Philip K. Dick in Orange County Edited by Christine Granillo and Jesse La Tour
Science fiction author Philip K. Dick is known for his trippy/dystopian stories and novels, many of which have been made into films—like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, etc. What is less well-known is the fact that he spent the last years of his life living in Orange County. He had an apartment in Fullerton! Dick’s last six novels (written roughly between 19701982) are set mainly in Orange County, and they offer an insightful and disturbing portrait of an ultra-conservative, paranoid, Nixon-era 1970s OC and America. This zine features writing and artwork based on the “Orange County Novels” of Philip K Dick.
BOOKMACHINE books + zines www.bookmachinezines.com Fullerton, CA 2015
Table of Contents
Jacked In by Jonathan Snyder……………………………………………….. Orange County References in the Novels of Philip K. Dick……….
A Timeline of Philip K. Dick’s Life in the OC……………………….
Philip K. Dick’s Reality: Just Strange Enough for Fiction
Introduction by Dr. David Sandner…………………………………….
By Christine Granillo…………………………………………………………………
Introducing the Ghost of the Simulacrum of the Presence of the Emanation of the Memory of the Writer Who Lived with Us Here in this Place: On Philip K. Dick in Orange County By David Sandner………………………………............................ A Brief Account of How I Became a Dickhead By Christine Granillo………………………………............................ The Town I Live In by Kevin Malone…………………………………… Book Reports on Philip K. Dick’s Orange County Novels by Jesse La Tour………………………………………….. Poetry by Naomi……………………………………………………………….. A Scanner Darkly: Paranoid Prophecy By Jordan Young…………………………………………………………………. Philip K. Dick and James Joyce By Steve Elkins..................................................................... Ode to Aliens Eating My Brain, for Philip K. Dick By David Sandner…………………………………………………………………
A Timeline of Philip K. Dick’s Life in the OC 1972: Dick moves to Fullerton, invited by CSUF professor Willis McNelly. He rents an apartment on Quartz Lane. It is in Fullerton that Philip K. Dick befriends budding science-fiction writers K.W. Jeter, James Blaylock, and Tim Powers. 1973: Dick marries his fifth (and final) wife, Leslie (Tessa) Busby. Dick’s third child (Christopher) is born. 1974: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is published. PKD begins receiving revelations and visions which prompts a long spiritual/intellectual search. He refers to this time period as 2/3/74 throughout his extensive Exegesis. 1975: Dick continues research into Orphic, Gnostic, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist thought to explain his strange visions. 1976: Dick and wife Tessa split up, which prompts him to attempt suicide. After a stay at the Orange County Medical Center, he moves into an apartment in Santa Ana with a woman named Doris, who has cancer. 1977: A Scanner Darkly is published. Dick spends a few months in Sonoma, California with friends, then heads back to Santa Ana. 1980: Dick becomes the chairperson of the Rules and Grievances Committee of his condominium complex in Santa Ana. 1981: Both VALIS and The Divine Invasion are published.
1982: PKD dies in Santa Ana from a series of strokes and heart failure, at age 53. He is buried in Fort Morgan, Colorado beside his sister Jane. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Dick’s final novel) is published.
Introducing the Ghost of the Simulacrum of the Presence of the Emanation of the Memory of the Writer Who Lived with Us Here in this Place: On Philip K. Dick in Orange County Dr. David Sandner The visionary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick lived in Fullerton, Placentia, Santa Ana, Anaheim—all around North Orange County—for the last ten years of his life. They were productive years, and relatively happy ones. He called this place home. Something about Orange County seemed to fit him, but what does that mean? Here’s something science fiction author (and PKD’s friend) Gregory Benford noted: I found he didn’t much like the aspects of the county that I found best, such as the beaches and ocean. He never visited my home perched high up with a view of the town and ocean in Laguna Beach. Only slowly did I realize that he was agoraphobic, so vistas and great weather mattered little. No, it wasn’t the weather—sunny year round until you feel you’re mad with the sameness of it, like the repeated pulsing glint reflected off tinted windows in an endless traffic jam. PKD lived inland, away from the beaches and their wealth and tanned bodies and surf music. He preferred the tract-housing of our hidden suburbia and its proliferating malls and super franchise stores and fast food joints—and its desperate, angry 1970s punk soundtrack for those who won’t conform so easily. He hung out with college students, punk rockers, sf writers, all those who saw all too clearly in the glare of that stark bright sun how much was lost—all those who would never dare to dream but might still sneer, futily, at the forgotten hope of something real existing in some unnamed place behind the con of modern life. Writing to Willis McNelly, English professor at California State University, Fullerton, about moving here, Dick asked: Anyhow, if I could make by degrees my way down to Fullerton, do you think it’s the sort of place I might like to live, at least for a while?
McNelly wrote back: You must realize of course, that Fullerton is in the heart of darkest Orange County… Upper middle-class suburbia… OC is also the place where Nixon’s representative in Congress is a card-carrying member of the Birch Society. Yet he liked it here. Maybe he liked having the hypocrisy out in the open, where he could see it. Maybe that represented a kind of honesty he could stand. CSUF alum and PKD’s friend, writer Tim Powers said: I think he liked the anonymity. Nobody in Santa Ana knew who Philip K. Dick was. He was just this guy going to Trader Joe's [to buy] lunch." Here, with relief, he didn’t have to exist so much, or work so hard to be real. In one of those Internet memes that now circulates forever, archived in insipid collections of quotes…marked as epigraphs on blogs…and stuck as tags below e-signatures, Philip K. Dick once wrote: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Perhaps much the same thing could be said for Orange County. You stop believing in it, yet here it is. It doesn’t stop believing in you, even if you want it to. You belong here, with all the terrible rightness and fitting-in that that implies. So, if you want, believe something else. Like: PKD landed here from another planet. He stayed, because, well, there is no here, and that comforted him—we live in a simulacrum, a fantasy presided over by a mouse, a place sustained and built by the hopes of immigrants, and scoured by Birchers and minutemen and a long tradition of regressive politics. Or: PKD was a replicant built to die for your sins. Or maybe even: PKD was a science fiction writer who saw not the future, but the past, feeling himself connected to a time of Roman persecution of Christian sects. In a kind of recovered memory experience he called “2-3-74” in honor of the months and year of its occurrence, PKD answered the door of his apartment here, in the OC, for a pharmacy delivery and received instead a revelation. That revelation of past life and his encounter with a divine force he called “Valis” propelled his writing ever after. His post-Valis work was, for him, some of his most important, his most meaningful.
What PKD’s novels offer us is a vision of our science fiction present: not the unlikely future, whatever that is—not the shiny premise of the present offered up by the powers-that-be for our quiet consumption—but instead speculation on the dark deceits that make up our reality, things not easy to believe but that will not go away. Like the possibility that we might still be human, even beneath all the neon-lit cybernetic dreams that light up our manufactured desires. Perhaps PKD never existed, but we can remember him for you anyway. Because we need to…. You are PKD. Didn’t you know? When did you forget? This book/zine is the product of an attempt to recover the presence and influence of Philip K. Dick in Orange County. Some of us come to the knowledge of his life here, and his writings set here, with a kind of relief: as if, at least, though still forlorn, we can see we’re not alone. The artwork and words you hold in your hands arrive like a bottle thrown, tempest-tossed, on the shore; they arrive unexpectedly, surreptitiously, as poems, as drawings found on the pages of Dick’s own books, as digital manipulations, as comic book covers. As a red storm funneling into us. They are messages scrawled as graffiti on the prison walls of our reality. They are notes, written in code, passed furtively from hand to hand. The essays render strange conclusions. The stories end before they begin. The characters here wander sideways, refusing neat narrative. They run from monsters into mysteries. The pictures capture a world obscured, mysterious, luminous. Vibrant colors harbor dark shadows. Eyes stare from the sky. Explosions and fire and smoke, as if Rome burns still. These words and images come to you as invitation, as lifeline, as record, as revelation. Treat it as gospel, as disposable, as a secret, as an unfortunate failure to live
up to expectations, as your last chance. But take it—read and gaze with a hunger that will not be sated…but sustains us nevertheless. One last note, a short history: this book/zine is an outgrowth of a website built as part of a class project at California State University, Fullerton, in Spring 2014, and launched late 2014 with the help of bookmachine, Fullerton’s independent book and zine store. The website is https://sites.google.com/a/fullerton.edu/philip-k-dick-in-the-oc/ We hope you’ll check it out, and “like” it’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pkdinoc Here’s the backstory to the site, archived there by me: In 1972, author Philip K. Dick moved to Fullerton, California, in Orange County, at the behest of Dr. Willis McNelly, Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. Dick lived in the OC for ten years until his death in 1982, and left his manuscripts and papers to CSUF’s Special Collections in the library. Twentytwo years later, I proposed the first Digital Literary Studies class for the English Department at CSUF. As a final collaborative assignment, our class, using the fact of Dick’s presence on our campus, created our website, “Philip K. Dick in the OC.” With the site, we intended to document and share CSUF’s literary history by creating digital archives both aggregating and ordering what was out there into relevant links and commenting upon it from our own perspective—and creating our own content through interviews, new explorations, and research, especially into our University’s Special Collections. Here are some things we created and discovered, the highlights: --Google Earth maps of places Philip K. Dick lived in Orange County and
of locations mentioned in two OC novels, A Scanner Darkly and Radio Free Albemuth. --A new inventory of recent changes to the Special Collections holdings of Dick’s work that documents what the Dick estate removed in the past few years and now holds privately, including evaluations of early documents by Dr. McNelly and a new video interview with the Special Collections librarian that tells the story of the holdings from their arrival at CSUF to now. --A new video interview with Tim Powers, a writer, CSUF alum, sometime protégé and friend of PKD. --Archives including: local media write ups of PKD in the OC by the LA Times, OC Weekly, Rolling Stone, and others; letters and other documents; photos; and more from 1972-1982. What does it all mean? The site we made is for you to explore, and find PKD, or his influence, still among us, here and now. Maybe it will comfort you. Maybe you’ll find the last thing you expect…. After all, PKD never dies. He just repeats endlessly like any meme let loose into the endless present future of our dreams. Perhaps he is trapped in a government prison with L. Ron Hubbard and Elvis. If you take the wrong road on an Arizona highway and give the right password at the checkpoint you find there, they will let you in to talk to him. He’s just a head now, attached to tubes and circuitry, but his dreams are more real than any reality you know. Why not read one of his books and find out? Unless you’re afraid—but, no, you should be afraid: read him because you are, because you’ve come to know that not only is the world not what it seems, it isn’t what it doesn’t seem either. Even if you are paranoid, you’re not yet paranoid enough. Don’t expect answers, but you need to ask questions. Ask PKD, I think he knows.
