Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 5 -- Gabriel Mckee

We're less than a week away from Dick-Fest 2024. In fact, you'll find some pretty detailed info and a schedule here, which is otherwise dedicated to our series dedicated to getting to know the presenters at this year's Fest. So, without further ado, is my interview with Gabriel Mckee: 

What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

 I'll be talking about ideas of control and freedom in the Exegesis, particularly as they relate to the concept of "astral determinism" in Hellenistic religion and philosophy-- the idea that human destiny is controlled by external forces (in particular, the stars and planets). The starting point of my talk is sections of the Exegesis where Phil is talking about the dreaded "Xerox missive," which took on a central importance in his understanding of what liberation meant. The idea of breaking free from the path that the universe has prepared for you-- metaphorized as "groove override" in the universe's eternal LP-- is an absolutely crucial one in the Exegesis, and the concrete example Phil is talking about is his reaction to the weird photocopy he got in the mail. After a career of writing about androids who think they're human, Phil found himself mired in anxiety over the idea that he was subject to some kind of external control-- but that he had pushed through and found himself experiencing a sense of freedom when he didn't look at the letter, didn't do whatever destructive thing it was that it was intended to bring about. I don't think it really matters what the true origin or content of the letter was; it's mainly important for having become a symbol through which Phil explored themes of fate/destiny/programming and freedom/choice/liberation.  I look at this through the lens of modern ideas--particularly Jay Kinney's concept of "agency panic"-- and ancient ones-- early Christian and Hellenistic texts about astrological control.

How’d you get involved in Dickdom? 

PKD was one of the first SF authors I read when I started getting into the genre toward the end of high school. A friend lent me a copy of VALIS and I was instantly obsessed. It got me interested not just in science fiction, but in religion and theology as well. I was active on the old Jazzflavor email list and ended up studying religion as an undergraduate and going on to a master's from Harvard Divinity School-- along the way writing Pink Beams of Light From the God in the Gutter: The Science-Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick (University Press of America, 2004), and the PKD-adjacent The Gospel According to Science Fiction (Westminster John Knox, 2007) shortly thereafter. When I heard that Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson were working on an edited version of the Exegesis back in 2010, I knew I had to be involved-- and am grateful to Erik Davis and Rich Doyle for helping to facilitate that. 

What kind of Dick-related work are you currently involved in? 

I've just finished a major non-PKD project that I have been working on for several years: The Saucerian: The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker, a biography of a prolific UFO book author, publisher, and showman, which is due out early next year from MIT Press. I'm contributing smaller pieces to a couple other PKD projects, including George Sieg & Michael Barros's edited volume The Esoteric Theology of Philip K. Dick (forthcoming from Lexington Books) and Keith Giles and David Agranoff's Dickapedia. I've also been an active collaborator in the Zebrapedia project since its inception, and have been talking to Rich Doyle about ways to enhance the online Exegesis interface-- I hope to have some more news to share at the Fest about coming developments there. 

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 4 -- David Agranoff

Here's the fourth installment in our semi-regular feature, getting to know the speakers at this year's Dick-Fest (June 13-16th in Fort Morgan, Colorado). This time it's hardcore accomplishist and DickHeads Podcaster David Agranoff!

What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

    My research is focused on two aspects of Phil’s work. I consider myself an expert in Phil’s novel writing formula (as laid out in a 1965 letter to fellow author Ron Goulart) and Preview the research involved in my upcoming book Unfinished PKD: The Outlines and Fragments of Philip K. Dick by David Agranoff. It will be the first release of EXEGETICS: PKD STUDIES a series of PKD themed non-fiction books, a side line started by Professor D.Harlan Wilson, as a sub-press from his publishing company Anti-Oedipus Press. He was my dream editor for the book, and then we ended teaming up on the Dickheads Podcast.
    The talk will include deep dives into the materials I used to write this book about 17 outlines and fragments that Phil never got around to writing. So I am going to talk about how the research
was done, where treasures I found and what people can look forward to in the book. It is pretty impossible to be humble about this book. The outline for the novel Anti-Talent eventually morphed into UBIK. That research alone will change how Phil and his writing is taught. That Anti-talent outline which Phil never meant for anyone but himself to read, talks to himself, convinces himself into and out of plot directions, tells himself which ideas he is repeating and openly mentions influences.

