PKD Segment on The Electric Playground

Just got word that The Electric Playground, a website devoted to SF-fandom, is running a short video piece on Philip K Dick's cinematic adaptations. I wish they'd interview me for these things, instead of just telling me they've been posted. But if you want to spend three minutes listening to a couple guys tell you a few things (literally) about Philip K Dick, head on over and take a look.

What would I have said if I'd been interviewed? Something about how all the bad PKD movies have dodgy chairs, and all the good movies capture Dick's themes, but don't necessarily have to stay true to the plot (A Scanner Darkly being the exception that proves the rule). I'd also probably bring up a few points from this article I wrote. Oh, and I'd be sure to mention that sometimes, believe it or not, books are just better than movies, and that the ultimate sign of a story's success is not a cinematic adaptation, but rather a dedicated group of readers who fall in love with their own version of that fictional reality, and who care enough about that world to plumb its depths in search of meaning.

Courtesy of The Onion

Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War

NEW MUNICH—The new Sci-Fi Channel series Fallen Axis, which eerily depicts a world in which Germany actually lost the Second World War, premiered Tuesday evening to high ratings in an alternate universe to our own.


Read the rest here.

From Our WTF? Deparment

A student of mine recently ordered a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for class online, and when it arrived he became suspicious, since the page numbers I was assigning didn't match up with the chapter breaks in the book. Turned out the student had mistakenly ordered a 'Oxford Bookworms' edition of the novel (pictured above). After some additional research, I discovered that the Oxford Bookworms Collection takes novels and abridges them both for length and to fit particular reading levels.

All fine and well, of course, (I guess) but Amazon does not make it clear that this is an abridged version, or that it differs in any way from Dick's novel. Bad enough, but then I started reading the Amazon reviews of this edition. It's almost like they'll let anybody write these reviews. Here's a paragraph that I think indicates serious damage has been done to the reviewer's corpus callosum:

"Unfortunately for Isidore, and Deckard too, it's beyond question that androids are in fact incapable of empathy, of identifying with others and comprehending their lives. They abandon each other in danger, torture animals out of curiosity, and sacrifice humans at the merest hint of trouble. (Of course, there are humans who do that, too, and there's something dangerously innocent about PKD's assumption that empathy is a universal human characteristic, but it's his book.) More to the point, although this lack of empathy makes the androids dangerous, it also makes Deckard's job all the more devastating to his conscience once he discovers that, as a human, he has feelings of empathy for the androids. Can he eliminate the android threat and still retain his own humanity?"

Wow, just wow. Of course the androids in the book repeatedly demonstrate the ability to empathize. Furthermore, Deckard is proof that many humans don't possess any ability to be empathetic, unless they are forced to acquire it, painfully, and with great suffering. 'Can he eliminate the android threat and still retain his own humanity?' Is that serious question? Because the answer is that nothing in his human nature demands that he not kill androids. Deckard's morality doesn't evolve out of necessity, or because it's a latent condition of his being, but out of struggle. Deckard's humanity is equally demonstrated in his desire to kill the andys, complete his assignment, and buy himself a nice animal as it is in his final realization that 'electric things have their lives too, paltry as those lives are.' Not only can't this reviewer affix his review to the proper edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, he also appears unable to process moral ambiguity.

At the end of the Bookworks edition there are some reading questions. Check these out (not liable for the desire to poke yourself in the brain with something sharp that these may elicit from you):

This novel has a mysterious title. What do you think it tells you about the story?

What do you remember most at the end - the fake toad or Iran's changed behavior towards Rick? What does that suggest?

Is there any hope at the end of the novel?

The film Blade Runner ends with Rick (who is divorced) and Rachel Rosen deciding to spend whatever is left of their lives together. Do you prefer that ending, or the one in the book?

Stuff From All Over

I'm right in the middle of a huge stack of papers to grade, but the PKD-related news stops for no man. Here are a few interesting items.

First, this touching story from the Fort Morgan Times in Colorado about people leaving stuff at Phil's grave. "Toy and stuffed sheep are frequently placed at the tombstone of Philip K. Dick, who was buried at Riverside in spite of his family's wishes because he wanted to be interred next to his twin sister, who died in Fort Morgan in infancy." Except of course, Jane died in Chicago, not Fort Morgan....