A Brief Account of How I Became a Dickhead Christine Granillo
The Philip K. Dick in Orange County project started last year during a Digital Literacy Class I took with Dr. David Sandner at Cal State Fullerton. As a class, we created a website that was dedicated to Philip K. Dick’s time in Orange County and his connection to Cal State Fullerton. Before I took this class, my only knowledge of Philip K. Dick was from the story “The Electric Ant,” so I confess: at the time this project started, I was a newbie at PKD. Yet, once I started reading more of Philip K. Dick’s works, it clicked. I was an instant fan. Like David Gill says in the short film “Why Philip K. Matters” when I got hooked, “I did that thing that Dickheads do, they go and they buy a giant stack of books.” I buy more of his books before I’ve even finished reading the ones I already have. When I think of why I like Philip K. Dick so much, I realize I appreciate the social commentary he provides, the scary predictions he forecasted in his novels that somehow feel all too real today, and the astonishing way he portrays humanity. The first novel I read was A Scanner Darkly. I became tuned in. I began to understand what the fuss was all about. I tripped out over the mention of sights I am familiar with and grew up around; some that no longer exist, like the La Habra DriveIn that was just down the street from the house I grew up in. It felt surreal to see the landscape of the Orange County that I take for granted mapped out in the novel I was holding in front of me. Not only was Orange County mapped out, but it was mapped out in a novel that rejected the plastic, conservative image OC has crafted for itself. Rather, it called this image into question and displayed the underbelly that exists within Orange County. It was this, the presence of Orange County in his novels, that my class was interested in exploring. This is what we wanted to put on display on our website. Philip K. Dick is a famous author; 11 of his books or short stories have been adapted into films—some of them, like Bladerunner and Minority Report, were huge successes. It seems like something Orange County should be proud of, yet somehow
the legacy of Philip K. Dick sleeps quietly through the night under the cover of a thin blanket. It’s time to pull the blanket. On to the show…
The Town I Live In Kevin Malone
So I stole Flow My Tears
I was 15 years old when I moved to Orange County
Do Androids
lived next to a junk yard temporarily
and A Scanner
I wasn’t a happy transplant
from The Library Police
no mountains in the background just The Matterhorn
I was on the WWW years later
Intersections with four gas stations on every corner
reading paranoiac rambling letters
Everybody talked like a surfer
that PKD had written to the FBI
I wasn’t used to my small high school
and to the Secret Service
I hated it
2 or 3 had return addresses
I was miserable and young now I’m old and miserable
I visited a couple of apartments that he lived at in Fullerton One particular house was where PKD had an intense religious experience
My older sister from Brooklyn visited me
that provided inspiration for the last four novels of his life
she was miserable and younger
I met a couple people that were doing yard work next door
and said that I MUST READ Philip K. Dick
I told them why I was there and the significance of the location
and of the author’s influence in Science Fiction and cinema They had know idea who I was talking about and just shrugged when I rattled off a list of movies based on his books So I took a picture of the door of his old apartment and left
Not that many years ago I tried to add PKD’s name to a list of Fullerton notables on Wikipedia It kept getting removed but a famous porn star’s name remained PKD is listed now as a notable of Orange County, California though but not of Fullerton
That’s okay I can deal with that The porn star’s name is still there though hopefully by now she’s retired from adult films and writing Science Fiction
Book Reports on Philip K. Dick’s “Orange County Novels” Jesse La Tour For my contribution to our PKD in OC zine and art show, I decided to read each of his last novels, and write book reports on them—paying particular attention to their commentary on Orange County (where I grew up and live).
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was begun when PKD was living in Berkeley, but completed and published when he was in Fullerton. The book sets up nicely some of the main themes he would explore for the rest of his life. The year is 1988 and the U.S. is a totalitarian police state. Police (pols) and national guard (nats) have set up checkpoints everywhere. If you want to go anywhere, you have to pass through these checkpoints, and present various forms of ID. If you don’t have proper ID (that is, if your identity is not stored in the vast databases of the state), you can be sent to a forced labor camp (FLC). To be “undocumented” is a sure-fire trip to one of these detention centers. College students live in walled-off underground areas, surrounded by pols and nats. If a student tries to escape (and spread “treasonous” ideas) he/she is sent to an FLC. Black people have been sterilized, and are rapidly going extinct. They still live mostly in urban ghettos, like Watts. Richard Nixon is worshipped like a God, or a new Messiah, and herein lies a main theme that will permeate all of PKD’s OC novels—the ultraconservative/reactionary policies of Nixon (who was, after all, from Orange County) are taken to their logical conclusion. The student radicals and African American civil rights leaders have clearly lost in America. The country has devolved into a paranoid, hyper-policed, and (frankly) dumber place. The main character of the novel, Jason Taverner, is a super famous talk show
host with a weekly viewing audience of 30 million. In place of social consciousness, the people of PKD’s alternative USA tune into mindless television and celebrity worship. Sound familiar? The main “action” of the novel begins when Taverner wakes up one day to find his identity has been totally erased from the government’s vast databases. This is dangerous because to be without proper ID is a ticket to a forced labor camp. Jason’s journey to recover his lost identity introduces another of PKD’s major themes—the struggle to maintain one’s identity in an increasingly alienated, repressive, and mechanized world. The title of the book comes from a nearly lost piece of poetry, which begins each major section of the book. The poem reads like an elegy to a lost society. In the worlds of Philip K. Dick, something shattering happened in America between 19681970. Voices of protest and conscience (like MLK and Bobby Kennedy) were silenced and a new order rose to power, represented by Richard Nixon and his homeland Orange County, California. Dick’s final novels, as we shall see, are a kind of elegy to what was lost in the late 60s, and a cautionary tale about where he saw the country headed.
A Scanner Darkly A Scanner Darkly is the first novel Philip K. Dick wrote that is actually set in Orange County. Like Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly presents a future, dystopian U.S.A., a fascist police state. Unlike Flow My Tears, in which the police state is overt and obviously repressive (represented by numerous army/police checkpoints and forced labor camps), the police state of A Scanner Darkly is more subtle. Rather than being overtly oppressed, the characters in A Scanner Darkly are being surveilled and destroyed from within (through drugs, technology, and the occasional secret agent). For this reason, the world of A Scanner Darkly is much more recognizable and familiar. The main character of the novel has two personas: Fred (an undercover narcotics officer), and Bob (a drug addict). Fred the officer is given the assignment to monitor and electronically surveil Bob the doper (aka himself). The split personality of
Fred/Bob reflects a larger schism that has happened in society. The world of the novel seems evenly divided between two main categories: the straights (conservative establishment) and dopers (liberal subculture). Because of his position as both a “straight” and a “doper,” Fred/Bob gives us (the reader) insight into both worlds, and into the deeply divided society that the novel portrays. Before moving to Orange County, Philip K. Dick spent the 1960s living around Berkeley, the heart of “hippie” subculture. Then, in the early 1970s, Dick moved down to Orange County, the heart of “conservative” reaction to the 1960s social movements. Through the split personality of Fred/Bob, Dick is also representing the vast cultural divide between 60s Berkeley and 70s OC—two extremes of American society. As in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, there is a sense in A Scanner Darkly that the liberal, socially conscious dream of the 1960s has died and been replaced by something dark and sinister—drugs and paranoia—a society rotting from within. In the alternate world of Flow My Tears, people turn their brains off with bad TV. In the alternative world of A Scanner Darkly, people turn their brains off with drugs. The book laments the early deaths of such 60s icons as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, tragic victims of 60s drug culture. Whereas, in the 1960s, drugs were seen as liberating and part of a larger social movement, by the 1970s, drugs had replaced social consciousness and become a world unto themselves, a swirling morass of death and despair. By presenting a cast of main characters who are “dopers,” Dick’s sympathies clearly lie with the subculture, rather than the establishment. This is represented in a scene in which “Fred” is giving a presentation to a roomful of “straights” at the Anaheim Lions Club. Fred is supposed to give a canned speech about the “war on drugs.” As readers, however, we get access to his inner thoughts, Bob’s thoughts, and we see how much he detests his audience: “The straights, he thought, live in their fortified huge apartment complexes guarded by their guards, ready to open fire on any and every doper who scales the wall.” As Fred struggles to get through his speech, he actually says, deviating from the scripted speech, “because this is what gets people on dope…This is why you lurch off and become a doper, this sort of stuff. This is why you get up and leave. In disgust.” As the novel progresses, Bob/Fred struggles to keep his two identities intact,
but things ultimately fall apart. The hypocrisy of his life, like the hypocrisy of the society in which he lives, becomes too much for him to bear.
