Now Read About Last Year, Then Purchase and Read My Fiction!

 
Happy New Year, gentle readers! 2012 was quite a ride for this humble blogger. Philip K Dick Festival, done and accomplished, a roaring success -- a success which still nourishes me during this cold and dark winter. Such memories: I gave Jonathan Lethem a ride in my car. Umberto Rossi and Laurence Rickels rode in that car too! Watching Radio Free Albemuth with 120 Dick-heads! These aren't sentences, mostly because no mere arrangement of words can capture how great it was.

Was there any other Dick news in 2012? Lawsuits, adaptations and rumors of adaptations, down websites, the rise of the Facebook PKD group, Precious Artifacts!, two issues of PKD Otaku!.

Pretty good year. 

Now, what do we have to look forward to in 2013? Well it's the year when Linklater's version of A Scanner Darkly is set. Will a quarter of the population get hooked on Substance D (otherwise known as Fox News)? Perhaps. Will we see a theatrical release or Netflix appearance of Radio Free Albemuth? Stay tuned to find out.

2013 is starting out on a high note for me personally, with not one, but two science fiction stories out today. My story "Escape Velocity" is in issue six of Speculative Edge which is available in both Kindle and print editions.

And I've got another story, "Bedroom Eyes" appearing in issue one of Theurgy Magazine. That one you can read online (here), and if you like it, you should probably order a hard copy (here). The cool thing is my co-editor at Pravic, Nathaniel K Miller also got a story placed in Theurgy, so they've obviously have good taste. Speaking of which, you have issue one of Pravic, right? Well stay tuned, issue number two is imminent.

In terms of Dick stuff, I've got Erik Davis' write up from Dortmund to run in the next couple days. Radio Free Albemuth at the Philip K Dick Film Festival! Reading Nick and the Glimmung with my seven-year-old. Sentence fragments, again! Time to go.

2011: Now Read About Last Year

It's that time of year, dear readers, when every blogger, in order to have something to write about during the slow week after Christmas, looks back and reflects on the year just ending. Most people are talking about what a crummy year it was, and it was, if you were, you know, unemployed, or illegally detained, or swapped out for spare parts.

But for Dick-heads, the year was pretty OK.

Here, in no particular order, are the most awesome Dickian things to happen in 2011 (and some things to look forward to in 2012. I know it's not organized that well... not my problem):

Umberto's Book! - The Twisted Worlds of Philip K Dick, by Italian Scholar, Umberto Rossi, is, I think, the best secondary source yet published on Dick's work. Insightful, articulate, nuanced without being hyperbolic or pedantic, Rossi's work will be a boon to Dick thinkers for a while to come. I'd link to it on amazon, but I can no longer do business with amazon in good conscience, so buy it at whatever Huge Internet Retailer you currently support.

Adjustment Bureau - We got a Dick adaptation in 2011. Not to my tastes, but some people seemed to like it. I just think Dick's stories push the envelope, and these recent adaptations have fallen back on tired movie standards, and all that pushing, the feeling of it, is gone. There is, however, much litigation underway, along with a possible Adjustment Bureau TV show. According to IMDB, Ubik has a 2013 release date.

The Rebirth of PhilipKDickFans.com. Under new management, the fan site is up, running, kicking ass, and taking names. Check it out, and be sure to pick up your free 2012 calender. Also, did you know the entire back catalog of PKD Otaku is now available here?! You could circumnavigate the globe several times by barge and still not have time to read all the amazing PKD commentary in there. Also, House of Ubiquity is underway, but badly needs your support. Make it a New Year's Resolution to share a weird Dick experience with the world.

The Exegesis - The book that many Dick-heads had been waiting for finally arrived last month. Though reviews have been fairly negative, the book has been happily chewed on by Dick-heads for a couple months, and I would hope we will see some interesting study and insight come from this giant volume. Working on the book was, for me, one of the highlights of the year.

Radio Free Albemuth - While RFA continued racking up accolades and wowing audiences at select festivals, few Dick-heads have had a chance to see it. According to director John Simon, Radio Free Albemuth will see some kind of theatrical release in 2012. That's huge, as the movie is now vying with Barjo for the 'Best PKD Adaptation Nobody Has Seen' award. Stay tuned for details on when and where RFA will be.

Philip K Dick and Philosophy - a cool book that examines Dick's work (and the cinematic adaptations based thereupon). In response to every review that fails to account for Dick's philosophy in The Exegesis, there is now a book dedicated to the study of that very unity.