Second, a few MP3s of interviews Dick did with Paul Williams have turned up on the web. Nothing new, but perhaps if you've been trying to find these interviews you're now in luck. They're worth listening to. In the interview Dick talks about Robert Heinlein, parenting, Now Wait For Last Year, Mussolini, writing novels, along with some great stuff on Jung, Freud, and Kurt Vonnegut. Interesting error. Phil is totally wrong when he says "Freud never left Vienna."

Finally, in this review of Lethem's new book, Chronic City, which is garnering a lot of attention, the author writes: "Lethem's love of New York, his heartfelt appreciation of the city and its boundless possibilities, enables him to not get lost in the ether in the way that Dick (who, it must be said, was absolutely a child of Los Angeles) almost always did."

Why must that be said? Perhaps because it isn't true, and without at least one person unafraid of error we may never have heard that sentence uttered...?

Now that these are all assembled I notice the common theme is that each article contains at least one substantive error, but such is life.

VALBS Transmission

I've been thinking a lot about how this blog can best contribute to the serious study of PKD, which is very much the wild west of academia. I think we (ok, I) need to dig into more of the scholarly analysis of Dick's work, and try to find the articles and essays that can deepen our readings. There's a lot of academic kipple out there, and it just keeps on multiplying, driving out the none-kipple, making it harder to find the good stuff. Looking back, I have giant gaps in my masters thesis about Dick, simply because I didn't know about several important essays. Whether this is a testament to the obscurity of the secondary materials or my researching skills, I'm seeing a lot of these gaps in the new studies of PKD hitting the market.

What follows is an email interview I conducted with Italian PKD scholar Umberto Rossi who has assembled the most complete electronic bibliography of PKD-related material, VALBS, Vast Active Living Bibliographic System:

Q: When did you start VALBS?

A: Uhm... well... good question. Let me tell you that I started from two
existing bibliographies, one prepared by Andrew M. Butler, the other
by Salvatore Proietti... both notorious dickheads. I merged them and
put them on the web. I guess it was 1999 or 2000, something like
that.

Q: What's there?

A: Everything they and I could find which deals with Philip K. Dick. It's
a secondary bibliography. You have monograph, collections, articles,
reviews, etc. And webpages, provided they belong to something like
an online journal/magazine.

Q: How do you locate new articles and essays for the bibliography?

A: Three sources, fundamentally: the MLA online bibliography for
articles, Amazon.com for books, and the emails of those who visit my
webpage and ask me "Hey, why isn't my book/article/essay in
VALBS?"

Q: What are some of your favorite academic papers on Dick?

A: Disch's on Solar Lottery; Andy Butler on Lies, Inc.; Frasca on
Transmigration; Jameson's essay on History and Salvation; but
surely I'm forgetting some other short essay.

Q: Who are some of your favorite Dick scholars, or scholars of science
fiction?

A: Those I have already mentioned. I might add Kim Stanley Robinson.
I'd also like to add two more Italians, Antonio Caronia and Domenico
Gallo, whose La macchina della paranoia (The Paranoia Machine) is
an excellent introduction--unfortunately published by a very small
press, and written in a language that not even Italian understand
properly any more...

Q: Who should use VALBS?

A: Students. I have read several PhD dissertations recently, and I am
amazed by the important books and articles they regularly omit in
their bibliographies. I suspect that those young scholars have been
tutored by university professors who weren't knowledgeable with
Dick, and couldn't support them the way they deserved to be...

Personally I do not believe in bibliographies on paper anymore. I'm
not one of those digital fundamentalists who believe that the web and
Kindle or some other toy will replace books. But I do believe that the
days of reference books are limited. Look at the success of the
Wikipedia. I have worked as a translator, and I can tell you that no
pro translator who hasn't been struck by Alzheimer uses printed
dictionaries today. They all use dictionaries on CD-ROMs. So what's
the use of a paper bibliography today? None. Unless it's the
bibliography of a monograph, that is, part of a larger book. But if
your purpose is collecting all the secondary texts on Dick, go digital.
Put it on the web!

Q: What role do you imagine VALBS playing in the Dickhead community?

A: Reference. It should be THE secondary bibliography. A way to know
what's available, what's been written, even in languages different
from English. A way to know who's studying Dick now and who's
studied him. I dare say it might turn in a sort of collective memory of
PKD scholarship, be it academic or independent.

Thanks Umberto!

