Dear Santa, Please Bring Me...

(Hard core PKD fans will understand why this image.)

From the NYT:

Philip K. Dick’s ‘Exegesis’ Will Receive Two-Volume Release
By DAVE ITZKOFF

After a lifetime’s worth of literature that explored the future, the farthest regions of space and the afterlife, a posthumous work by Philip K. Dick will take readers to a different alien terrain: the inside of the author’s mind.

Mr. Dick, who died in 1982, was best known for existential science-fiction novels like “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” He also spent years of his life wrestling with what he considered religious visions that he began experiencing in the 1970s. He recorded his reactions to and attempts at deciphering these spiritual visions in a work he called the “Exegesis,” reputed to be 8,000 pages - or longer.

Though few have read the work and fewer still have fully understood it, the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt plans to release “The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick” in two consolidated volumes edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, a Philip K. Dick scholar, with the first to be released next year.

Mr. Lethem, the author of novels like “Chronic City” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” and who has written frequently on Mr. Dick, said Thursday in a telephone interview that he hesitated to describe ”Exegesis” as a work.

“The title he gave it, ‘Exegesis,’ alludes to the fact that what it really was, was a personal laboratory for philosophical inquiry,” Mr. Lethem said. “It’s not even a single manuscript, in a sense – it’s an amassing or a compilation of late-night all-night sessions of him taking on the universe, mano-a-mano, with the tools of the English language and his own paranoiac investigations.”
...

Dick is the hottest, most fecund dead author not named "Shakespeare" I know.

He has more movies made from his novels than almost any living writer, and more movies made based on his very specific blend of hallucinatory magic realist and science fiction than anybody ("The Matrix" was, for example, simply the best PKD movie that he never wrote.) Here is a list of the films that have, are, and will-soon-be been made out of selections from his body of work.

From a whole world marching backwards in time, ingesting shit, upchucking fresh peaches, and burning all knowledge in an orderly fashion...to the near-dead living inside of consensual hallucinations and being vampirized in their comas...to the one of the first* and very best Alternate History novels...to a carefully constructed simulacra of a 1950s-style suburb designed to keep one man hoodwinked into fighting a real war...to the fabrication of a fake drug war to slam the fascist lid down on humanity once and for all...Dick turned out one amazing, disturbing, polished piece of high, weird art after another, making just enough to die poor and living just long enough to see one of his lesser works made into what would become one of the all-time iconic film masterpieces.

Other great science fiction authors have certainly produced more wordage, but almost none have aged as well, growing somehow more rather than less accessible and relate-able over time, because Dick wasn't bedazzled by the science first and foremost: he was interested in paranoia, alienation, the slipperiness of Reality and the great pain and comedy of being human.

He wrote about people suddenly losing everything, including their identities. About figuratively turning sharp corners just quick enough to catch a glimpse of genuinely alien creatures loping away and hurriedly camouflaging behind them a Real Reality over which our absurd world is only loosely and fitfully draped. He wrote about the daily struggle to pin down True Things and to find a way to let God's Love slide in between life's dime store demiurges, false idols and fast food commercials.

Dick's work throbs like a wild, feverish documentary of our own lives five minutes from now because we live in a PK Dick Universe: a place where lunatics get away with vast and improbable crimes, where monsters hide in the open under a welter of jangly jargon...and where we are also perpetually tormented by the distant harmonies of a Better Universe where we know we should be living.

Which is why I look forward to snatching up a copy of the book(s) and reading at least some of the man's final thoughts, crazy or not.

After I've given it all a spritz of Ubik of course :-)




* UPDATE: Prof Fate is quite correct:

"Sorry to nitpick, drifty, but Dick did not write the first Alternate History novel (although I agree The Man in the High Castle is one of the best of the genre).

Though I can't say for sure he deserves the honor of first out the gate, Ward Moore published his "If the South had won" novel Bring the Jubilee in 1953, nine years before MitHC came out.

And seeing as how I have a copy on my shelf, I really ought to have been more careful. Must've been that damn butterfly I stepped on when I was out hunting this weekend :-)