Above: PKD with Ridley Scott after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was optioned for Blade Runner (via Tim Powers)
Author Philip K. Dick was an enormous influence on popular culture, including the evolution of virtual worlds/the Metaverse -- both for writing the book that inspired Blade Runner and stories like "The Trouble With Bubbles", which Matt Ball credits (among many) for helping inspire the concept. One of my own favorite PKD novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), has a depiction of a drug-induced virtual world that eerily resembles the avatar-based Malibu that Second Life eventually became.
All that said, here's a fascinating online conversation going on now that fellow PKD admirers should check out:
Philip K. Dick, The Last Ten Years: A Conversation Between a Dark-Haired Girl and Tim Powers
It's a public conversation thread on The WELL, the pioneering online community, with participation by PKD friend and acclaimed sci-fi author Tim Powers, along with commentary by literary giant Jonathan Lethem, who edited the Library of America's Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.
Most specially, they're joined by Linda Castellani (nee Levy), one of Philip Dick's "Dark-Haired Girl" muses. The memories they share of PKD are hilarious and moving, but also, disturbing and sad, as the author struggled (and sometimes lashed out) amidst mental torments, poverty, and drug abuse, just before the cusp of his breakthrough with Blade Runner.
You can read and participate in the whole thread here, and I've excerpted some key passages below. First, from Lethem, commenting on these bruising memories of PKD:
At a moment where readers of this thread may be somewhat stunned into silence by the revelations about "our hero", I'll say that I'm thinking a lot about this stuff in light of my current renewed researches on PKD before the Festival this coming weekend, where I'll try to put some of this in the context of his writing life. I want to say something that I hope will not seem flippant or odd: The cruelty and coldness you experienced from Dick may not have been so much a bug as a feature.
That's to say, the argument about android v. machine in him was also taking place in his life, in his body, in his own choices and responses. Even if he failed to accept this and instead projected it onto others -- and so often, and tragically, he projected it onto a woman. A dark-haired girl.
So when you say "she was a redhead", what you're saying is that in a very sad way, hair-color was a kind of dumbed-down Voight-Kampf Test he was applying. Without understanding that he was actually looking in a mirror. So, that the coldness he thought he detected in you was a terror-vision of the empathy-devoid android self he most feared in himself. So -- perhaps the same thing he processed so powerfully for us in his art (even if processed incompletely, by definition) was inverted into a nightmare in his behavior.
As for those "revelations", Linda shares some of them, such as a time she was driving with the author, who'd already declared his unbridled adoration of her:
The letter in which Phil effusively declared his love for me, was dated April 21. It didn't take long for the dark side to emerge.
My journal entry, dated April 28, [seven days later] starts "I am still shaking," and continues for another seven pages, detailing a shocking event that occurred with Phil.
We were going somewhere, and as usual, I was driving. I think that what triggered this even was that I mentioned I had an upcoming date with Norman Spinrad. Phil reacted in a way I had never seen anyone do before: he curled up into himself as if retreating and then became what I can only describe as catatonic. It scared me…
His enraged reaction inspired her to write this in her journal, addressing him:
“Through the anger, the frustration, the final intense hatred, I heard the truth. Coldly, starkly. You are no one if no one responds. And you are all you think about. Your pain, your heartaches, your disabilities, your self sorrow. And in my hearing them they became my burden but damn, I was so sick of your dependence on me.
I won't let you make it my responsibility to pull you out of your depression. I am not an object of adoration...and I became smothered by the identity you tried to lay on me...I heard the epithets and the unbelievable things you called me*...I heard insanity crying out...you said you'd hit me, and I believe you."
Tim Powers, author of the bestselling Anubis Gates, shares both his dark and amazing times with PKD:
[I]n San Rafael his wife left him and, not wanting to be alone, he let all sorts of street people and runaways stay at his house. I remember noticing that his Hugo award (which he'd won in '62 for Man in the High Castle) was pretty beat-up looking and missing the plaque, and he explained that he had had to use it as a club to break up a fight, and that one of these "roommates" had unscrewed it from its wooden base to hide drugs inside it.
[W]hen Serena or Jim Blaylock and I would be sitting around in Phil's living room over a bottle of Zinfandel late at night, he could convince us of anything.
He'd look around, then lower his voice and say something like, "My researches in the Pre-Socratic apocrypha have revealed to me a fact which has only been known to six people throughout history -- each of whom died within a day of learning it. I'll tell it to you." And we'd be all "No, don't tell us, we're not listening!"
I recall that one time he convinced Blaylock and I that archeological research in San Diego had found that one branch of prehistoric man had one eye two noses apiece, and that the world had not seen the last of these creatures. For reasons I forget, this was a very scary prospect. Blaylock and I drove away expecting to see a one-eyed-two-nosed guy at every traffic light. Apparently someone had claimed such a discovery had been made, and eventually I read a letter in one of the Collected Letters volumes in which Phil laughingly derided the idea -- a week before he solemnly told it to us.’
Powers was one of the first people to discover PKD's untimely death, and was there when Blade Runner led to some final recognition -- and generosity:
He came into a lot of money (I don't recall the amount, but substantial) when Warner Brothers bought the rights to Blade Runner. Actually, I think it made him uncomfortable to have a lot more money than he needed -- he gave away a fair amount, as for instance to UNICEF and other causes. At one point a teller from his bank wrote to him and said, in effect, "Mr. Dick, I see you have a lot of money in your account; I'm having a hard time getting by financially ..." and he sent some money to her.
Linda also shares some of her zany adventures with Philip Dick, such as his hilariously bizarre plan to hide a marijuana stash in multiple Carl's Junior bags. And, profoundly, her insights into why PKD was obsessed with the "dark-haired girl" figure:
Apparently, the search for the dark-haired girl stems from the fact that he had a twin sister who died six weeks after they were born. His mother said that she had dark-hair.
Subsequently, stories have emerged that his mother was unable to produce enough milk for both of them, that Phil got the lion's share, and that Jane died of malnutrition. From what I've heard, she was unable to get the medical and emotional support she needed to feed them.
She called the doctors asking about formula - remember, this was the 1920's; I don't know that commercial formula was even widely available - although a medical team was dispatched, it's not known what they recommended, and Phil's father had ensconced himself at his office so that he didn't have to hear the babies cry. Also, to complicate things, at that time the advice to young mothers was to let babies cry, not to pick them up or comfort them, which went against all of her maternal instincts. I feel the utmost sympathy for her.
Phil paints her as evil when he talks about her. He thought she should have been "put out to sea." But, like everything, it was complicated.
Much more here. The conversation thread is winding down, but hopefully it becomes an important facet for how we remember the legendary author.
Image of Linda via the Total Dick-Head blog.
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