pause) That really brings up the issue about David and Kevin and your feelings that at least in part, you and Kevin Briggs were incorporated into David and Kevin of VALIS. 

APEL: There’s a couple of lines right out of our interview with him that comes right out of the mouths of David and Kevin in VALIS. Plus, most of the exploits in VALIS took place in Sonoma. Kevin [Briggs] called me and said, “Guess what! We’re characters in the book.” Then I read it and it was very clear to me that he did use us as characters. And, then I talked to Phil – I called him on the phone – and I said, hey, I know how you work, that you use real life people. And I know how you combine people occasionally into characters in your fiction, but I want to know is this David in VALIS actually David Scott Apel? And, is this Kevin really Kevin C. Briggs. And he said, “Sure are.” So, I got it directly from him that these characters were at least partially based on us. Now, Tim Powers and Kevin Jeter have also claimed that the characters are based on them. And I know they’re the more famous ones – the better and longer term friends of Phil’s than Kevin and I were. Yet, when I asked Phil about it, he was confirming that he at least used us in part, combining me and Tim Powers into David and Jeter and Briggs into Kevin.

You know, I hate to make a big deal out of this. I don’t want to sound like one of those people who is waving their hands for attention, yelling “Me, Me.” I just want people to know the real story. Because I’m sure at the time, even Jeter and Powers didn’t know the whole story. That’s all. And, I’m very proud to be associated in Phil’s mind with Tim Powers. He’s an enormous talent. We’ve since exchanged letters and it’s a point of honor for me that Phil would connect us in that manner. 

JM: EJM: Ok, let’s discuss what you call Phase Two – the second section of the book – dealing with dream telepathy. Do you recall who first mentioned the topic? Did Phil mention dream telepathy or did you?

APEL: No, I think I did, because a good friend of mine wrote a book called Dream Telepathy and we wanted to know if Phil had read that. Actually, Phil mentioned the concept and I said what you’re talking about sounds like the same thing in the book by Alan Vaughan where he covered experiments by several scientists who actually transmit and receive material in the dream state. So, it was something Phil was definitely aware of. 

JM: I bring it up because it’s crucial to the next phase of what happens in your book, AFTER Phil dies. 

APEL: Well, any condensation of those experiences runs the risk of sounding crazy. Which is why I took the time and the effort to detail the entire range of experiences in the book. Any kind of summary here will make it sound like something from the psychic friends network or a bad movie, some psycho-thriller made for cable TV. But, yes, a year or so after Phil died I began having dreams about him and about subjects he had talked about. And, as someone who had been keeping a journal of dreams for over 20 years, I paid a great deal of attention to them. I was able to identify them as very different from any other type of dream I had ever had and therefore paid even more attention to them. They all seem to revolve around these ideas of Phil communicating with me. So, you know, I’m fairly open-minded, and decided, OK, I’ll entertain the idea. But, what really made my mind up to even pursue this was the tremendous number of “synchronicities” that started to cluster around Phil Dick related activity. I couldn’t ignore the links between what was happening inside my mind and outside in my own environment. So, at the risk of looking like a fool – something I excel at – I decided Phil had some kind of message that he wanted to get through. So let’s just go ahead and take the next step and try to find a medium – which for some people is perhaps a contradiction in terms. But, since I knew Alan Vaughn who wrote the book Dream Telepathy, I contacted him and set up meetings with a number of different mediums and eventually I got some decent evidential data. 

[Note: Now, I won’t attempt to cover this vast amount of “evidential date” here. That is Phase 3 and takes up nearly half of the book. That’s for you to fully explore, if interested, in Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection. What I can say is that just as Scott believes Phil was completely sane and rational, I found Scott to be quite convincing, incredibly honest and sincere— both in the book and during this interview — discussing his experiences with mediums and attemps to contact Phil on the other side. And Scott wondered aloud about why so many people had similar experiences.] 

APEL: You know, I thought it was very interesting that after Phil died, others wrote about Phil making contacts... [Michael] Bishop, [Richard] Lupoff...was this same psychosis affecting them? Maybe because he WAS making a big splash in a psychic pond and ripples were going out to his friends. I just happened to be close enough to get doused. Others were far enough away to just see the ripples.

JM: And now looking back on it, what do you think the message was?

APEL: He wanted his friends to know he was OK, that he loved them and here’s some evidence that there is life after death. In some sense the whole story, in true Phil Dick fashion, transcended even the idea of interesting experiences, he wanted to come back and prove his philosophy, the stuff he spent his adult life writing about. In some sense, it’s like a footnote to say: “By the way, I’m back and I was right.”