How’d you get involved in Dickdom?

I have been reading PKD since the 90s, but I didn’t become a serious Dickhead until my homey Anthony Trevino (who I co-wrote a SF/Horror/Crime novel Nightmare City that is available from Grand Mal Press) pointed out that there is no podcast about Philip K. Dick called Dickheads, and what a shame that was. The idea was that we would read each novel in publication order. The show was co-hosted by Anthony, myself and our friend Langhorne J. Tweed. Six years later, Anthony left the show and Professor D.Harlan Wilson has taken his seat. We are almost done covering the novels. We also have done lots of bonus interviews, panel interviews and more. We were started I barely knew anything and now I am a bit of know-it-all.

What kind of Dick-related work are you currently involved in? 

    Still working on the podcast, I am a nerd for all science fiction history and I also write a column for Amazing Stories. I am doing the final edits on Unfinished PKD. I recently used the PKD formula to write a novel called “Great America in Dead World,” I will be figuring out a publisher for that in the next year or so. Keith Giles and I will be co-editing Dickapedia: A Philip K. Dick encyclopedia. That is a fun project and all volunteer, and in we are putting together a team of volunteers to help us do the research. Each team member will be assigned a novel. You’ll get your name on the back cover, and a bio in the book. Dickfest is a great place to work on those community ties if you want to get involved in that.
    I also just released my 10 th novel and it is very Philip K. Dick influenced. The novel is called People’s Park. It is a really weird novel and I hope people check it out. Bring a copy of any of my books to Dick fest I would love to sign it. I will have a few to sell. My holocaust revenge horror novel The Last Night to Kill Nazis is available nationally at Barnes and Noble so buy that and bring it!
    More importantly come to Dick fest and lets talk PKD! You don’t want to miss it!

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 3 -- D.H. Wilson

Here's another in my semi-regular profiles of the scheduled guests for this year's Dick-Fest in Ft. Morgan, Colorado, June 13-16. In this post we'll meet, doctoral Dick-Head D.H. Wilson (the picture is Brett Weldele's rendering of DH as Gully Foyle from Bester’s The Stars My Destination -- not directly Dick-related, but we'll accept it). 

TDH: What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

Hello! I’ll provide an overview of the book I’m currently working on, The Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions, for Routledge’s Auto/Biography Studies series. Here’s a brief description that I included in my proposal to the publisher: Philip K. Dick was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific, forward-thinking authors and a luminary of intelligent, idea-driven science fiction. His singular oeuvre, esoteric mythos, and chronically autobiographical novels and stories have generated a surplus of biographies in an effort to uncover his “real” identity. Most attempts to biographically render PKD in the light of would-be “truth,” however, are undergirded by a speculative conundrum that his characters and their author cannot escape themselves. Infinite Regressions will unpack this overarching thesis while functioning as an engaged overview of the biographical literature on PKD. PKD scholarship is vast, but my monograph will be the first comprehensive study to account for and interpret this material as a collective literary venture. I appropriated my subtitle from PKD’s Exegesis, an 8,000-page journal inspired by a hallucinatory breakdown that he experienced in the 1970s. Written between 1974 and his death in 1982, the Exegesis is an epic attempt to understand an ostensible trickster god, and yet every gesture towards definitive knowledge results in “an infinite regression of theses and countertheses.” Biographers fall through a similar trap door when they try to “understand” PKD, but that isn’t to say that their biographies aren’t productive or meaningful. As literary artefacts, they are largely meritorious. Ultimately, then, PKD’s biographies call attention to the inherent instability and variability of biographical writing, which has always evaded a grand definition.

TDH: What’s your connection to Dickdom?

Most recently, the Dickheads Podcast. In 2023, I became a co-host with David Agranoff and Langhorne J. Tweed, who started the podcast with Anthony Trevino in 2017. Such great fellas. I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about PKD for years, though, beginning in graduate school in the 1990s at the University of Massachusetts, where I was working on my M.A. degree in English. In an independent study with SF scholar Robert Crossley, I read The Man in the High Castle and “Faith of Our Fathers.” Thereafter I devoured his entire canon, as we PKD fanatics tend to do, and I remember trying (and failing) to emulate him again and again when I first started writing my own fiction.