Radio Free Albemuth In 1974, while living in Fullerton, Philip K. Dick had a religious experience that would inform the last four novels of his life. This experience, which cartoonist Robert Crumb documented in a comic entitled “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick,” involved a random delivery girl arriving at his door. The woman was wearing a gold Christian fish necklace. When Dick looked at the necklace, a beam of pink light shot into his mind and gave him visions and messages—specifically that his young son had a birth defect and needed immediate surgery. This proved correct, and Dick believed the beam of pink light was a revelation from God, or something like God. The first novel he wrote following this experience was called Radio Free Albemuth. Like his previous two novels (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly), Radio Free Albemuth is set in an alternate/dystopian U.S.A. that bears a striking resemblance to the conservative, reactionary Nixon-era U.S.A that Dick inhabited. His experience of living in Orange County, birthplace of Richard Nixon, gave him plenty of ideas and inspiration for the novel. In Radio Free Albemuth, America is ruled by a fascist tyrant (masquerading as a conservative Republican) named Ferris F. Fremont. The letter “F” is the sixth letter of the alphabet, so the numerical equivalent of his initials F.F.F. is 666, the number of the beast from the biblical book of Revelation. Fremont’s career closely resembles that of Richard Nixon. The novel describes “the budding career of the junior senator form California, Ferris. F. Fremont, who had issued forth in 1952 from Orange County, far to the south of us, an area so reactionary that to us in Berkeley it seemed a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare, where apparitions spawned that were as terrible as they were real.” Fremont, like Nixon, had risen to power as an anti-communist crusader. Following the deaths of such 1960s liberal icons as Bobby Kennedy and MLK, Fremont’s rise (like Nixon’s) signaled the end of the socially conscious 60s dream of a more open society. The USA, under Fremont (like Nixon), had spiraled into paranoia,
scandal, disillusionment, and increased police and military. The country had curved in onto itself, and was rotting from the inside. The two main characters are Philip K. Dick (yes, the author is a character), and his friend Nick Brady. At the beginning of the story, Nick operates a small record store called University Music on Telegraph in Berkeley, where Phil sometimes buys music. One day, Nick starts getting these strange visionary and auditory revelations, which compel him to move down to Orange County, the belly of the beast, so to speak—the birthplace of Fremont (Nixon). While living in Orange County (Placentia, in particular), Nick continues getting messages from the mysterious/divine spark of light, which he calls VALIS, which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Nick discusses these visions with his sci-fi writer friend, Philip K Dick, and the two speculate about the origin, content, and meaning of these strange messages. They believe they come from outer space, from an ancient, distant star, a star called Albemuth. Nick’s visions are of the ancient Roman empire in the first century, around the year 70 A.D. when Rome destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, and both Jews and Christians were scattered and persecuted. Nick’s visions and messages tell him that the empire never ended, that there is an ancient, cosmic conflict going on basically between the forces of light and good, the interstellar communication network of the universe, and the forces of darkness, evil, and tyranny, represented by empires like Rome, and now the United States. Nick’s visions urge him on to a spiritual quest to subvert the empire through rock music. Personally, coming from a religious background myself, I was greatly moved by Dick’s mystical understanding of God and religion. He sees it as a vast, intergalactic mind, communicating across time and space, connecting all living things. VALIS is what some people have called God. And the few rag-tag people on earth who are able to receive his messages form a small, persecuted minority who bravely stand up against the forces of tyranny and oppression. They may not see the empire fall in their lifetime, but their spirit lives on, out among the stars, and occasionally glimpsed in the creative productions of the counter-culture—in science fiction stories, rock music, and in love between human beings.
VALIS With VALIS, Philip K. Dick began a trilogy of novels that would turn out to be his final work, and arguably his masterpiece—his Divine Comedy, his Brothers Karamazov, his Star Wars. For this report, I’d like to compare VALIS to those other masterpieces, to (hopefully) shed some light on what he set out to achieve with these, his final (and perhaps greatest) novels. VALIS and The Divine Comedy The Divine Comedy is a three-part epic Italian poem written in the 1300s by a guy named Dante. The three parts represent the medieval catholic view of the universe. It is both a work of cosmology (understanding the universe) and a personal quest. The author himself is the main character. At the beginning, he finds himself lost, and then descends into hell, where his slow journey of enlightenment begins. Along the way, he meets a vast array of literary and historical figures who give him insight. In VALIS, Philip K. Dick (the main character in his novel) begins his journey in the throes of grief, loss, and suffering. His marriage is ending and he attempts suicide. At the same time, he has a divine vision which compels him on a journey of understanding and healing. VALIS, like the Divine Comedy, is a work of cosmology, an attempt to understand the universe. Dick draws on science, religion, philosophy, and art to form his own understanding of the cosmos, which he calls his “tractate” or “exegesis.” Along his journey, he “meets” (through reading and discussion) a vast array of literary, philosophical, theological, and artistic figures. VALIS is also a journey of healing. PKD is sick, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, existentially. His journey, like Dante’s, is both personal and cosmic. VALIS and The Brothers Karamazov The Brothers Karamazov is a 19th century Russian epic novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It follows a family of four brothers, each on their own journey to understand themselves and the world. It is a passionate quest for enlightenment, full
of suffering, loss, and occasional grace. Each of the four Karamazov brothers represents a different philosophical outlook, and each may be seen as aspects of Dostoyevsky himself. There is Ivan (the atheist), Alyosha (the monk/mystic), Dmitri (the sensualist), and Smerdyakov (the deranged bastard). Through the interplay of these different perspectives, Dostoyevsky seeks to, in the words of the New Testament, “work out his own salvation with fear and trembling.” Like The Brothers Karamazov, much of the “action” of VALIS consists of PKD discussing theories of knowledge and the universe with his friends—characters who mirror the four Karamazov brothers in interesting ways. There is Kevin, the skeptic. Kevin is always sarcastically making fun of, and picking apart, PKD’s religious theories. Kevin is Ivan. There is David, PKD’s catholic friend, who sees the world though the lens of Christian faith. David is Alyosha. There is the twin persona of Philip K. Dick and his alter-ego Horselover Fat. Philip is rational, while Horselover is deranged. These two could be compared to Dmitri and Smerdyakov. Dmitri’s quest, like Philip’s, is to overcome/transcend his mentally ill alter ego, to achieve harmony and peace. Like Dostoyevsky, Philip K. Dick personifies aspects of himself through his characters, to work out his own salvation/enlightenment.
VALIS and Star Wars Around the same time VALIS was published, another work of science fiction was taking America by storm—Star Wars. In writing his science fiction epic, George Lucas drew upon the mythological ideas of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which sought to draw lines between archetypes of world mythology. Lucas used these archetypes to create his own hero's journey—the journey of Luke Skywalker. Luke begins his journey in ordinary circumstances, but he is ultimately drawn into a vast and ancient cosmic battle between the forces of evil (represented by the Galactic Empire and the dark side of the Force), and the forces of good (represented by the Rebel Alliance and the light side of the Force). Luke meets guides and companions who help him on his journey. Like Star Wars, VALIS begins in ordinary circumstances—suburban Orange County. However, the author eventually learns that there is a vast/ancient cosmic war going on, which he is drawn into. While living in Fullerton, he has a vision of the ancient Roman Empire superimposed on 1970s southern California. Repeated throughout the novel is the line “The Empire never ended.” Philip/Horselover learns that the forces of evil/empire still exist, and are now personified by Richard Nixon and an oppressive American police state. The author sees himself as part of a small cadre of resistance against this evil empire. VALIS, being a dense work, full of literary references, welcomes comparisons with many works of literature. I hope, by making a few of these comparisons myself, I have shed some light on what the author was trying to do with this work.
The Divine Invasion The Divine Invasion, the middle novel in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy, is set in the future, maybe a century or so after the events of VALIS. The novel beings on a distant planet, a human colony in the CY30-CY30B star system. Herb Asher, a main character, lives and works alone in a dome on this mostly inhospitable planet. He is like a cell phone tower operator, transmitting information across the galaxy. It is suggested that the reason he is living in this outpost is because there was a war on Earth and he chose this exile over being drafted. Herb’s exile is made bearable by the fact that he gets to transmit and listen to non-stop music, especially his favorite pop superstar, Linda Fox (aka The Fox). The action of the novel begins when Herb starts getting disruptions in his transmissions, and learns that another being is living in exile on the mountain where his dome rests… Yahweh (aka God). When the Roman empire defeated the last of the Jewish rebels in the Siege of Masada in 74 C.E., Yahweh was driven from his mountain home in Israel to this distant planet in the CY30-CY30B star system, Fomalhaut (aka Alebemuth). Ever since 74 C.E., God has not ruled the Earth. Instead, the ancient Adversary, Belial (aka Satan) has ruled. The inhabitants of Earth are mostly unaware of this. In Herb’s day, the most powerful entities on Earth are the Christian-Islamic Church and the Scientific Legate (both corrupt institutions). Most humans believe they are followers of God, but in fact they are living under the domain of Belial. This situation, that the earth is under the dominion of an invisible “evil empire” (which may in fact be a hologram) is a main theme in the VALIS trilogy. Meanwhile, back on his distant alien planet, Yahweh is hatching a plan to retake the earth and free it from its oppression. Like the biblical story of the Exodus, Yahweh appears to his servant Herb in the form of a fire and a voice. Instead of a burning bush, Herb’s electronic instruments burst into flame, and God tells Herb that he will be an instrument of liberation. Herb is told to visit the nearby dome of a dying woman named Rhybys, who (it turns out) is miraculously pregnant (though she is a virgin). The plan is for Herb, Ryhbys, and their friend Elias (aka the prophet Elijah) to
smuggle this special child to Earth. The child’s name is Emmanuel. Thus, the action of the novel begins, a cosmic struggle for the salvation of the Earth and (as it turns out) the entire universe. The novel blends science, religion, philosophy, and mythology to create a story that is both ancient and futuristic, cosmic and personal. Who will win the epic battle? Will Emmanuel succeed in saving the world from the clutches of Belial and his evil empire? You’ll have to read the book to find out!