My first project is going to be to read Frederic Jameson's book Archaeologies of the Future, which is very dense and, as they say in the Hawaiian Islands, 'hybolical,' meaning overly verbose in its prose, but Jameson is a respected critic outside of science fiction and his interest in Dick is incredibly important in terms of serious study. Plus, it's clear from the following quote that he's onto something:

"Dick's work transcends the opposition between the subjective and the objective, and thereby confronts the dilemma which in one way or another characterizes all modern literature of any consequence: the intolerable and yet unavoidable choice between a literature of the self and a language of some impersonal exteriority, between the subjectivism of private languages and case histories, or some nostalgia for the objective that leads outside the realm of individual or existential experience into some reassuringly stable place of common sense and statistics. Dick's force lies in the effort to retain possession and use of both apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive subjective and objective explanation systems all at once" (350).

That quote would have taken my master's thesis to the next level, but I didn't know Jameson had written on PKD, neither did my advisers.

Part of the problem with studying this stuff is that it can be really hard to find. I have a bunch of PKD-related files that I'd like to post somewhere so that I could link to them in various discussions. If a Dick-head knowledgeable about these things could chime in about potential file sharing sites I could use to make .pdfs and mp3s available that would be much appreciated.

Some Thoughts on 'Adjustment Team'

As the adaptation of Dick's 1954 story 'Adjustment Team' (filming as 'Adjustment Bureau') is currently in production, I decided to revisit Dick's story to see what those guys have to work with. I just don't read enough of PKD's short stories. They're so good, but there's so many, and I'm just starting to get a handle on the novels. All things in due time, I guess. Anyway, 'Adjustment Team' is pretty cool.

What surprised me about the story was how derivative it was. I mean that in the most complimentary, Lethem-esque, cultural contamination kind of way, and by no means is it a criticism.

First of all, when Ed Fletcher accidentally interrupts the 'adjustment' his lifeless coworkers appear to be made of an ash-like substance:

" The hall was dim, gloomy with clouds of ash. The overhead lights flickered fitfully. He reached for the door handle. The handle came off in his hand. He dropped it and dug his fingernails into the door. The plate glass crashed past him, breaking into bits. He tore the door open and stepped over it, into the office.
Miss Evans sat at her typewriter, fingers resting quietly on the keys. She did not move. She was gray, her hair, her skin, her clothing. She was without color. Ed touched her. His fingers went through her shoulder, into dry flakiness.
He drew back, sickened. Miss Evans did not stir.
He moved on. He pushed against a desk. The desk collapsed into rotting dust. Earl Hendricks stood by the water cooler, a cup in his hand. He was a gray statue, unmoving. Nothing stirred. No sound. No life. The whole office was gray dust -- without life or motion."

This reminds me of Fitzgerald's famous 'valley of ashes' scene from The Great Gatsby:

"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground."

As a scholar I can't help but see the similarities, but perhaps I am imagining a connection where none exists. Dick could also be working on a metaphor about the unreal, counterfeit nature of the 9-5 office job.

What I found far more interesting was the rationale for the 'adjustment.' Warning, what follows could be considered a spoiler:

"The Old Man waved his hand. Behind him in the shadows an immense map glowed into existence. Ed caught his breath. The edges of the map faded off in obscurity. He saw an infinite web of detailed sections, a network of squares and ruled lines. Each square was marked. Some glowed with a blue light. The lights altered constantly.
"The Sector Board," the Old Man said. He sighed wearily. "A staggering job. Sometimes we wonder how we can go on another period. But it must be done. For the good of all. For your good."
"The change. In our -- our Sector."
"Your office deals in real estate. The old Douglas was a shrewd man, but rapidly becoming infirm. His physical health was waning. In a few days Douglas will be offered a chance to purchase a large unimproved forest area in western Canada. It will require most of his assets. The older, less virile Douglas would have hesitated. It is imperative he not hesitate. He must purchase the area and clear the land at once. Only a younger man -- a younger Douglas -- would undertake this.
"When the land is cleared, certain anthropological remains will be discovered. They have already been placed there. Douglas will lease his land to the Canadian Government for scientific study. The remains found there will cause international excitement in learned circles.
"A chain of events will be set in motion. Men from numerous countries will come to Canada to examine the remains. Soviet, Polish, and Czech scientists will make the journey.
"The chain of events will draw these scientists together for the first time in years. National research will be temporarily forgotten in the excitement of these nonnational discoveries. One of the leading Soviet scientists will make friends with a Belgian scientist. Before they depart they will agree to correspond -- without the knowledge of their governments, of course.
"The circle will widen. Other scientists on both sides will be drawn in. A society will be founded. More and more educated men will transfer an increasing amount of time to this international society. Purely national research will suffer a slight but extremely critical eclipse. The war tension will somewhat wane."