[Note: I first read TDC in 1997 while engaged in my own series of Dickian synchronicities—“meaningful coincidences” as Scott described them. It was truly weird since I was working on a concept for my own novel which deals with Phil making contact from the hereafter [A Kindred Spirit]. When I started writing it, I had no idea so many others had tackled the topic of Phil “coming back.” Of course, I was just learning how pervasive the Phil factor is. TDC includes an essay by Ray Nelson, co-author with PKD on The Ganymede Takeover, in which Phil visits him in the dream state urging him to write a sequel to The Man in the High Castle, based on notes they once developed in a writer’s group. Just good essay material? Nelson later confirmed to Scott that he started working on the sequel because the experience with Phil was “so real.” I’ve since learned that Paul Williams, former literary executor for Phil’s estate and founder of the PKD Society (and rock historian extraordinaire), experienced untold synchronicities, at the least, and at times actual feelings of contact with Phil, during the years he spent on the PKD project. I mentioned some of this to Scott during our conversation.]

APEL: Now, what you’re saying about you and Paul Williams and other people, that’s what I’m talking about. Synchronicity is not unusual among writers or among creative people. It’s actually quite common in the creative fields. What IS unusual is that so many people who knew Phil, or were fans of Phil, have these experiences clustered around Phil Dick material. Most writers, when they experience synchronicity, think it’s a sign that they’re on the right track, discovering meaning somehow and doing what they should be doing. But, what interests me is how many people, who are fans of Phil, have experiences like this related directly to Phil Dick material. It’s another step beyond just synchronicity. It’s the added Phildickian element and the real sense that life is becoming like a Phil Dick novel. You know, am I dealing with Palmer Eldritch? In Phil’s afterlife is he a benign interfering god or like Palmer Eldritch who is going to haunt me for the rest of my friggin’ life?

[Note: Scott says the experiences stopped once he published the book in 1987 and he felt closure to that ten-year period of his life. He went on to other projects, writing nearly 600 video and movie reviews for the San Jose Mercury News, writing plays and even appearing in some Killer B movies he became notorious for reviewing. So, why re-visit the book and the strange PKD experiences now?]

APEL: A whole new generation of readers are discovering Phil on their own or thorough the Internet. The first time I published the book it was truly a labor of love, my tribute to the man—Philip K. Dick and I didn’t care if I made a dime of profit. This time my motives are a bit more mercenary—I would like to make some money.

I’ve started up this new web-based independent small press publishing business. In addition to the Phil Dick book, I’m offering Chaos and Beyond, an anthology of Robert Anton Wilson material, my own Killer B’s video guide, and a real Phildickian science fiction comic novel called MFU, which I think is one of the funniest damn things I have ever read. And, finally, I do intend to publish that collection of interviews with the science fiction authors. There is so much brilliant material from the writers, material that should not be lost or forgotten. So, for now, I just hope to get my small press off the ground and make a success of it.

[This interview was originally written in 1999 for Greg Lee’s ‘zine Radio Free PKD. Scott Apel did republish TDC as a trade paperback in July of 1999.]

D. Scott Apel: Favorite books and Philip K. Dick recommendations

[Editor's note: This blog posting originated when I asked Scott what his favorite books are, and then asked a follow-up question asking him for his five favorite Philip K. Dick books. It  was not originally written as a freestanding essay. -- The Management.]

By D. Scott Apel
Special  guest blogger

My all-time favorite quote comes from Voltaire: “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.” I mention this partially because I spent many, many hours in discussion and debate with other writers and editors at Apple’s iTunes, where we dissected specific words to determine how people understand them and whether we were being misleading when using these words in various promotions. “Best,” for instance, was a verboten term. Who decides what is “best,” and what qualifies a piece of content to be promoted as “best”? Anyone who disagreed with our choices could potentially be offended. But no one had an objection to labeling a movie “great,” since that word is so nebulous as to be meaningless—but it clearly indicates that “we like it.”

 The point is that “favorite” is one of those vague words that could be interpreted in many ways. Does it mean pleasure reading? Great Literature? One’s list of Desert Island Books? Guilty pleasures? I published over 200 film-related articles, many of a “roundup” nature (“The Ten Best Film Noir Classics”) and I always began these pieces with “the ground rules” if only to avoid being accused of leaving out someone else’s choice of “best.” So, before I list my choices, here are my parameters: These are all works of fiction, in English (or translated into English). They are not necessarily Great Literature (although some absolutely qualify), but are the titles that had the most profound and longest-lasting influence on my approach to writing. Each in its way revealed how the boundaries of literature can be expanded and illustrated what language and literature are capable of.