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer The final three novels Philp K. Dick completed make up what is known as the VALIS trilogy. It's not a trilogy in the conventional sense (like Lord of the Rings). That is, it does not tell a linear story with a set cast of characters. Each novel has a totally different setting and totally different characters (with the possible exception of God). Rather, the novels form a trilogy in a more abstract, thematic sense. Basically, what unites them is the idea of a spiritual quest, of characters struggling to understand the nature of reality, themselves, and God. In the first two novels (VALIS and The Divine Invasion), this spiritual quest involves science fiction conventions--space travel, virtual reality, etc. The final novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, however, is not science fiction in the conventional sense. It is set squarely in the real world (more specifically, California in the year 1980), and yet it deals with the same themes of the previous two novels--the theme of spiritual searching amidst ordinary life. In fact, as I will argue in this little report, this is the novel's main theme--the struggle to reconcile the life of the mind/spirit with ordinary, day-to-day existence in late 20th century America. The novel tells the story of a well-known episcopal bishop named Timothy Archer (based on the real-life bishop James Pike, who became famous in the 1960s for his radical views and social activism). He marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama. He was a friend of Bobby Kennedy (who, were it not for his assassination in 1968, might have gotten elected president instead of Richard Nixon, and history would be different). Bishop Archer supported the ordination of women, and many other "progressive" causes. But the 1960s are over, and things have gotten darker in America. The year is 1980, John Lennon has just been assassinated, and Bishop Archer is beginning to have doubts about his faith and the state of the world. These doubts are exacerbated by the recent discovery of ancient, pre-Christian documents found in the Dead Sea Desert, known as the Zadokite documents. Like the famous Nag Hammadi Library and the Dead Sea Scrolls, these new documents seem to shed light on, and call into question, certain aspects of orthodox Christianity. The Zadokite documents, which were written over a century before Christ,
contain many of the famous "I am" sayings of Jesus: I am the Resurrection, I am the bread of life, I am the vine, etc. For Bishop Archer, these ancient writings call into question the divinity of Jesus, and show him to be a follower of a much older Jewish sect, not an originator. The followers of this ancient sect, the Zadokites, believed that by eating certain mushrooms, they were eating the spirit of God. What the documents essentially demonstrate is that Christianity is based on an ancient Jewish mushroom cult. In the midst of these discoveries, Bishop Archer is also dealing with the suicide of his son, and the physical and mental deterioration of his lover, Kirsten. Due to these personal and spiritual crises, Timothy Archer finds it increasingly difficult to maintain his position as a spiritual leader. How can he preach and counsel his congregation when he is so full of pain and doubt? Timothy Archer, like most of PKD's characters, is a complex and sympathetic protagonist. His is likeable and highly educated. He quotes Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare as readily as he quotes the Bible. He is a man who has cultivated his intellectual/spiritual life to a very high degree. He is a genuine and passionate seeker after knowledge, truth, and wisdom. And yet, as the novel progresses, his world (both inner and outer) begins to crumble. The narrator of the novel, Angel Archer (widow of the bishop's dead son Jeff) provides a nice contrast to Timothy. Unlike the bishop, she leads a rather ordinary life, first as a clerk in a law office, then as manager of a record store. Unlike the bishop, she is not religious. She is, at heart, a realist--quick to point out and make fun of high-minded bullshit. Which is not to say that she is uneducated. On the contrary, she has an English degree from Berkeley, and is totally at home shooting the shit with the bishop about philosophy, literature, even theology. The difference is that she is a skeptic, and seems more in tune with reality than the bishop who, in his time of crisis, turns to a quack spirit medium, and actually believes that his dead son is trying to reach him from the afterlife. The title of the novel comes from the idea of transmigration of souls, which refers to the spirits of the dead transferring to the living. It is actually a common belief in many world cultures, just not in the west so much. For the narrator Angel Archer, the bishop's problem is that there is a gap between his intellectual/spiritual life and his ordinary existence. Angel, who is not a
Christian, sees this fusing of the spirit and body as an essential part of human life. In biblical terms, this is called incarnation--making the word flesh. For Angel, any idea, however grand, remains meaningless until it finds expression in real life. When Tim is spiraling out of control, Angel sees herself as a grounding force, bringing him back to reality. This idea of incarnation, or fusing of idea and reality, is perhaps best represented by an episode in Angel's life when these two worlds (spirit and body) collided and she was, in effect, "born again" (not in the evangelical sense). What happened was she had a really bad toothache and could not sleep. She stayed up all night, reading the entirety of Dante's Divine Comedy and drinking cheap bourbon, waiting for the dentist's office to open in the morning. She describes the experience in this way: "I read Dante's Commedia, from Inferno through Paradiso, until at last I arrived in the three colored rings of light...and the time was nine A.M. and I could get into my fucking car and shoot out into traffic and Dr. Davidson's office, crying and cursing the whole way, with no breakfast, not even coffee, and stinking of sweat and bourbon, a sorry mess indeed, much gaped at by the dentist's receptionist...So for me in a certain unusual way--for certain unusual reasons--books and reality are fused, they join through one incident, one night of my life: my intellectual life and my practical life came together." This fusing of the intellect and practical life, of seeing and experiencing the ideas of literature embodied in real, messy, painful life--that is the great theme and insight of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. This theme is evident throughout the novels of Philip K. Dick, but it reaches its clearest expression in the VALIS trilogy. These deeply personal, weird, tormented books were, I think, a way for Philip K. Dick, the literary artist/intellectual, to fuse his own pain, his intense and vast intellectual pursuits, and his day-to-day life together--to incarnate spirituality from amidst the garbage, pain, and fragments of late 20th-century America. Like Angel reading Dante, ascending to the heights of heaven while still suffering like a sonofabitch--that is the magic and poetry of Philip K. Dick's art.
Anokhi Naomi Querubin-Abesamis Born again into another dimension He awakens and drifts between realms that are real He protects. He perseveres and Navigates through uncharted Waters. Silently he unhooks the floating rope that bonds them
through each domain while she disappears below the tide yet again like an unfilled vessel that inaudibly leaves the harbor with no wake. The despair and insanity ripples through his heart silently and forcefully beckoning her to come back for the Inevitable. The murmuring waves whisper distantly to keep her afloat hypnotizing her with a striking view across the horizon of unwavering threads of tangerine colliding with the ashen mist of illumination and determination By grace And through faith she finds her existence beneath the sodden and murky layers of the ocean’s surface. A mirror’s reflection encircles her. She sees neither darkness nor light only Enlightenment— all the while listening to the desperate sounds
of the engine blades under the craft named Union and His undaunted will to reach Her.
Mezzo Mezza Naomi Querubin-Abesamis The ecstasy of altering your life’s course and placing this in your hands Is like making love. A love that is not rushed. A love that takes its sweet time because it knows intuitively that time is an illusion and in another lifetime… It had you. It is a slow and smoldering love like the still water of the Colorado river a relentless intent
that cuts into you and leaves ridges so deep so profound…
searching,
and carves a path
sifting through, every single grain of sand on every shore to all…
Yet it finds a way
The ends of the earth.
around every part of your Grand Canyon.
A radiant Diamond, snugly held in place surrounded by smooth grains of black sand as if waiting for just you… To find it.
When you experience a timeless piece like this There is an inborn impulse in you that this is right—so right you don’t question—can’t question why. You just know from the first moment you laid eyes on it… It had to be yours. It was a moment that left you quivering, imprinted with your Beloved’s tough monogrammed all over your body, like a perfected pattern tattooed across this canvas work of art. When you steal but a a glimpse of its reflection across the way It is like finding that glistening diamond after desperately
You are trembling with a passion so fierce. First in the eyes where it all begins. This mystical beauty so rare. A vision that locks you, paralyzes you and draws you into its depths… And you have no earthly fear. You let it touch your shoulders and it’s a perfect fit, like the way your Beloved touches you for the first time. It sends jolts of energy
through you and ignites feelings that have been dormant for lifetimes.
And you vibrate to… The same intonation.
You clutch it so tightly to your side like embracing and clenching into the One. But it is slow and deliberate. It is careful You want this so badly you hold on and… You never let go. You run your fingers above and below the surface and you feel the wholeness of it, the soul of it, never full of it. Like running your fingers along the most sensual parts of your lover’s body. Glazing over it lightly but with every intention and invitation for the love to come and get you. And it gets you. All of you. Erupting on every level of your Being,
You cannot and dare not take your eyes off this for one second. You endure through it, you sacrifice for it, truly loving it as if— It was the first and the last… Joy of your life. You are the seeker and the sought, the alto and the soprano. It melts into you harmonizing fate and free will composed into One destiny.
A Scanner Darkly: Paranoid Prophecy Jordan Young
Science fiction is a genre that exists across many futures that never came; whether it be the leather and spikes of the eighties’ post apocalypse or the chrome and hot dog stands on Mars that lived in the Golden Age. Most predictions are now looked on as outdated speculation that may or may not be attached to stories of merit. There are some stories, however, that read almost like prophecy. These stories have a way of haunting the reader. When reading A Scanner Darkly for instance, one can almost feel the creeping paranoia of Philip K. Dick crawl up your spine. The 1994 of A Scanner Darkly feels like the California of today. The suburban landscape, gated communities, hidden drug culture, and yes even the seemingly endless strip malls with the eternal “McDonald Burger” restaurants, they all strike a very unsettling chord for those of us who live in the looming shadow of a cartoon mouse. The deeply personal nature of this book makes it an even more surreal experience. If you spent your youth on the fringe of California society you may recognize the nexuses of counter culture activity: the ramshackle drug house complete with an overgrown front yard, the darkened streets, and the midnight parking lots bathed in the eerie light of neon closed signs and fluorescents. The police still lean out from their cars and harass those that stand out. You may recognize the characters as well, and you may know the end of their stories well before you ever read them. Philip K. Dick knew these people personally, just as you may have known them. You may have known them in a different time and the names and details may be different, but it’s almost as if you’ve shared the experience. The way in which Philip forced us to question what is real seemed to leak out of the pages of A Scanner Darkly. Not only do you wonder what reality the characters faced, you are forced into his state of mind. Questioning who may be watching and why. A question that raises just as much fear now as it did then. A Scanner Darkly is a message that transcends time, a warning for those that would heed it, and a strange connection
to those that would accept it. I feel as though I have met Phillip K. Dick after reading this. I feel as though some of the hardships I have been through are shared by him and perhaps my burden is a bit lighter as a result. When a book can bridge the gap of time and space, creating a shared experience between people that have never met, I think the goals of science fiction have been achieved. Thank you Philip K. Dick, wherever, whenever, or whatever you may be now, your words have touched me in a profound and strange way.
