Weekly News Roundup

Lacking sufficient time these days to properly post about each of the exciting new Dickian developments, I have reluctantly promised myself that I will at least update the blog once a week. In these posts I will try to serve up all the news that's fit to print, and hopefully sometime in the near future I can write up some longer posts on some of the stuff I've been thinking about.

For now a little of the pressure is off because dedicated Dick-head Cal Godot has taken over philipkdickfans.com from Jason Koornick. The site was languishing, besieged by malware, spammers, and Can-D. Cal has moved the site to new servers, forever banishing the Black Glimmung's malware to the frozen seas of our rapidly degrading memories. So cruise over, register a username and let's get the chat boards going over there. philipkdickfans.com was always a really good resource, one that'll be nice to get back. As you can see when you click over there, Cal is still moving in, but there is a really good interview with PKD from the Harvard Advocate [er, make that the Hartford Advocate] in 1981.

Check out this exchange:

In an interview in 1976, you indicated that VALIS had already been sold to Bantam Books. Yet it didn't appear until early this year. What caused the delay?

"Bantam held it up for awhile because they had a change in editorship. The version that has been published was written in 1978. I guess they had a backlog; they didn't print it right away. But the real origin of the delay was the fact that I did, for the first time in my life, two completely different versions of the same book. The first version appears in the second as the movie they go see. I wasn't satisfied with the first version. I wanted to do a book that was better than my previous novel, A Scanner Darkly, and even after Bantam had purchased VALIS and all that was required was that I type a final draft, I simply was not satisfied that I had done the best book I could do." [Emphasis mine]

He's not talking about Radio Free Albemuth I don't think. It's an interesting remark. Read the whole thing.

Also, our pal, Umberto Rossi is posting over there and the organizer of the Philip K Dick Festival, Mr Lord Running Clam has even penned a review of Too Big Too Fail.

Speaking of the Philip K Dick Festival, there are some new pictures from the fest.

So Radio Free Albemuth premiered in New York. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it, but they also thought capitalism saved the Chilean miners, so I'd go with Gabriel Mckee's review of the film. Mckee writes:

"There's also a strong emphasis placed on the novel's political message. It gives a sinister illustriation of an America gradually transforming into a police state that reminded me of Southland Tales.** In this context, those contacted by the alien satellite from Albemuth become not just religious visionaries, but revolutionaries as well."

The man makes a good point. I really hope I can see a cut of this in the near future - hopefully before the government takeover.

Hopefully a bright light will fire from the sky soon enough with information about when and how this film might make it to a theater near you.

Speaking of Gabriel Mckee, he's pointed out in the comments that his DADOES exhibition is now online.

The Internetz are still buzzing about Ridley Scott producing Man in the High Castle. It is pretty exciting. I want to go back and read the book again, but my memory is that the book is fairly internal. How will that translate to the screen. Will the story still be set in an alt-1960s? We'll just have to wait and see, but somebody at the New Yorker was on about it:

"I read a lot of Dick in my teens and twenties. I’ve still got a row of crumbling PKD paperbacks on my bedroom bookshelf—sixteen of them, seventeen if you double-count one that’s an Ace Double Novel, with two stories upside-down from each other. I haven’t reread any of them for decades, but they seem to occupy a permanent place in my brain, judging from the way they pop up when I’m writing about something unusually weird."