 In no particular order, the most influential works of fiction in my life include:

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Labyrinths by Jorges Luis Borges
The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Oedipus in Disneyland by Hercules Malloy
Any of Donald E. Westlake’s comic caper novels (The Hot Rock; Drowned Hopes; etc.)

 I could also add any novel by Jules Verne and Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (since I’m in it).

 And although they might seem out of place, I would be remiss if I did not include MAD magazine (from 1952-1970) and The National Lampoon (1970-’75) – although not novels, these humor magazines were print publications and were primarily responsible for my subversive attitude and approach to writing humor. Add to that the recordings of The Firesign Theater and Spike Jones, and you’ve got some insight into my sense of humor.

 Non-fiction has informed my psychological development as much as those works of fiction have influenced my writing. The Top Ten Non-Fiction books in my personal pantheon include:

Collected Works by Carl Jung
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
Roget’s Thesaurus
The Path to Enlightenment by the Dalai Lama
Science of Survival by L. Ron Hubbard
Mirror of Venus by Wingate Paine
The Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley

Sadly, these lists cover only print literature. There are so many more deep influences among movies (Forbidden Planet; Last Year at Marienbad; the Marx Brothers; Fellini), television (The Prisoner), and music (Bach, Beethoven’s symphonies, Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, and the Moody Blues are just the tip of that iceberg).

Favorite works by Philip K. Dick

My friend Will Jacobs (also a writer) is also a big PKD fan, and he said something that has stuck with me for like five decades now: "The first Phil Dick book a person reads is always their favorite." My interpretation is that the first PKD novel one reads is so impactful, unique, and different than anything else one has read before that it makes a huge and long-lasting first impression.

My Top 5 Favorite PKD novels would be:

Eye in the Sky (the first Phil Dick book I ever read -- perhaps proving Will's point!)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
VALIS (and not just because I'm in it, but that don't hurt)
UBIK
We Can Build You

...but this is not to say that many others don't have many redeeming qualities. I still quote a paragraph from Clans of the Alphane Moon regularly, for instance.

You will notice that many of Phil's best-known works are not on my list, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Nothing against either of them, just not among my personal favorites.

Note: Scott was Philip K. Dick's friend and did a well-regarded book about Dick. This has been added to the "D. Scott Apel Resources" section on the right side of this page. 

Valis trilogy on sale

I think of ebooks as modern paperbacks, i.e. inexpensive ways to build one's personal library, and I like to occasionally note book sales that might be of interest to readers of this blog. I noticed this week that the Amazon Kindle ebook version of Philip K. Dick's Valis trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) is about $2 right now, cheaper than many cups of coffee. (If  you don't want to give your money to Amazon, you can also get it as an ebook for $2 from Barnes and Noble.) 

Dick is an example of a classic science fiction writer whose books often go on sale as ebooks; I've noticed that Philip Jose Farmer, Poul Anderson and Clifford Simak books, for example, are also often cheap. I recently took advantage of a similar sale to buy and read Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said when it also sent on sale for about $2; it's back up to $14 now. I thought it was one of Dick's best books. 

With RAW fans at the Phil Dick conference

The 3rd International Philip K. Dick Festival was held in Fort Morgan, Colorado from June 13 – 16, 2024. (As you'll recall if you read this blog, that's where Dick is buried.)

My friend Ted Hand writes (about two weeks ago), "As you may recall I've been looking into the PKD/RAW connection and had the privilege of interfacing with the fan-scholarly Dickhead community last weekend. By coincidence David Gill had his last online PKD class meeting the day we all arrived in Fort Morgan, CO, and I got to ask Tim Powers what he remembered of conversations surrounding Cosmic Trigger in Dick's circle in the late 70s. Unfortunately he didn't remember much other than that the book was around. Another Californian who was present remembered that Cosmic Trigger was often on someone's coffee table in counter-culture circles at the time, but Dick scholar Doug Mackey (who remembers reading PKD in 1957!) told me that he found CT pretty dubious at the time. Which helped me calibrate the relative weirdness of the early Dick audience... Also had a nice chat with a young lady from Mississippi who rocked a t-shirt with "I have seen the fnords." Was nice to confirm that the younger generation is still taking acid and reading Prometheus Rising (she was excited to learn that there is more Tarot stuff in Game of Life which she hadn't heard of)."

As for the conference, Ted reports, "The big insight related to PKD was that despite the importance of the Nag Hammadi 'gnostic' scriptures in Valis, there are only a couple of references to Nag Hammadi in the Exegesis (as reported by Gabriel McKee) although we still have another thousand pages or so left to transcribe in the Zebrapedia project."