Image courtesy of Driftglass

We also have the opportunity to enjoy the most Dickian presidential election in history, which has so far pitted a womanizing African American pizza tycoon, against a theocratic foster mother to some 28 children, against The Three Stigmata of Newton Gingrich, against a pro-life Libertarian, all vying for the chance to challenge the first African American president, who's up for re-election.

Two, count 'em, two, big PKD conferences in 2012, one in Germany, and the one I'm working on in San Francisco. 2012 is going to be a big year for Dick-dom. I don't think we have yet reached the end of the Phil Dick novel we all seem to be stuck inside.

Thanks for reading in 2011, let's hope we all survive 2012. It's a bit Dickian, this whole thing about a Mayan doomsday prediction for this year, right?

Now Read About Last Year (2010)

I wish I could find this scene from the blooper reel to the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, during which Roy Scheider tries over and over again to get a ball-point pen to sit suspended in the air in a harness made of fishing line to try to depict the zero-g environment of space travel. Try as he might, the stupid thing will not stay. It's a nice metaphor for 2010, which felt at times like an endless blooper reel.

I thought we'd have seen both the Adjustment Bureau and Radio Free Albemuth adaptations in 2010, but neither materialized - though RFA made a strong showing at NYC's Gotham Screen Film Fest. Adjustment Bureau is now due out in Spring of 2011. So Inception was the closest we got to a PKD adaptation in 2010 - and it apparently was inspired by Scrooge McDuck. I actually plan on seeing the film this week and hope I can write something up about it.

Highlights of 2010 included:

The Philip K Dick festival was held in August 2010 in Colorado. Definitely my funnest vacation of the year. A great time was had by all of the dozen or so who showed up. (Does this mean we're only a year and a half away from the next PKD Fest scheduled for the Bay Area 2012?! Yikes!)

Word arrived that two new Exegesis volumes are headed our way.

The arrival Laurence Rickels's nearly-indecipherable book I Think I Am: Philip K Dick - a long-awaited examination of Dick's irv made by a shining star in the academic community which, like many things in life, straddles the line between clever literary analysis and opaque, post-Freudian academic wankery.

A new edition of Anne Dick's memoir Search for Philip K Dick, was released by Tachyon publications (with a new Introduction written by yours truly). A fun read, an important resource, and now... even easier to get...

Scott Timberg's pair of great articles about PKD: one about his time in Southern California and one about Anne and her memoir. The ratio between good, insightful articles about PKD and the glorified press releases we've read about PKD in the past is headed in the right direction.

Cornell University selected Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as their incoming freshmen read for 2010 and I made a fun trip to Ithaca to talk about the book at the local public library.

It was a great year for me personally. The New York Times article and my Introduction of Anne Dick's memoir are accomplishments I'm quite proud of, and I hope to be able to build on these in 2011.

What else is there to look forward to?

Another academic book about PKD! This one by Italian Dick-head Umberto Rossi who has been kind enough to share some of his work right here on this blog. I have high hopes for Rossi's book.

I can't think of anything else to look forward to... besides burritos and stuff. Oh and maybe this year we'll see Radio Free Albemuth in theaters in addition to Adjustment Bureau. That would be cool. If two PKD movies hit theaters this year, well, you know what that means: prepare yourself for the onslaught articles examining 'Hollywood's Fascination with the Unlikely King of Sci-Fiʼ...

This may sound insincere coming from a Total Dick-Head, but I couldn't do this without you, gentle readers, so keep those insightful comments and gossipy emails coming this year. In fact there's gonna be some really cool never-before-seen stuff.... in the very next post!

I almost forgot to mention that this blog has received the coveted Top Kidney Disease Blog award of 2010 from the prestigious Certified Nursing Assistant website, based (I'm guessing here) upon the number of times the word PKD appears (which for many, sadly, does not stand for Philip K Dick but Poly-cystic Kidney Disease). And this is like the most Dickian thing ever, right?! I mean this weird, grammatically-awkward operation, Certified Nursing Assistant is giving away awards based on a computer's misreading of subtle linguistic quirks! Oooh, and a banner!

(note this content was removed in 2013 when the nurses contacted me repeatedly and asked to have it removed. Why did you send it to me in the first place, I was tempted to ask). 

I heard a numerologist on right-wing radio (WTF?! Right?!) and she was saying that the eleven in 2011 is a door, and we can be whoever we want to be when we go through that door - and this is our year to do that. Phil Dick reminded us in his novels that time is door we can pass through in only one direction, no matter how hard we may try to do otherwise. So choose your two-thousand-and-eleven-door wisely dear readers.