TDH: Tell us about your new publishing endeavor.

Research and note-taking for Infinite Regressions is occupying most of my time right now, although I have a monograph on Stanley Kubrick’s futurist cinema coming out in November from Stalking Horse Press called Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness. Very excited about that one. As editor-in-chief of Anti-Oedipus Press, I should also mention that I’ll be spearheading a new PKD book series. Here’s the formal description on AOP’s website: EXEGETICS: PKD STUDIES is devoted to original, high-quality scholarship on and about Philip K. Dick, one of the science fiction genre’s most renowned innovators and a singular voice in twentieth-century literature. Books in the series include critical and/or creative explorations of Phildickian fiction, nonfiction, biography, cinema, and multimedia. Scholarly yet defiant of academic stodge, EXEGETICS aspires for the definitively New in the world(s) of PKD.

More details soon!

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 2 -- Blake Wilson

In preparation for the upcoming Dick-Fest 2024 in Fort Morgan this June, Total Dick-Head is running a series of interviews with fest guests. This week it's Blake Wilson. 

TDH: Can you tell us a little about how you got interested in Philip K. Dick?

Blake Wilson: I can literally point to the first PKD I read: it was Phil's 1981 letter to David Hartwell (editor, Timescape Books) outlining his would-be next novel The Owl in Daylight. It was published for the first time in issue #13 of the late great fanzine Forced Exposure, which came out in the winter of 1988. I was an avid FE reader in the late 80s, mostly due to the excellent writing and music coverage by Jimmy Johnson and Byron Coley. I liked a lot of the music they liked (Sonic Youth, Big Black, Swans, Mission of Burma). They also loved PKD and his name had popped up in some earlier issues, but the letter was the first thing I read. I was fascinated. I had to find out more about him. The problem? Nothing was in print––at least nothing I could find, and used bookstores weren't turning up anything. I kind of forgot about him until I received a piece of junk mail a year or so later from the Quality Paperback Book Club, one of those "book of the month" subscription deals. Lo and behold! There it was: the first omnibus edition of The VALIS Trilogy! Brand new! I ticked the box and agreed to join. I may have literally taped a penny to a postcard and sent it back, which is how those clubs worked back in the day. VALIS arrived a few weeks later. I read it. It blew my mind. I still have that copy, dogeared and heavily penciled, held together with more than one layer of packing tape. The next QPBC mailer offered The Nag Hammadi Library by James Robinson, which would have blown right past me but for the PKD book I had just read....my first "PKD moment," perhaps? So I added that to the growing collection, which soon included the fruits of intensified used book scouting in Sacramento, San Francisco, Berkeley, and the rest of California. I also somehow ended up on Mark Zieising's mailing list, so I was able to score a brand new copy of Dark Haired Girl directly from him. When Sutin's biography and the Vintage editions started coming out in the early 90s it suddenly seemed like PKD was everywhere. The so-called "mainstream" novels all appeared around this time as well––for better or for worse. It was somewhat of an embarrassment of riches to be in the middle of this PKD “revival” as it were, but very exciting. 

TDH: Tell us a little about your PKD-related publications and endeavors... 

Blake Wilson: I currently have two book chapters in print. One of them is in the book The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy (Open Court, 2017) and it gets into what I take to be PKD's politics and how they weave their way into the book and, less subtly, into the TV series. The other is in Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy (Open Court, 2019), and it's about "ethical" cops: Rick Deckard (Phil's version and the movie version) and K from 2049. I've got two more book chapters in the works. Both are about religion. One of them, "Perturbations in the Reality Field: Logos, Gnosis, and Aletheia in Philip K. Dick's Late Works," should be coming out any day now in a book edited by Richard Feist called Jesuits in Science Fiction: Reason and Revelation on Other Worlds (Vernon Press). The latest is called "The Conquest of Death and the Divine Afterlife: Philip K. Dick's Life and Fiction of the 1960s," and it will be appearing in the The Esoteric Theology of Philip K. Dick (Lexington, I think). I know several folks at DickFest are publishing in this book and I'm really looking forward to the discussions. I've also given a few conference presentations where I shared the stage with you, David. On the horizon: I'm gearing up for an article or two on PKD's ethics. 