Also, here is a thread by Ted on his Philip K. Dick project, and he explains, "I think the conclusion to my PKD project is that he can be situated in the Hermetic tradition. Starts out by wondering how to deal with PKD as a transmitter of the Yates take on Bruno's 'magical memory' to the Phildickian Gnostics in works like Valis and Cosmogony and Cosmology."

Also, above is the video of author Jonathem Lethem's keynote talk at the conference, about which Erik Davis says is a "great talk." From the YouTube posting: "His presentation was called 'Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist: Philip K. Dick and Palestine: A Journey by Way of Etienne Souriau's 'Different Modes of Existence,' David Lapoujade's 'World's Fall Apart,' and Cyril Kornbluth's 'The Marching Morons.' "...but us D*ckheads like to call it 'The Sermon on the Porch.' "

For RAW on Dick see two books: Chaos and Beyond and Beyond Chaos and Beyond.   RAW and PKD met at a science fiction convention in 1978 in Santa Rosa, California, here is one account and here is what D. Scott Apel remembers. 

Philip K. Dick's grave in Colorado

 

Author Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982, is not buried in California as you might expect, but in Riverside Cemetery in Fort Morgan, Colorado, in a grave with his twin sister. 

My friend Tracy Harms, who used to live in Cleveland, now lives in Colorado (where he used to live when he met RAW years ago), and he discovered by accident that the grave is nearby. So he went there and sent me the photographs, giving me permission to post them on the blog. 

Here is a photo in context with other Dick family stones.

A closeup view of the headstone from above. Tracy explains, "There were a score of small items that had been left at the twins' stone. Most are visible here along the top of it." 

Addendum: I forgot to give the location of the grave -- Section K, Block 1, Lot 56. 

Total Dick-Head's Guide to Philip K. Dick

An online class that I wanted to pass on information about, seeing as how sombunall of you are Philip D. Dick fans as well as RAW fans: Phillip K. Dick scholar David Gill will be teaching an online class on Dick, 16 weeks total, with "special guests," cost is $185 or $195, classes will be recorded for those not available for the live sessions. The class starts Jan. 30; more information at the link. 

Here is some of the pitch:

"Wanna know what made science fiction’s most enigmatic genius tick? Wanna find the hidden autobiography and obscure literary references in his writing? Take a deep dive into the luminous brilliance of Dick’s fiction and the uncanny weirdness of his life with David Gill, a scholar who has studied PKD for more than two decades, and is currently at work on a full-length biography. The class features an all-star roster of Dick-Head guests including novelist Jonathan Lethem, counter culture thinker Erik Davis, PKD biographer Gregg Rickman, PKD friends (novelist) Tim Powers and ("dark-haired girl") Linda Levy, PKD scholars, Sam Umland, Umberto Rossi, DH Wilson, DE Wittkower (editor of Philip K. Dick and Philosophy), and Gabriel Mckee. 

"The sixteen-week zoom, 32 session course will look at the author’s biography, including his traumatic infancy, drug use, and mystical experiences. It will also offer close readings of over a dozen novels, multiple biographies, academic articles, and secondary sources. We will take a deep dive into early short stories like “Roog” and “Progeny,” and novels including Eye in the Sky, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and Valis."

Gill writes the Total Dick-Head blog. It would be difficult to think of a better opportunity than this class for the really serious PKD fan.

I exchanged emails with Mr. Gill back in 2010, trying to pin down the time that RAW and PKD met at a science fiction convention in California; Gill tried to be helpful, but I never got a definitive answer from him and his army of experts. 

But I eventually tracked the information down! See my blog post, "When Bob Met Phil." The third comment is from Scott Apel. Note that accounts differ on how the two actually met. 

Erik Davis to teach 'Three Stigmata' course

Erik Davis has announced he will teach a course on Philip K. Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch starting Jan. 23.  a five-week course available in person in Berkeley, California, and also available online.

Full details here, but here are some relevant bits from the announcement: 

"The first evening will serve as an introduction to Dick, his personal and psychological trials, and the religious experiences and concerns that started to emerge around the time he wrote this wild, biting, and creepy novel. Subsequent nights will work through the book in 50-60 page increments per week (read the Vintage edition if you can). Topics will include: virtual reality, consumer psychedelics, Barbie dolls, space-faring billionaires, transhuman augmentation, global warming, Mars colonization, the Eucharist, the cosmic 'Outside' (H. P. Lovecraft and Olaf Stapledon), the Gnostic demiurge, the bardo, the nature of evil, the genre of horror, and the breakdown of consensus reality.

"We will make the lecture portion of the evenings available for online viewers, but I will continue my practice of not recording the Q&A portion of the evening, which I find creates a better vibe in the room, loosens me up, and rewards those who make the trek and pay the bucks."