Philip K. Dick and James Joyce Steve Elkins It seems arbitrary that science-fiction writers are rarely regarded as working within the realm of high literature, no matter how profound, eloquent or revelatory their work is. Yet there has been an increasing push in various literary circles to canonize Philip K. Dick as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Despite the fanfare, I’m still hard-pressed to find published writings comparing Dick’s work to great writers of any century. When Jesse Latour first proposed the idea of a “Philip K. Dick In Orange County” zine, I thought it might be interesting to explore an underlying dialogue I sensed between the major works of Philip K. Dick and James Joyce. At first glance, this may seem an unlikely pairing: a pulp science-fiction writer struggling to maintain his sanity in Orange County and a Jesuit-educated Irishman widely regarded as a genius who trail-blazed the highest summits of 20th century literature. But reading them side by side unveils a profound conversation bridging both halves of the 20th century. Each draws from a similar pool of encyclopedic references in their heartfelt struggle to expand the poetic vision we can have of: -the experience of God -the collective unconscious -the relationship between words and the world -the nature of time and space -the foundations of how we know what we know -the process by which madness (especially schizophrenia) becomes an identifying trait of prophets and a central ingredient in the gestation of humankind’s most sacred beliefs and cherished principles of “civilization” -the appreciation of theology as far more than a series of technical debates over
the minutiae of religious beliefs, but a window into deep psychological truths that guide most of our lives; especially the inner odyssey that begins when the symbols of one’s culture must be destroyed and resurrected in new configurations to enter into a living relationship with them. The intimate connections between the unofficial trilogy Dick wrote in my hometown of Fullerton (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) and Joyce’s unofficial trilogy comprised of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, now strike me as even deeper, and more deliberate on Dick’s part, than I realized when I first read them over fifteen years ago. In the first chapter of The Divine Invasion, a central character announces: “I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work.” Likewise, Joyce’s obituary (written by Joseph Campbell in 1941) reads like a synopsis of Dick’s VALIS trilogy: “Joyce…who toiled then thirty-seven years to effect a divinely comical transmutation of the entire spectacle of modern life; of the God with Two Arms, not alone in the rock of Peter’s church but in every stone in the street, not alone in the Sacrifice of the Altar but in every utterance of man, beast, fowl, or fish - in every sound whatsoever, from the music of the supernal spheres to the splash of a sewer or the crack of a stick; James Joyce, who in one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all cycle-wheeling history, is dead.” “Yes,” Dick might have responded, summoning quotes from Valis, “the divine intrudes where you least expect it…symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” Together, Dick and Joyce relentlessly sifted through the debris of the last several thousand of years in search of all we’ve forgotten about our past that might usher us into a meaningful relationship with the present. The comparison of their work that I began writing three months ago became too vast to complete by the time this zine went to press, but for now, consider this a sneak peek at a work in progress.
Ode to Aliens Eating My Brain, for Philip K. Dick David Sandner I saw Philip K. Dick on the bus today in Fullerton, California, a crowded place where no one lives and nothing happens. Long time now, I said. Aren’t you dead, I said. That depends, he said. On? Who’s asking, he said. I want my bike back, I said. I’m sorry about that, he said. We paused, breathing in exhaust and stale sweat from another fine Orange County morning, light bright as a commercial for laundry detergent. We hooded our eyes in dark glasses and adjusted our sleeves over our cancerous skin lesions. The surveillance cameras blinked in mild irritation, waiting for mistakes. But death is something that happens sometimes, he said, and then keeps on happening. *** When we grew up together as kids on Mars, Philip K. Dick stole my bike. He asked to ride it around our block of prefabs, and never came back because sometimes Philip K. Dick is kind of a dick. Later he denounced me to the FBI and the Thought Police. I first read his stories in prison, in exile. (Jealous, I had refused before.) Philip K. Dick gave me a mental wedgie with a line of prose. *** After college, Philip K. Dick let me sleep on his couch for, like, a year. He gave me a fake ID card that he said would be real later.
Philip K. Dick gave me his last dime—the date on the coin was in the future. Philip K. Dick made me a better writer except he stole my ideas: he rummaged my head or ransacked the future for stories that now I’ll never write. *** As the bus rolled past Harbor, past Fullerton College, past phantom Orange groves and the simulacra of a dying future, Philip K. Dick bored me recounting his illnesses and ex-wives. Then he gave me one of his novels which later disjointed my brain, timeslipped it, transmigrated it across alternate timescapes. As we held the book between us, sitting at the back of the bus, he convinced me I was the reincarnation of his twin sister, dead as an infant, and we swore brotherhood; but at a science fiction convention the next week, he pretended not to know me. He refused to sign the book, saying I must have stolen it from someone else. I left in tears. *** Philip K. Kafka, Franz K. Dick, Flipping Fill-up Cough-ka, Kash-money Dick. Too much Substance D in the drinking water. A spaceship casts a shadow across the sun. Our alien overlords feed us lies on cocktail napkins and run advertisements in our dreams. Philip K. Dick once loved the whole world for almost a week together, a feat accomplished but twice before: once by a saint and once by a woman, entirely unknown, who, dying, figured out what the world was all about. That wasn’t why she loved us. She loved us anyway. I like her better for it, and I think Philip K. Dick was more like her than the saint. Just saying. *** Rehabilitated, I joined the Thought Police (though secretly I was a spy for
Aramchek). I interrogated Philip K. Dick in Room 203 at the Orange County Civic Center. I told him he had two brains. I told him he didn’t know anything. I implied it was too late to do anything about it. I never let him know what it was. I guess I was still mad about the bike. *** I didn’t steal your bike, Philip K. Dick said, as the bus careened into the stars. I was abducted by aliens, he said. (He later explained they had a base on Titan, Saturn’s moon, from which they watched us through our dreams, which they ate, only to later shit out as our destiny.) So aliens stole my bike, I said. No, man, they abducted me and left the bike. Someone else must have taken it. So are you buying me a new bike? I asked. Man, you don’t know suffering until you’ve had aliens in your mind, he said, eating your dreams from the inside out. I looked into his eyes but when I saw fish symbols glinting like the clouds of Magellan, I turned away. I could handle the truth. But not the lies that made the truth possible. Forget it, I said. I wish I could, he said. Anything. No. About the bike, I said. OK, he said. *** Cal State Fullerton… my stop, I said, pulling the cord, making the bus shudder and cough. Can I buy you a cup? I’m not getting off, he said. I’m never going to. They’ll find me if I do. I have to keep circulating. I nodded. Can I take anyone…a message? Or something new you wrote? He snorted. Too much of that, he said.
No message? Yes, he said, scratching his overfull beard, squinting at me. Tell them I never got off the bus. Tell them I never did. I nodded. The bus snugged the curb with the squeal of tires on concrete. The light above the doors turned green. Time to go. I stepped off into another Disney day. I shaded my eyes to look back and see him. I thought to see him slumped against the window, staring through his reflection at nothing. But no one was there. Still, in my coat pocket, I felt the soft cover of the book he’d given me. I clutched the book and turned. Like fighting fire with fire, I thought, I will read my Philip K. Dick. I will cut the tape spooling my brain though an empty wind blow on forever. I set out over the trackless red dust of Mars, plagued by choking dust devils and a pitiless, inhuman sun. Into the impossible present. Into a future on fire.
Jacked In Jonathan Snyder Sweat rolled down Tristan’s forehead as he ran. He turned to look, hoping that the eel had given up. Instead, the spotted slug continued its determined run with its six spiny legs moving at a blurring speed. Its visceral bulbous eyes sat atop a triangulated head while its mouth filled with needle sharp teeth snapped from side to side in expectance of a meal. He saw white foam dripping in waves from its mouth. Tristan ran by empty hotels that looked like ancient carcasses floating quickly by in the dim fog. Ghosts of young, blonde, and fit men and women walked by him in the mist. Some carried a surfboard in hand while their feet pounded against the concrete. Others were already floating in the water that used to reflect a crystal blue hue. Grains of greenish sand squeezed through his toes as he attempted to pick up the pace. When he dared to look back again, the eel seemed to be gaining ground. He suddenly realized that this could be his time. He didn’t deserve to go like this. He always looked out for everyone else. He remembers sitting at his mom’s bedside in the hospital. She had told him that he was an angel the night before she died. His father might miss him, or maybe not. Mom wouldn’t want me to lie down. Tristan scanned around for anything he could use as a weapon, but he only
glimpsed rocks and sand on the lunar landscape. Just as his legs screamed for him to stop and fight, he saw a cliff with a cave opening ahead. Maybe this thing had evolved to grow legs but there’s no way it can climb too. He made a leap for the six-foot landing and was able to clasp his two arms to the rock opening. He pulled himself up and in, just seconds before the creature slammed into the rock and jumped a pitiful foot or two into the air while gnashing at him. “Shit,” Tristan said, as he decided to go deeper into the cave. There was nothing inside except for a few empty beer bottles and McDonald’s wrappers. But on the far wall of the cave was perhaps the strangest thing he had ever seen. In big red letters, someone had painted the words, “La Raza.” What does that mean? When Tristan looked out of the opening after a few hours, the eel was gone. He jumped down and quickly ran back to his car. He could not get the words out of his mind when he returned to his Anaheim home, and he continued to cycle the words around in his head during a long shower and even later when he lay in bed waiting for sleep to come. He tried to think of other English words it was similar too – raise, raze, rabbit. Nothing ended with an “a” like that and nothing started with “la.” He couldn’t get it out of his mind. Even though it seemed to mean nothing, he knew that it held significance, somehow. He finally drifted into fitful sleep. 2. The next morning, promptly at 7 a.m., Tristan’s IPhone 9.14 began chirping. “Snooze,” he growled a total of five times, as he and the machine went through the repetitive process the same number of times before he finally decided to remove the jack from the back of his head and crawl out from the warmth of his bed. Tristan grumbled for coffee as he walked into his modest kitchen, and his
coffee machine instantly began the process of brewing. The IPhone began listing his schedule for the day, “class at 11am,” “work at 5pm.” Tristan ate breakfast, exercised, and took a shower. He stared at himself in the mirror as he combed his short and carefully trimmed hair. He looked directly into his blue eyes and wondered what was behind them. Sometimes he didn’t think he knew. He felt like his skin didn’t belong to him. He wondered why it looked the same as everyone else’s. He didn’t want to be like everyone else. He didn’t need to be. He marveled at his perfect hands, looking at the murals in his palms and the trite nails attached to his fingers. His nails never grew long. He wanted his nails to grow so that he could pick at his face until it resembled something different. After the bathroom, Tristan headed to his CPU module. First, opening the door to the chamber and taking a seat in his familiar leather chair and then taking the cord from the main unit and plugging it into the connection on the back of his neck. He put his glasses on and shut his eyes as he waited for the system to load. Within seconds, he opened his eyes and saw the world laid out before him. For a short period, he browsed the latest self-driving vehicles and read up on the latest jacked in software before remembering the words. “La Raza,” he whispered as he attempted a quick web search but received zero results. Already beginning to feel the slight frustration of not being able to look up something quickly, he shifted his search to his university library’s site. The search was unfruitful there too, and instead, he kept getting a help function that replied, “Did you mean raze?” “Raze; verb. 1. To tear down; demolish; level to the ground.” Moments later, an AI librarian popped up in his field of view, smiled, and asked, “Can I help you find something?” “Where can I find information on ‘La Raza?” Tristan asked. The librarian’s smile faded as it said, “I’m sorry, no records exist on this
subject. Those words are unrecognizable. Can I help you with anything else?”