Those of you who have read Asimov's Foundation Series may immediately see the similarities. I was especially struck by the description of the sector map, which sounds very much like the Prime Radiant, a device that stores and displays the long equations used in Hari Seldon's Psychohistory. Asimov's first installment, Foundation (1951), came out a few years before 'Adjustment Team' and I think it's pretty clear (to me at least) that Dick is riffing on some of Asimov's ideas.

But I also like that the reasoning for the adjustment confounds both Marxist and Free Market readings: Douglas must be younger, a more ambitious and determined capitalist, willing to take chances and think big. But the ultimate goal of all adjustments is a utopian world where scientific reasoning transcends national borders. Very much in line with what Asimov seems to imagine.

It's also clear, based on the recent interviews with the film's stars, that the movie will bear little resemblance to the original story. I hope they keep a lot of the original stuff in though, because it's pretty cool.

My First Look At Radio Free Albemuth - The Movie

About a month ago I had the opportunity to drive down to LA to see a screening of Radio Free Albemuth with director John Alan Simon. Pretty cool, I know. John wanted me to take a look at the current cut of the film before any further changes are 'locked out' and they begin the painstaking work of mixing and cleaning up the sound, correcting the color-timing, tweaking the special effects, and putting on the final polish.

I really enjoyed the movie and think most Dick-heads are also going to like this film 1) it's an independent release, so it's free of dodgy chairs, high-speed chases, fight scenes, gun battles or Keanu, Tom, Nick, Arnold, or any other Scientologist; 2) and best of all, it's very true to the book. While writer/director John Alan Simon was forced to cut some of the material from the novel, I think he did so in a very effective and sensitive way.

Above: Director John Simon with Katharyn Winnick playing Rachel, and Shea Wigham, filming of one of my favorite scenes.

Although most of the autobiographical material about Philip K Dick as a young child has been excised, John still manages to get us to care about these characters pretty quickly. John mentioned that he kept the 1982 director Ivan Passer's film Cutter's Way in mind while writing the script and shooting the film. Having never seen it, I rented it last week, loved it, and instantly saw its influence in Radio Free Albemuth. Both are loving portrayals of counter-culture heroes whose personal moral codes triumph over The Man - though at a supremely high price.

Above: Jonathan Scarfe who plays Nick Brady pays the price.

If you remember, John Alan Simon filmed this movie on a modest budget with private financing in a fast 27 days, using the high-end digital Viperstream camera system which David Fincher used for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Zodiac. and Michael Mann used for Collateral. Currently, Simon is deep in post-production. What I saw was a version very close to the final edit of the film but in much lower resolution image quality than the final film will be. The lighting, sound effects, and musical score were still at a pretty early stage, so I had to use my imagination during some points. The film had a very 'indie' look to it, kinda like Cutter's Way.

Like I said, I think Dick-heads will like this film. It's really interesting how Simon positions the film in an alternate world through the clever use of dialog and scenery. Try as you might, you cannot locate this film in time. Also there are a few establishing shots that seem to encompass several of the book's themes in their composition; one of my favorites was a shot of a palm tree with barbed wire strung in loops before it.

Aside from Alanis Morrisette, who turns in a good performance as Silvia, the actors in RFA are relatively unknown. I thought the guy playing Phil , Shea Wigham, is really good. I think he's the first person to play PKD, and my only complaint is that when he appears onscreen writing, I wanted to yell, 'Type faster!'

Above: Shea Wigham as Phil.

As always, there will be some armchair quarterbacking going on afterwords, but John Alan Simon has made a very gutsy PKD adaptation. He has bravely filmed the novel's many visions and dream sequences, which, I'm sure, was no easy feat, and explains why the film has taken somewhat longer than usual in post production due to creating complicated digital effects on an "indie" budget. I felt like this movie is a labor of love, a tribute to Phil from a screenwriter and director who really gets him, not one who simply sees Hollywood gold in adapting his stories. You have to respect that.

Stay tuned for a forthcoming interview with John Alan Simon when we'll learn more about the production, and when we can expect to see the film in theaters.

More production photos can be found here.