NY Times critic on Philip K. Dick

The New York Times has a book critic named Molly Young who writes a column/newsletter called "Read Like the Wind," which offers book recommendations for both old and new titles. (Apparently there are people who need book recommendations. I have recommended hundreds of books to myself, but only manage to read a few dozen every year.)

The latest column is called "The Essential Philip K. Dick," and Young discusses Dick and recommends ten of his books, with recommendations aimed at different reader interests, e.g. what to read if you are totally new to Dick, what to read if you want his best novel (Young says it is Ubik, which I still haven't read) and so on. I've read something like 5-10 Dick books, but Young is obviously is more well-read on Dick than I am, and apparently a bigger fan. The above photo from Twitter shows the license plate on her car. 

My favorite Dick novel is The Man In the High Castle. I haven't felt a huge urge to read him since reading Now Wait For Last Year a few years ago, although I suppose I ought to try Valis and Ubik. 

Here is Molly Young's website.  And you can follow her on Twitter. 

Hat tip, Nick Helseg-Larsen, although also I also take the Times and subscribe to Ms. Young's newsletter. 

The Beatles were Philip K. Dick fans? [UPDATED!]

Philip K. Dick, paperback writer 

Martin Wagner posted this comment on my post a couple of days ago about the Beatles' Revolver album:

"Tessa Dick, the last wife of PKD, said in an interview with the German Spiegel, that John Lennon called her husband in the 1970s to tell him that The Beatles wrote "Paperback Writer" in his honor."

I was surprised to see that. Here is a bit more: 

"In an interview given to Der Spiegel in 2016, Philip K. Dick's last wife, Tessa Dick, said that John Lennon had called her husband during the 1970s and told him that Paperback Writer had been written in honor of him. Source (in German): [1]. Quote from the linked interview: "In den Siebzigerjahren rief einmal John Lennon bei ihm an und sagte ihm, den Song 'Paperback Writer' hätten die Beatles ihm zu Ehren geschrieben." ("In the 1970s, John Lennon called him [= Dick] to tell him that The Beatles had written 'Paperback Writer' in his honor.").

"Of course, we also have John's own quotes in the article that it's mainly Paul's song, but if you look at those quotes closely, you'll see John actually talks about the tune as being entirely Paul's, not the lyrics."

Source.

My old friend Brett Cox (mentioned in the Revolver blog post) once wrote a parody of "Paperback Writer" for a fanzine about a person who wants to publish a science fiction novel; from memory, I believe the first line was "Donald Wollheim won't you read my book?" Wollheim, a famous SF book editor, was one of Dick's editors. So perhaps Brett was more right then he knew? This reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson's bit  in Illuminatus! about Beethoven being a member of the Illuminati, which RAW apparently put in because he loved Beethoven and it was a good joke. RAW later read Beethoven biographies and discovered he was more right than not. 

Many of Dick's titles were first published as paperback originals (much like Illuminatus!, as a matter of fact) and the Philip K. Dick Award is given to the best paperback novel published in the previous year. 

Thanks for the tip, Martin! 

UPDATE: Martin wrote to me and shared this passage from Tessa Dick's memoir, Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright: "On another occasion, Phil took a telephone call from a man who said he was John Lennon, and he was in a hotel room in Canada with Dr. Timothy Leary. 'Yeah, sure, you bet,' Phil said. He did not believe it, but eventually the man convinced him he really was John Lennon of the Beatles and that he and Dr. Leary were both fans of Phil's writing. He told Phil that the Beatles song 'Paperback Writer' was about him."

I still don't know what to make of this, but the additional details are intriguing and seem to add to the possibility the claim is true. A possible date for the phone call would be 1969, when John Lennon recorded the song "Give Peace a Chance" in Canada. Timothy Leary was present. Details here. 

Philip K. Dick on RAW

I don't actually know what Mr. Dick was referring to. Source: Ted Hand on Twitter, and he also has Dick quotes on the McKennas and Timothy Leary.

Review: 'High Weirdness'

Was Philip K. Dick just crazy in early 1974, or did he have information beamed into him by a Vast Active Living Intelligence System?

And what was it about California in the 1970s that made mystical seekers ready to see a UFO after eating psychedelic mushrooms in Colombia,  or to obtain communications from advanced beings from the Sirius star system?

These are some of the questions California “counter-public intellectual” Erik Davis considers in his new book, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, released in the U.S. by the MIT Press.

The book focuses on three people who were, well, highly weird.