the Unified Order needed to defend itself from the radicals.”
“No, thank you,” Tristan replied. The librarian’s smile returned, and it continued watching Tristan with its helpful arms holding books until Tristan closed down the program.
“That’s right,” the professor said. “This system worked incessantly to keep peace within the world and sustain the principle of one nation for all. The radical front attempted to disrupt the very fabric of civilization as we know it.”
Five minutes to eleven, Tristan reopened his university directory. The mainframe took a moment to access his encryption code before he found himself walking into the virtual history 305 class. He watched the other digitized students take their seats. Their fair skin complemented the linoleum, and the uniformity of their postures matched the blankness of the walls. The professor walked in soon after with a briefcase in hand. He looked similar to the teachers Tristan saw in every class, but the difference between him and the students was that there was no human behind the professor’s glasses. The AI educator taught faster than any human could, and it never forgot a lesson plan. It had an answer to any question a student asked. It was perfect in every way. Tristan’s dad had told him that human beings used to teach in real classrooms only about twenty years ago – when Tristan was only five. But once government officials realized they possessed the software and that they could save lots of money, they enacted Directive 305, which brought about the current educational system only a year after the Last War in 2045. Besides, the United Order targeted many of the professors as radicals in the war. Perhaps it was not so much the perpetuation of violence that worried society but the very idea of ideas. “Good morning, students,” professor Markley said. “Good morning, professor,” the class said, except for Tristan. “Today, we will continue our discussion on the Last War,” professor Markley said. “Who knows why the wars began?” A girl at the front of the class immediately raised her hand and said, “Because
“But, who were they?” Another student asked. Professor Markley said, “They were preposterous groups of radicals and misfits who somehow unified under a badge of deconstructivism. They perpetrated a philosophy of violence against the very government who fed them. They walked under the banner of individualism and therefore selfishness towards their fellow human beings. The radicals fought to hedge money, industry, and materials away from the people and into the hands of the rich. Fighting took place throughout the world, but since the War and the defeat of the various rebel factions, we are united under one global banner.” “But what was it like before the war?” Tristan abruptly asked. Professor Markley chuckled, “When was the last time you viewed your fifth grade history lessons, Mr. Thompson?” “As you should very well know, the U.O. formed early in the 17th century because the population needed leadership and order in their lives. Besides a lack of current technology and the disruption caused by the Last War, we have lived in general harmony.” “With the advancement of RFID technology that simulated with human cerebrums and the entirety of the human body, the U.O. enacted a mandatory emplacement of ‘jacks’ on all citizens soon after the War. Henceforth, all residents of this unified world look the same. Everyone is equal and fused together without conflict over individual interests. We all work as one for the interests of society.” “We’re all beautiful now, Tristan. There is no need to be different. People no
longer need to worry about discrimination. People no longer need to worry about unneeded emotionality, infectious diseases, poverty, or individual identity. This is utopia…”
at night?”
“Well, I found these strange words recently,” Tristan stuttered, “and I was wondering what they meant.”
“Okay, well we need to see you at the main office right away. We want to make sure you are feeling okay. The school knows life can be quite stressful for new students.”
“Don’t interrupt me Mr. Thompson!” Tristan could hear the shuffle of someone’s imitation shoes while all was quiet. The professor stared at him incredulously. “Well, go ahead. What were these words?”
“Yes,” Tristan said quietly.
“No problem.” “Okay, how about you come to the main Fullerton office at one p.m. tomorrow then?” “Yes sir, I’ll see you then.”
“La Raza,” Tristan uttered softly. Tristan could feel the eyes of the entire classroom watching him for some time. They whispered amongst each other. The professor was silent for a moment as he stared at Tristan coldly. The image of the professor turned to static for a brief second while Tristan felt small beads of sweat going down his forehead back in his chair at home. Finally, the professor said, “Sounds like rubbish to me. Perhaps you need to worry more about your lessons and less about your video games, Mr. Thompson. I think I am also going to report you to the office. You are asking interesting questions of late.” Tristan made his digital effigy look down at his desk, and he tried to maintain this likeness for the rest of class. When the lecture ended, he logged out by walking out of the classroom and entering the school lobby. He quickly tried to close down the school simulation by walking out an exit door. Before he could leave, a box sprang up on the screen with the face of a man with an impeccable haircut. “Tristan,” the man said. “I am Mr. Sanders. I am contacting you because we have gotten reports that your mood seems unstable. Are you plugging in to your jack
“Thank you,” Mr. Sanders said before the box blipped out of Tristan’s vision. 3. The next day, Tristan jumped in his hybrid, spoke the desired location to the car’s automated system, and was on his way to the main CSU Fullerton campus. When he arrived at the empty Nutwood parking lot, the car automatically found and swerved into a space. He got out of the car and began walking. The campus was dead. It was a phantom of its former self. Buildings sat dilapidated and empty. He could see planters where green life must have lived at one time, perhaps lost to the California drought that never ended, and before the state struck a deal with Alaska to create a water pipeline. Even after this water brokerage was complete, the state still set strict demands on the types of plants one could plant. He supposed that once the physical school system shut down for good there was no reason to plant more drought friendly cacti. He saw four giant trees still standing in front of the humanities building with roots curling wildly over and through the concrete. They looked like giant monoliths or imposing guardians of the ancient campus.
Tristan imagined how life must have been here. He could see two students talking on a bench while sipping some coffee, a student running to class with a binder in his hand – late for his chemistry final. He thought about pretty girls with their brown hair glinting in the sun; real girls that he could perhaps talk to in class and not just images that didn’t portray reality. A student on a skateboard almost hits him and yells “sorry man!” He walks by a student talking to a professor about that day’s lesson, and a group of students talk jovially about another student in class. A quiet girl with dark hair sits on the grass and reads her book intently. Boys wearing tank tops walk proudly and flex their biceps at every opportunity. A chipmunk scurries down a tree and eyes Tristan.
“But that’s in Death Valley, nobody goes out there anymore. And I don’t even know your name.” “I’ll give it to you if I see you there. Otherwise, I’m risking a lot even being here. I mapped your eyes. If anyone else tries looking at that paper, it will disintegrate immediately. Good luck, man, I hope to see you soon. We need more good peeps like you.” The man abruptly turned and walked away. Tristan could briefly make out his dark hair before he went around a corner. Wait a minute. Didn’t he have blonde hair?
He is startled into reality by a voice, “Hey man!” A scraggly looking man came around the corner of the Humanities building. “I saw what you asked in class, man. I know the answer,” the man said as his eyes darted in every direction. “Wait, what are you talking about?” “You gotta unjack first before I’ll tell you anything, man. You gotta take that thing outta your fuckin’ neck,” the man twitchily said. “I can’t take it out. They say we’ll die from the pollution if we do.” “They just tell you that so they can control you, man. Look, there’s a whole different world out there for you, man, but you can’t see it until you unjack. Even then, they’ll be looking for you. I unjacked and the CIIA went through all my files in my mainframe and searched my house. But they’ll never get me, man.” “Um, okay.” “Look, I saw you asking the questions. You’re not who you think you are. Nobody is. If you want to know the truth then find me here,” he hands Tristan a note.