TDH: What do you plan to talk about at the PKD Fest? 

Blake Wilson: Dunno! Probably something about religion or ethics. Or religion AND ethics. 

Thanks, Blake! See you in Colorado! 

Get to Know the Fest Guest -- Part 1: Keith Giles

In preparation for the upcoming Dick-Fest in Ft. Morgan I will be featuring some of the guests on this humble blog as it rises from the ashes of the last decade. 

First up is Keith Giles, who goes WAY back in the world of PKD. Keith who was an early reader and commenter on this blog has since blossomed into a media mogul of sorts, with a series of popular books about Christianity, a podcast, and all sorts of other stuff. He's also helming Quoir Publishing which just put out an anthology which includes Tessa Dick among other PKD luminaries. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Keith will tell you all about it below: 

TDH: Can you tell us about your relationship to Dick? 

I've been a fan since roughly 1983, after BLADE RUNNER released and I bought the paperback version which, to my great surprise, was a completely different story called DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? After reading that novel, I decided to go back to the bookstore to find more PKD books. The next one was FLOW MY TEARS THE POLICEMAN SAID and by the time I got about halfway through that book I was a huge fan. 

I also lived for about 25 years in Orange County, California. This meant I had an opportunity to visit the apartment building where Phil lived in Santa Ana, and the hospital where he died. I also had the opportunity to hold signed copies of his novels in my hands at the local Orange Public Library. So, I never got to meet Phil in person, but I feel a close connection to him having lived in the same places he lived and walked the same streets that he did.

Since those early days, I've done my best to read nearly everything he's written, including all of his short stories and the vast majority of his novels. My Blade Runner and PKD vintage paperback collection is pretty obscene.

Most recently, I was asked to speak at the San Diego Comic-Con panel in 2023 which was a dream come true.

What do you plan to talk about at the fest? 

The topic I want to talk about at the DickFest this year is "The Exegesis and Quantum Science." This talk will include the influence of Valentinian theology and the Gospel of Thomas as well. 

 I believe there is also some talk about my joining a panel discussion with Ted Hand and Aharon Varady on PKD and religion.

TDH: Can you tell us a little about Quoir Publishing and the 'Augmented' anthology?

As of January of 2023, I became co-owner of Quoir Publishing. Prior to this I was only one of their published authors. So, even though I never dreamed of owning my own publishing company, the opportunity sort of dropped into my lap. 

Quoir is a publishing company by authors, for authors. That means we make sure all of our authors retain 100% ownership of their copyright and we offer 60% of the royalty to authors [compared to 10% or less offered by most other publishers]. We've been around for about 7 years now. Our goal is to publish great books and to promote and champion our authors and their work in every way possible.

Last year we published Volume 1 of aa brand new SF anthology called "Augmented" which featured some fantastic short stories by Tessa Dick, David Agranoff, Claudia Christian [Babylon 5], and many others. 

We're excited to publish more new SF titles in the next few months,including a new PKD-esque novel by David Agranoff called "People's Park" [March 2024], plus the SF novels, "So Eden Sank To Grief" by Eric Reitan and "RJ the Astronaut" by Jon Turney, both releasing in February, 2024.

TDH: Any other Dick-related stuff you want to promote? 

Last year Quoir was honored to publish Volume 1 of a PKD Short Story Anthology called "Sci-Fi Lullabies" and later this year [2024] we plan to publish Volume 2, featuring a Foreword by Tessa Dick. Volume 3 will come later next year with a Foreword by author and co-host of the DickHeads Podcast, David Agranoff.

Also, I taught a course at UTEP [UT El Paso] 2 years ago on The Gospel of Philip K. Dick and that I have an online course by the same name available here. 

There's more exciting stuff on the horizon for PKD fans to be excited about, but I can't talk about them just yet.