Thursday, December 16, 2010

Happy 82nd Birthday PKD!


Our favorite author would be 82 today. Kind of bittersweet, but I think we can all admit that Phil would never have lived to be 82, and if he had, a quick look at any number of today's news stories would probably kill him where he stood.

4 comments:

LarryS said...

Happy Birthday PKD! (2 days after mine, 1 day after Clarke)
I've always thought his birth and death dates a quirky coincidence- the ultimate anagram, very PKD!
May you continue to rest in peace!

ZenWoman said...

Hi All, I posted this yesterday, on the day, on the PKD fan site

I agree Phil probably could not have made it to 82... health or other reasons.

Anonymous said...

This man ruined my taste in science fiction - I can't read any other SciFi authors anymore. And I am so sad, and angry in a way, that Phil died in his 50s, after a life full of hardship and grief. What a man. What a spirit... So unfair.

Robert Cook said...

How hard to believe it's been so many years since his death...nearly 30!

I still remember riding the midnight bus out of LaGuardia Airport headed to the #7 train into Manhattan, (I worked at a hotel across from the airport at the time, but lived then, as now, in the city) and picking up a section of that day's NY Times that a previous rider had left there, and finding by chance the obituary that Philip K. Dick had died. I don't know which shocked me more...that he had died or that the Times had published his obituary!

I was in my 20s then, and now I'm older than Phil was when he died. Time is fleeting for all of us, my friends!

(By the way, as it seems to mirror our current geopolitical and military circumstances, I'm presently rereading THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH, a novel that is so perceptive about human systems of power and propaganda as to seem prescient, yet is less achieved than it could have been due to its I'm-writing-as-fast-as-I-can first draft prose. Nonetheless, now seems the most apropos of times to read or reread this book, for those so inclined.)