Perplexed, Tristan continued until he arrived at the only building that elicited a shiny and new exterior. The big block letters on the top of the building read “Mihaylo Hall.” He pushed in the glass door and stepped inside. 4. “Good afternoon, Tristan,” Mr. Sanders said. “Hey,” Tristan replied as he sneaked a look at the man sitting across from him in a black three-piece suit. The only odd thing was Mr. Sanders’ shoes. They were a greenish color and quite large for the man’s medium stature. “Is everything going okay with school? We have had some reports that you are asking some strange questions.” “I didn’t ask anything. I’m fine.” Tristan decided to use the age-old adage of denial. He had heard about other students that asked odd questions. His only friend, Corey, well they were sort of friends, told him that there was a kid they sent to a reconditioning camp in Alaska. Mr. Sanders stared at Tristan with cold blue eyes for a few seconds. His neck
seemed to twitch slightly. It reminded Tristan of the eel’s elongated throat bobbing and weaving. “You wouldn’t be lying to me would you Tristan?” “No.” “Well we’ve decided that you need a new jack,” Mr. Sanders said as he pulled out a new neck unit. He placed it on the table and rolled it towards Tristan. “Now, make sure to switch the systems tonight when you go to bed. The new jack will charge and download while you sleep. Any questions, Tristan?” Take your medicine, boy. “No,” Tristan said as he took the new attachment unit and put it in his pocket. “Okay, well make sure to plug it in tonight. We will be alerted if you don’t and then we might have to take further measures.” “Yes sir,” Tristan said as he stood and quickly left the office.
made everyone beautiful. Now he was wondering what it was like without it. He really didn’t have much to live for. His mom was dead, no girlfriend, no friends – no one really liked him. They all thought he was weird. He would miss his dad, but he’d live without Tristan. Dad had his new girl and kid to keep him happy. Tristan took the scalpel from the counter. The sharp relic was an instrument he found on one of his wanderings. He gave special care and attention when cleaning and sharpening it, as if he knew he would need it someday. He ate a few yellows and waited a few minutes for the painkillers to kick in before plunging the point deep and under the jack connection box in the back of his neck. As he screamed in pain, he dug deeper, attempting to sever the circuits from the unit to his brain without damaging his spinal cord. With a blood-curdling cry, he pulled the system from the back of his neck and quickly pulled a towel around the wound. Soon after, he blacked out. Hours, maybe only minutes later, he awoke to the sound of knocking at his door. “Hello, Mr. Thompson?” An official voice said.
Before Tristan went to bed that night, he decided that he wasn’t going to install the new jack. He wondered why these people couldn’t answer a simple question. Why did they insist on controlling him without listening to a thing he said? He felt more alive running for his life from the eel than he ever had. Then there were the words that he felt must have a meaning. They had a connection to the world before. He dreamed about this previous place wherever he went. If he could find that stranger, maybe he could get some answers.
Tristan moaned as he pulled himself up from the floor. When he looked in the mirror, he almost fell again. He had changed. His skin was darker and hair had sprouted on his arms. There were small wrinkles on his face and even some dark moons under his eyes. Even the pupils of his eyes had changed into a hazel color. He put his hands through his hair and mussed it up as much as he could. He felt different. He felt alive. He felt new. He felt beautiful.
When Tristan woke up in the morning, he remembered what the man had said – “you gotta take that thing outta your fuckin neck.” Since he could remember, his parents and teachers always told him that the jack protected him and everyone else from pollution and a number of other potential threats. It was a biological defense for humans as well as a direct connection to the cyber world. It made everyone equal. It
The knocking turned into a pounding on Tristan’s door. He scanned his apartment for some kind of weapon. No citizens had real weapons any longer after Directive 315. He settled on a small Angel’s baseball bat his dad had gotten him during a game a few years ago. He yelled, “Coming!” to the waiting man as he put the bat behind his back and walked towards the door.
Tristan unlocked and opened the door. Standing in the doorway was an imperfect man in a suit. “Good morning, Mr. Thompson, I’m Mr. Frank, I’m here to…” Before the man could finish his sentence, Tristan swung the bat into Mr. Frank’s skull, breaking the bat into pieces. The man crumpled to the floor and Tristan made his way outside. The sun warmed him, as it never had before. He breathed in the air and smiled as the oxygen washed through his lungs. He could smell the manure in the grass and the gas fumes in the air while his ears listened to the chirping of a bird. A flood of happiness washed through him as he saw the orange and yellow colors of leaves on nearby trees. He couldn’t remember seeing anything so vibrant in his life. He began to run down the suburban street. As Tristan ran, he saw a perfect looking woman watering her roses in front of a yard. Her small children tottered about around her. She gasped and ushered her children in as she saw the disheveled Tristan running by with his bloody neck and characteristic characteristics. He smiled. He could feel the muscles in his legs pumping as he continued to run down the street with nowhere to go. But he didn’t care, as long as it wasn’t here.
Orange County References in the Novels of Philip K. Dick from Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)...
THE NIXON LIBRARY: “He trod across the wall-to-wall carpet, which depicted in gold Richard M. Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above wails of misery below. At the far door he trod on God, who was smiling a lot as He received his Second Only Begotten Son back into His bosom.”
CAL STATE FULLERTON: “You have one private pol,” Jason interrupted, “He’s sixty-two years old and his name is Fred. Originally he was a sharp-shooter with the Orange County Minutemen; used to pick off student jeters at Cal State Fullerton.”
from A Scanner Darkly (1977) KNOTTS BERRY FARM: “In the kitchen doorway Ruth appeared, holding up a stoneware platter marked SOUVENIR OF KNOTTS BERRY FARM. She ran blindly at him and brought it down on his head, her mouth twisting like newborn things just now alive. At that last instant he managed to lift his left elbow and take the blow there; the stoneware platter broke into three jagged pieces, and, down his elbow, blood spurted. He gazed at the blood, the shattered pieces of platter on the carpet, then at her.”
THRIFTY DRUGS (FULLERTON): “But in actuality the Thrifty (Drug Store in Fullerton) had a display of nothing: combs, bottles of mineral oil, spray cans of deodorant, always crap like that. But I bet the pharmacy in the back has slow death under lock and key in an unstepped-on, pure, unadulterated, uncut form, he thought as he drove from the parking lot onto Harbor Boulevard, into the afternoon traffic.”
THE ANAHEIM LIONS CLUB/OC SHERIFF"S DEPARTMENT: “Gentlemen of the Anaheim Lions Club, the man at the microphone said, “we have a wonderful opportunity this afternoon, for, you see, the County of Orange has provided us with the chance to hear from—and then put questions to and of—an undercover narcotics agent from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.” He beamed, this man wearying his pink waffle-fiber suit and wide plastic yellow tie and blue shirt and fake leather shoes; he was an overweight man, overaged as well, overhappy even when there as little or nothing to be happy about.” ORANGE COUNTY CIVIC CENTER: “He did not feel like returning right away to the Orange County Civic Center and room 430, so he wandered down one of the commercial streets in Anaheim, inspecting the McDonaldburger stands and car washes and gas stations and Pizza Huts and other marvels.” SUBURBAN ANAHEIM: “Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had hammed in the ‘on’ position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale ‘How the Sea Became Salt.’ Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.” KATELLA BLVD (ANAHEIM): “Driving slowly up Katella Boulevard, Bob Arctor searched for the New-Path sign and the wooden building, formerly a private dwelling, that the energetic rehab people operated in this area.” ANAHEIM STADIUM: “Hey,” Donna said with enthusiasm, “could you take me to a rock concert? At the Anaheim Stadium next week? Could you?”
GATESIDE MALL (COSTA MESA): “Donna worked behind the counter of a little perfume shop in Gateside Mall in Costa Mesa, to which she drove every morning in her MG.” FIDDLER'S THREE COFFEE SHOP (SANTA ANA): “Seated with Jim Barris in the Fiddler’s Three coffee shop in Santa Ana, he fooled around with his sugar-glazed doughnut morosely.” THE FUCKING BLUE CHIP REDEMPTION STAMP CENTER (PLACENTIA): “It’s the fucking Blue Chip Redemption Stamp Center in Placentia,” Charles Freck said. UNNAMED MEXCAN RESTAURANT (PLACENTIA): “Every week smalldenomination bills were dispensed to him by a machine masquerading as a Dr. Pepper source at a Mexican bar and restaurant in Placentia.” A "SLUM" APARTMENT IN BREA: “Strung out on injectable Substance D already,
she lived in a slum room in Brea, upstairs, the only heat radiating from a water heater, her source of income a State of California tuition scholarship she and won. She had not attended classes, as far as he knew, in six months.”
CAL STATE FULLERTON: “Once, when I lectured at the University of California at Fullerton, a student asked me for a short, simple definition of reality. I thought it over and answered, ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.”
DRIVE-IN THEATER (LA HABRA): “They burned me by vending that ham sandwich, so what I did—don’t rat on me—next time we went to the drive-in, the one in La Habra, I stuck a bent coin in the slot and a couple more in other vending machines for good measure…we fucked up a bunch of them.”
DOWNTOWN SANTA ANA: “One of the reasons Beth left Fat stemmed from his visits to Sherri at her rundown room in Santa Ana. Fat had deluded himself into thinking that he visited her out of charity. Actually he had become horny, due to the fact that Beth had lost interest in him sexually and he was not, as they say, getting any.”
And, finally, my favorite…
“Meanwhile he had entered therapy through the Orange County Mental Health people.”
“And this was Orange County. Full of Birchers and Minutemen. With guns. Looking for just this kind of uppity sass from bearded dopers.” from VALIS (1981) ORANGE COUNTY MENTAL HOSPITAL: “Fat found himself locked up in the Orange County Mental Hospital. An armed cop had pushed him in a wheelchair from the cardiac intensive care ward through the underground corridor which connected with the psychiatric wing.” UCI MEDICAL CENTER: “The chief cardiologist at the Orange County Medical Center had exhibited Fat to a whole group of student doctors from UC Irvine. OCMC was a teaching hospital. They all wanted to listen to a heart laboring under forty-nine tabs of high-grade digitalis.” “Being crazy and getting caught at it, out in the open, turns out to be a way to wind up in jail. Fat now knew this. Besides having a county drunk tank, the County of Orange had a county lunatic tank. He was in it…the County of Orange would bill him for his stay in the lock-up…So now he had learned something else about being crazy: not only does it get your locked up, but it costs you a lot of money.”