Author Terence McKenna journeyed to Colombia to gobble up psilocybin psychedelic mushrooms and wrote a popular handbook (under a pseudonym) with his brother explaining how to grow them at home.  Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illuminatus! cult novels  and friend of Timothy Leary, experimented with combining occult rituals, drugs, sex and Beethoven and wound up wondering what reality he was living in. Dick already was a prominent science fiction writer with mental health issues and a drug habit when he began to perceive information was being beamed into his brain.

Davis chronicles and tries to make sense of their wild stories, pursuing his avowed goal is to “take them seriously without taking them literally.”

High Weirdness the most absorbing  nonfiction book I’ve read in months, draws parallels among the three men and their similar experiences. Davis also offers similar but briefer accounts of Leary, who thought he was receiving messages from the stars while serving time in a California prison, and dolphin researcher John Lilly, who once blamed a “Borg-like Solid State Intelligence” for shutting down the Los Angeles airport.

Wilson fans will want to know that Davis devotes two chapters to him, one focusing on Illuminatus! and the other on Cosmic Trigger. The discussion of Wilson's libertarianism and esoteric influences are well-handled. Wilson also haunts the Philip K. Dick chapters in the book; Davis often uses Wilsonian terminology to discuss Dick.

The most well-known of Davis’ weird trinity is Dick, who died in 1982 from a stroke but since then only has grown more popular. His fiction has been made into movies and TV shows such as Minority Report, Bladerunner and The Man in the High Castle, and reissued in new editions by the Library of America.

Dick has been closely studied by scholars and fans attempting to make sense of his oddball novels and his Exegesis, a nonfiction document more than 2,000 pages long.  Dick scribbled it trying to make sense of a 1974 experience when a reflection from jewelry worn by a woman making a delivery to his home triggered a series of visionary experiences which inspired  his last novels.
Davis helped edit an abridged version of the Exegesis for publication.

He also seems to have read nearly everything written about Dick and remembered many of the best bits. I did not know, for example, that Leary gave a copy of Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch to John Lennon, who considered making a movie out of it. And while I knew that Dick took drugs, I did not realize he took dozens of pills every day as a “knowledgeable and compulsive pillhead.” Or that Dick considered himself an Episcopalian.

Dick was only 53 when he died but was married to five different women. Even during his “closest pass at a convention mainstream life” he sometimes hit wife no. 3 and “more than a few plates were  hurled through the open, glass-walled parlor,” Davis writes.

Dick clearly could be a difficult person to be around, but redeemed himself, at least to people who appreciate fascinating and unique novels, by writing works such as The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history novel set in a U.S. occupied by Nazis and Japanese who have won World War II.
Dick came up with the plot twists in High Castle using the I Ching. Davis is adept at detailing the ancient Asian divination system and the other ingredients of the California counterculture.

Davis himself was a friend of McKenna and “teenage Deadhead” who gobbled up paperbacks of Dick’s science fiction novels. But he also took a degree in English literature from Yale and studied religion in a Ph.D. program at Rice.

This gives him the ability to understand the lifestyle of psychedelic weirdos like McKenna and Wilson. But he also has the scholarly chops to trace the influence of the Jesus Freak movement and H.P. Lovecraft on Dick, and to discuss how the experiences of his trio relate to William James The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Referring to his own  “peculiar” and “enchanted,” experiences, Davis writes, “Then and now, I consider my own work and mind to be part of this stream of feral, fringe, psychedelically-inflected thought, though I am equally a creature of media theory, and Zen, and the comparative study of American religion.”

Time to read VALIS

The excellent new Erik Davis book High Weirdness (review coming soon) focuses much of its attention in the Philip K. Dick section on VALIS. That's a Dick novel I haven't read yet, but I plan to read it soon (although I will read the new Neal Stephenson novel first).

I mentioned this to Ted Hand on Twitter and he replied, "VALIS is the book that sent me down the road of years of grad school in philosophy, esotericism and religious studies, approximately as big a deal as Cosmic Trigger. It's also important for being a key literary experiment where PKD injects himself and his 'Exegesis' into the book."

The discussion began when Ted listed his top five PKD novels: Time Out of Joint, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS. I told him I'd have to delete Time Out of Joint to make room for The Man in the High Castle. Discussion here.

My Tarot reading, using PKD cards

When I'm not trying to explain to my friend Ted Hand that RAW's libertarianism is a feature not a bug, we often chat on Twitter and elsewhere about RAW-related and cultural matters.

Ted has been offering Tarot readings for $10, using the new Philip K. Dick Tarot cards he helped create. My newspaper has just been sold to a new owner, Ogden Newspapers, so I'm going through a period of transition. In the mood for input and willing to experiment, I paid him for a reading. When I got the results, I realized that I'm currently reading the PKD section of Erik Davis' new High Weirdness book, a mild synchronicity.

