Weekly News Roundup

Here I am with a bit of a Sunday respite and plenty of recent Dick news to recount.

There was a minor media blitz by Isa Dick-Hackett last week, talking about PKD adaptations at both io9.com and then later in an article in The Wall Street Journal. The interviews were both done to promote Adjustment Bureau which went to DVD recently. Gondry is still set to direct Ubik which is being scripted as we speak. I have high hopes for this one.

Radio Free Albemuth was screened at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on Friday. In a surprise bit of promotion there was a pretty good article on msnbc.com's Cosmiclog about the movie. I liked this line: "The movie seems certain to win over the sci-fi master's hard-core fans, who call themselves 'Dick-heads.'" I like this because I was careful, when I started this blog, to hyphenate Dick-head to see if I could affect the way the term is written. Before the blog (and with Deadhead) Dickhead was not, traditionally, hyphenated. In other words, kneel before the semantic power of Zod! My ripple is a mighty hyphen!

The future of Philipkdickfans.com is in doubt as the site has become a prime target of spam bots and requires extensive upkeep and monitoring. If you're interested in changing the name of the site and transferring it to another server let me know in the comments section. It's a good site, with, I think, more traffic than I get, and just needs a dedicated webmaster.

I skyped in a short talk to the fourth annual PKD Day at Nottingham Trent University. It was a very Dickian experience for me as it was 7:30 in the morning and I found myself connected to a small classroom full of Dick-heads. I had no idea how well they could see or hear me; indeed, I had very little connection to the room, and yet I had to speak off the cuff about PKD for about a half an hour. I felt like I was communicating from space. I should have recorded it.

Umberto Rossi's new book of PKD criticism is now available on Amazon:

Buy it from here so I can get a cut. I'm gonna need it to buy my own copy.

PKD Day Three at Nottingham Trent

This year June 13th will mark the third "PKD Day" at Nottingham Trent University. While there's no word yet on the lineup of speakers (stay tuned for that) the event has been a huge success in the past with even our own ever-ubikuitous Palmer Eldritch giving a talk at last year's PKD day.

I like the way the English department at NTU has organized this event, making it a casual, one day thing, that I get the sense they put on without a big budget. There has never been a comparable PKD event on this side of the pond. I've thought a lot about putting something like this together at San Francisco State University where I (and PKD biographer Gregg Rickman) work.

The problem is that these things cost quite a lot of money to do right. We'd want to bring in PKD experts from all over the world, organize symposiums, panel discussions, maybe even a tour of important PKD sites in the Bay Area. But perhaps I'm going about this all wrong. Maybe it should be a low-key thing, minus the scholars from all over the world. Maybe it should be in bar, rather than on a campus.

What do you think?

More info on PKD Day 3 here.