“Driving back to the modern two-bedroom, two bathroom apartment in downtown Santa Ana, a full-security apartment with deadbolt lock in a building with electric gate, underground parking, closed circuit TV scanning of the main entrance…he now lived in this fortress-like, or jail-like, full security new building set dead in the center of the Mexcian barrio.” EPISCOPAL CHURCH (SANTA ANA): “I can’t give the name of Sherri’s church because it really exists (well, so, too, does Santa Ana), so I will call it what Sherri called it: Jesus’ sweatshop.” MELODYLAND CHRISTIAN CENTER (ANAHEIM): “I wanted her to go to Melodyland and testify that Jesus had cured her.” CASA PACIFICA (RICHARD NIXON'S "WESTERN WHITE HOUSE")--SAN CLEMENTE: “Well, Nixon is still walking along a beach in California wondering what happened.” MOVIE THEATER (TUSTIN): “A couple of days later the three of us drove up Tustin Avenue and took in the film VALIS once more.”
JOHN WAYNE AIRPORT: “Around me the plane became substantial. David sat reading a paperback book of T.S. Eliot. Kevin seemed tense. “We’re almost there,” I said, “Orange County Airport.” SANTA ANA: “Time has been overcome. We are back almost two thousand years; we are not in Santa Ana, California, USA, but in Jerusalem, about 35 C.E.”
from Radio Free Albemuth (1985) THE RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY: "Being politically oriented, Nicholas had already noted the budding career of the junior senator from California, Ferris F. Fremont, who had issued forth in 1952 from Orange County, far to the south of us, an area so reactionary that to us in Berkeley it seemed a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare, where apparitions spawned that were as terrible as they were real-more real than if they had been composed of solid reality. Orange County, which no one on Berkeley had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world, Berkeley's opposite; if Berkeley lay in the thrall of illusion, of detachment from reality, it was Orange County which had pushed it there. Within one universe, the two could never coexist.” “It was as if Ferris Fremont stood amid the deserts of Orange County and imagined, at the north end of the state, the unreal thralldom of Berkeley and shuddered and said to himself something on the order of: That must go.” DISNEYLAND: "But when he got down to the LA area, in particular down to Orange County and Disneyland, and had had a chance to cruise around in his old Plymouth, he discovered something unexpected, although more or less in fun I had suggested it to him. Parts of that region resembled his Mexico dream. I had been right." "Maybe your destiny lies directly at the center of Disneyland. You could sleep directly under the Matterhorn ride and live on Coke and hot dogs, like they sell there. There're bathrooms. You'd have all you need." “I left my wife because I dreamed about a foreign land...which proved to be ten miles from Disneyland, near a lot of orange trees. Down in plastic-town U.S.A.”
MEXICAN BARRIO (DOWNTOWN PLACENTIA): Upon leaving the freeway near Anaheim--he took the wrong exit ramp and wound up in the town of Placentia--he discovered Mexican buildings, low-rider Mexican cars, Mexican cafes, and little wooden houses filled with Mexicans. He had stumbled onto a barrio for the first time in his life. The barrio looked like Mexico, except that there were Yellow Cabs. Nicholas had made actual contact with the world of his visionary dream.” “It was spectactular; here he was, raised in Berkeley, sitting in his modern apartment (Berkeley has no modern apartments) in Placentia, wearing a florid Southern California-style shirt and slacks and shoes; already he had become part of the lifestyle here. The days of bluejeans were gone." "I really don't understand much of what they say. I just get impressions of their presence. They did want me to move down here to Orange County; I was right about that. I think it's because they can contact me better, being near the desert with the Santa Ana wind blowing a lot of the time. I've bought a bunch of books to do research, like the Brittanica."
“Orange County isn't nuts; it's very conservative and very stable. The nuts are up north in LA county, not here. I missed the nut belt by sixty-five miles; I overshot. Hell, I didn't overshoot; I was deliberately shot down here, to central Orange County.� ST. JUDE HOSPITAL (FULLERTON): "Tell him you're bringing Johnny into the emergency room at St. Jude Hospital in Fullerton. Tell him to be there." ORANGE COUNTY JAIL (SANTA ANA): "Wonderful. Now what was I supposed to do? They really had me. I cooperated or I went to the Orange County Jail. And people died--were clubbed to death--at the Orange County Jail; it happened all the time. Especially political prisoners."
[Include Felipe’s map here]
Philip K. Dick’s Reality: Just Strange Enough for Fiction Christine Granillo
"People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams and fears are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true." – Philip K. Dick
To read a Philip K. Dick novel is to meet Philip K. Dick himself: the man who thought the government broke into his house and tampered with his belongings, who believed he received messages from a divine source, who lived in Orange County for the last ten years of his life, and who wrote a profuse amount of meaningful novels. To read a Philip K. Dick novel is to have his presence in your vicinity, to be holding him in your hands, in each page, with each word. He is in his novels. His reality is sprawled out on the page for all to see. Perhaps, at times his reality seems too strange to be true, yet PKD was not status quo. His reality was just strange enough for fiction. While Roland Barthes may argue for the death of the author once the ink has dried, I venture to take the stand that, at least in Dick’s case, the author is not dead and in fact lives on in his writings. This is perhaps most obvious in Radio Free Albemuth, in which Philip K. Dick is a character in the novel who happens to be a science fiction author from Berkeley, California, like Dick himself. Interestingly, Philip K. Dick is not the only character playing, well, Philip K. Dick in Radio Free, as Nicholas Brady is also
representative of PKD. Dick claimed to have experienced living with a dual consciousness which is clearly demonstrated through the characters Nick and Phil in Radio Free Albemuth. Together they embody the duality Philip K. Dick considered his own reality. The driving force behind Radio Free Albemuth is the mysterious visions Nick Brady receives from an unknown source—a source that directs him to move from Berkeley to Placentia, California. After much theorization, Brady names the unknown source VALIS: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Again, this idea stems directly from Dick’s own experience, which he also terms VALIS. In February of 1974, Philip K. Dick had a transformative experience when a woman dropped off medication to his home. It is in this moment that Dick claims he was hypnotized by a beam of light emanating from the woman’s necklace. From this point forward, Dick claimed he could see an eternal truth. Another event in Dick’s life that is mimicked in Radio Free Albemuth is when the character Nicholas Brady receives a message from VALIS informing him that his son is sick and needs to go to the hospital. In fact, this incident occurs in Radio Free after Nick becomes blinded by a pinkish-purple beam of light that results in an extreme headache, much like what happened to Dick during his VALIS experience. Nick states, “Rachel, Jonny has a birth defect” and later warns, “He is in imminent danger of death.” Nick, Rachel, and Phil rush the baby to St. Jude hospital in Fullerton where it is confirmed that Johnny had a life-threatening hernia. This event is nearly exact to what happened to Philip K. Dick, as he too received a message from an unknown source that his son was sick and needed to be taken to the hospital. Upon receiving this message, Dick and his wife, Tessa, rushed their son to the hospital only to find he was indeed in life-threatening danger. It is difficult to ignore the parallels between the experiences of Nick Brady and Philip K. Dick’s own life. Even further, the placement of Philip K. Dick within Radio Free Albemuth itself further amplifies that Dick wanted his reality to be reflected within the novel. Reading a work of fiction as autobiographical can be risky—it assigns a
certain meaning to the work based on the reader’s knowledge of the author. Yet, when reading a PKD novel like Radio Free Albemuth, it is impossible not to see Dick in his writing. In fact, it is important that he is there; it is not as much that it only matters because these events are real, but that they add a level of meaning to the text. Dick was not just writing to bend our minds—he was relaying his own special knowledge about life and the world. For a reader to dismiss Dick’s true experiences would be to discredit significant messages presented in his novels. In some ways, it is understandable that a person would be drawn to dismiss Dick. Dual consciousness, hypnotic beams of light, messages from an unknown source: some may think these are signs of mental illness, an unstable person, a radical left-wing, anti-Nixon (un)American. Further, Dick had acquired a reputation for being a heavy drug-user, something he wrote about in Radio Free Albemuth: “My real trouble concerning drugs came when Harlan Ellison in his anthology Dangerous Visions said in an introduction to a story of mine that it was ‘written under the influence of LSD.’” It is true, Harlan Ellison did write a preface to Dick’s story in Dangerous Visions stating Dick wrote the story while on LSD, thus setting in metaphorical stone the public image of Philip K. Dick as a strung out drug addict. It is also true that Dick did use drugs. Yet, he eventually rehabilitated himself—he received treatment at a Canadian drug clinic shortly before he moved to Orange County. In truth, Dick was remorseful about drugs. Take a look at A Scanner Darkly, where to take Substance D is to sentence oneself to death. First, death of the mind— the loss of sanity and the ability to function—then death its most absolute form. Even those who do not end up dead are for all intents and purposes no longer living. At the end of the novel, we see a vegetable-like Bruce in a field of flowers that turn into the very substance that destroyed his life, thinking, as if in a delusion, that he may one day see his friends again. A Scanner Darkly also explores issues of identity, paranoia, and the invasiveness of government surveillance, but at the heart of its message is the sad reality Dick experienced in his own life—people were suffering great losses as a result of drug use.
At the end of the novel Dick offers his author’s note, which serves as much more than an afterword to the story. It is a heartbreaking insight into Dick’s world. He begins his author’s note, “This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed – run over, maimed destroyed – but they continued to play anyhow.” The “they” he speaks of then turns to “we:” “We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief; even when we could see it, we could not believe it.” This is the turning point which makes it clear that Dick is talking about his own life—that A Scanner Darkly is about Dick’s own experiences and losses. Once again changing the perspective, he makes it clearly personal: “For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.” Indeed, Dick lists the names of 15 people to whom he dedicated the novel; some of which were deceased, others who were living with permanent psychosis, and he himself who he listed as having permanent pancreatic damage. Dick really makes no excuses for their behavior, only acknowledges the heavy consequences of their actions. Even in the deepest sadness of this reality, PKD’s works are astounding. While he presents dystopian societies that lead one to question the fate of the world, there is something beautifully human at the base of his novels. Dick may have been a wild and paranoid man, but he lived with unique insights into this world. Whether they were the product of mental illness or drugs or a divine metaphysical connection does not matter. What matters is that Dick had it and that he shared it with us. This is
why it is okay to see him in his writing—he is there. As he states in his author’s note, “Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel.”