Above are the three cards he drew, and here is his reading:

Here's your PKD Tarot reading. Cut off in the corner is the phrase "issues of scale can also be (a matter of) point of view," which is interesting given your situation with the paper being sold.

Indicator card is Joe Chip from Ubik, the quintessential PKD "small protagonist" who gets a sort of gnostic message from graffiti on the bathroom wall. That feels like some kind of a comment on your seeking out a Tarot reading!

Past card is Four of Swords, "The War with the Fnools." On the side of the cards is the I Ching correlation, interesting that it's minor setback. I'd take that as encouraging.

Future card is "The Dark Haired Girl" which is in traditional tarot the High Priestess, representing intuition or divine inspiration.

Joe Chip correlates with Hanged Man, which represents a situation of stuckness and/or self sacrifice. Can indicate something needs changing in your life or your approach.

Four of Swords in traditional Tarot is Truce.  Can indicate things having been brought to a resting point. Like once a problem has been solved. 

There's some kind of weird allegory about "the changes in the media business" here. I'm also seeing some play on that in Joe Chip's "impossible message." Doing journalism is such a challenging task in this brave new world.

 Dominance of Trumps in a reading indicate "forces beyond your control." So I'm seeing a pointer toward the goddess figure within, the Jungian anima.  There is an opportunity here to open yourself to some strange new ideas.

I guess my advice would be to keep seeking out ways to engage the "lunar consciousness" of weird intuition. Gaze at the moon, get high, find some spooky music. Dip into the irrational.

Oz Fritz reviews the new Crowley book

Aleister Crowley

At his blog, Oz Fritz reviews 93 The Aleister Crowley Primer by J. Edward and Erica M. Cornelius, and recommends it. Excerpt:

The 93 Primer has something for anyone with an interest in Thelema.  It can become an invaluable aid to those with little or no prior exposure to Thelemic philosophy.   It can do the same for anyone with experience ranging from moderate to extensive.  The potential for unlocking new keys, for pursuing new avenues of research in Thelemic study and practice seems just as unlimited and vast as unlocking new keys and gaining new insights to the human mind and nervous system.  This book rewards repeated rereading.

The book apparently is not currently available on Amazon, but here is a page for ordering. 

After I saw Oz' post, I wrote to him, noting that there's a fair amount of material about Crowley in Beyond Chaos and Beyond, the new RAW book. For example, there's a passage where RAW compares Crowley to Philip K. Dick as mystical writers, remarking, "they both fascinate me because they don't settle on any one explanation." Scott Apel then remarks, in a note, that Lawrence Sutin, who wrote an important Dick biography, Divine Invasions, also wrote a biography of Crowley, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. A search on Oz' blog for Sutin's name didn't turn up any mention, so I wondered if Oz had read it.

Oz wrote back, "I greatly enjoyed both of Sutin's bios.  The Crowley one was the first real comprehensive one that wasn't biased against him.  I recommend it highly.  Since then, two other excellent Crowley bios have been published by Richard Kaczynsky and Tobias Churton.  Sutin isn't mentioned in my blog because I read both his bios awhile before I began the blog and the books I do write about tend to be from my current reading."

More on the new Erik Davis book

A little more information has come out on High Weirdness, the new Erik Davis book that is "An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson."

Above, you can see the cover. Also, the release date, at least in the U.S., is July 23. That's Robert Anton Wilson Day.

Here again is the book description:

A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality―but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?

In High Weirdness, Erik Davis―America's leading scholar of high strangeness―examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.

RAW on PKD

A Wikimedia Commons photo of a Philip K. Dick bookshelf. 

Another wonderful "reprint" by Martin Wagner: Robert Anton Wilson's introduction to The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1977-1979. 

Excerpt:

Long ago, when my youth burned green and wild with oats (as Dylan Thomas, or a bad parodist of Dylan Thomas, might write) I picked up a sci-fi magazine and read a very short story called “Roog.” The story described a dog’s “paranoid suspicion” against garbage collectors, told from the dog’s point of view,1 and it absolutely juiced my neurons. I felt as if I had just smoked my first pipe of Alamout Black hasheesh (“We taking you higher”) all over again. I felt wigged. I felt as if “illuminated from above.” I felt, in short, that the dog hat talked to me.

Well, that Trip occurred a long time ago—almost forty years ago, I suspect—but I never forgot the name of the author of “Roog” and I never stopped looking for anything else by him in print. In 1978 or ’79 I finally met him—Philip K. Dick in all his beamish and batty beatitude. We both had reached our mid-forties by then, and I think we shared the subterranean tremors that shift male tectonic plates at that age. Specifically, as writers concerned with the “abnormal,” we each wondered sometimes if we had absent-mindedly graduated, somewhere along the line, from whimsy to lunacy. Phil had the persistent notion that, in February 1974, he had made contact with some sort of Higher Intelligence. Of course, as a card-carrying Postmodernist, he never really believed that totally. I had the suspicion that I had also contacted a Higher Intelligence, in July 1973.2 Of course, as an initiated Deconstructionist, I also never believed that totally.

Read the article to learn about the "baffled suspiciousness" of Dick and other writers.

A couple of notes:

1. The Wikipedia entry for "Roog" shows it was published in the February 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. RAW would have been 21 when he read it. F&SF was my favorite SF magazine as a teen and young adult, I had a subscription for awhile, so I'm pleased to know that RAW sometimes read it. The magazine still exists.

2. The first meeting between RAW and PKD, mentioned in the piece Martin posted, apparently was in October 1978 at Octocon II, a science fiction convention in Santa Rosa, Calif.; I investigated for this blog when they  had met. Find out more. 

Exciting book news: 'High Weirdness'

Erik Davis, speaking at RAW Day 2017. Watch the video of his talk. 

Here's a book many of  you will want to read when it comes out next year: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies by Erik Davis.

From the MIT Press summary:

"An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson.

"A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?

"In High Weirdness, Erik Davis — America's leading scholar of high strangeness — examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality."

Seeing Erik Davis' name on the book only makes the announcement ever more exciting, of course. He was one of the speakers at RAW Day last year in California.  Some of you probably listen to his Expanding Mind podcast.

The MIT Press bio: "Erik Davis is an American journalist, critic, podcaster, counter-public intellectual whose writings have run the gamut from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape, and Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica."

More details from MIT Press:

Hardcover
$34.95 T
ISBN: 9781907222764
500 pp. | 6 in x 9 in
10 b&w illus.
June 2019

Hat tip: Jesse Walker.

When PKD met RAW -- D. Scott Apel weighs in

Philip K. Dick 

Back in 2012, I put up a blog post about the time that Philip K. Dick met Robert Anton Wilson,  at Octocon II, a science fiction convention in Santa Rosa, Calif., in October 1978. 

D. Scott Apel has now weighed in with his own memories of the event, disputing certain facts reported by other parties. You should go back to my original blog post to get everything, but for your convenience, here is the account Scott recently at my blog entry:

Scott Apel said...
My my, how peoples' memories play tricks on them! In the interest of historical accuracy: I attended Octocon II in Santa Rosa in 1978, accompanying my friend Robert Anton Wilson and to perform some interviews. Phil Dick showed up uninvited--hardly as a GoH--simply because he was living in Santa Rosa at that time with a lovely woman named Joan Simpson. Kevin Briggs, my late friend and collaborator ("Science Fiction: An Oral History") and I had interviewed Phil a few months earlier, and I brought him up to Bob Wilson's room and introduced them. (The full story, including RAW's take on the event, can be found in my book "Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection." The book also contains a very funny story of how we introduced Phil to Leigh Brackett that weekend.) While the esteemed editor David Hartwell might recall a party in his hotel room that ended up with RAW and PKD, I recall the events very differently: the PKD/RAW meeting was private, save for Briggs and me; Hartwell may be thinking of a party I attended that ended up with PKD and Theodore Sturgeon deeply in conversation--a conversation that began with Ted saying to Phil "I've waited 15 years to have this conversation with you..." In our interview with Ted later that same day, he explained, "It was a fascinating experience, when you three [Phil, Briggs and me] walked in here and I launched into this." Hope this clears up a few of the misconceptions in previous correspondents' recollections of the event.

Incidentally, the book Scott mentions is quite good. 

What's your favorite Philip K. Dick book?

The Guardian runs an article in which writers are asked to name their favorite Philip K. Dick book. Nicola Barker picks Puttering About in a Small Land. Michael Moorcock likes Time Out of Joint. Adam Roberts likes Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 

Supergee blogs and reveals that Time Out of Joint is his favorite, too.  In a perhaps mild synchronicity, I was going to write Val D'Orazio, the Butterfly Language writer, and as her for a favorite. But before I could, she posted her "desert island books" and two of the six are Dick books:  Exegesis and VALIS. Ted Hand likes Galactic Pot Healer.

My favorite (so far — I've read several but have plenty left to read) is The Man in the High Castle. Not an innovative pick, I'm afraid, but I re-read it a couple of years ago and was knocked out again by how great it was. I like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? too. Obviously, I need to try Time Out of Joint.