Philip K. Dick on Reality

...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups.... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing....

—Philip K. Dick

From a 1978 speech entitled "How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later." Included in the anthology The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin (Pantheon, 1995).

This is not a still from Blade Runner....

"A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"

On January 19 (now you see how far behind I am on blog posts!) I was reading through my blog and forum feeds when I came upon this photograph on the Philip K. Dick blog Total Dick-Head. Little was said about the photo, other than "that's not a still from Blade Runner" and it's "the smog in Beijing, and some crazy building." I shared this photo on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, with what little information I had.

Aside from a couple "likes" and such on G+ and FB, nothing came of my posts on those two sites. But, Twitter was something else altogether....

I used the #PKD hashtag on my tweet, and that really got people's attention. Retweets and comments were coming in as fast as I could read them, over the course of days. Some of the retweets were in German, Spanish, and Russian, as well as character sets I didn't recognize.

I received a tweet from @spenap (Simón P.) informing me that the original source of the photo was the Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) blog. Simón also noted that the photo had been posted to Tumbler, and then picked up by Gizmodo. As he was kind enough to include a link to the WSJ blog in his tweet, I immediately checked it out.

This photo was among the "Photos of the Day" for January 14 on the WSJ blog, and is credited to ChinaFotoPress/Zuma Press. The caption under the photograph reads:

AIR OF MYSTERY: Haze obscured the Pangu Plaza Office Building in Beijing Saturday. Beijing on Sunday issued its first-ever 'orange' fog warning, an alert to the elderly, children and people suffering from respiratory disease to stay indoors and limit exposure to the pollution.

I later received a tweet from @nntd, stating "I took this pic." I replied, hoping to get clarification and/or confirmation, but received no response. But I will assume she/he is the photographer. The name associated with @nntd is in a foreign character set and thus only shows up in my twitter feed as three square symbols.

A brief search led me to the Gizmodo blog post. There are more than 40 comments, including one from "Settings" that includes a photo of this same building, from a different perspective, taken on a clear day:

According to this and other comments, these buildings are referred to as the dragon building, which, from the air, evidently looks like a dragon.

But back to my twitter feed: Just a few of the tweets I received in response:

Kyle Baker (@kbaker): That's the Beijing I remember while there. Eery resemblance. Beijing can be quite nice on clear days, though.

@mangochutney: it [the smog] only gets this bad when they power up the coal-fired power plants outside the 3rd ring of the city.

@mangochutney: the amount of soot that accumulated over the course of 2d on my closed balcony was scary.

Richard Lai (@richardlai): I'm in Beijing right now and I can confirm that the air is still very bad. Brought a couple of N95 masks along.

This whole twitter experience was really quite fascinating. To date my tweet has been retweeted 2,470 times, and that's not counting all the dozens of personal responses I received. I remain amazed....

I'll close with one last photo -- a cityscape -- and this is a still from Blade Runner, courtesy of Dan North's Spectacular Attractions blog:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die."
~Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Does Google Dream of Electric Sheep?

"Nexus 6 Replicants" graphic by Superior Graphix

I got the urge recently to reread Philip K. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? as it's been about 20 years since I last read this wonderful novel. It's so much different than the movie Blade Runner, which is based on DADOES?

The novel doesn't have the visual impact of the movie, nor does it have the manic emotions and level of violence of the movie. The novel is a completely different [reading] experience -- and if you are a fan of the movie and have not read the novel, I encourage you to do so.

But the novel notwithstanding, I am a huge fan of Blade Runner and, in fact, I own three versions of the movie: the original version with the voice-over (on video), the Director's Cut and the Final Cut (both on DVD). One of my favorite scenes: following the fight between the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), on the rooftop, after Batty saves Deckard, when Batty could have easily just let Deckard fall to his death below. Batty, with symbolic white bird in hand, says to Deckard (and to everyone):

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

PKD was offered $400,000 to write a novelization of the movie, but he refused, stating that the novel would remain as is and there would be no novelization. Now, to put that $400,000 in perspective: Since the film was released in June 1982, let's assume that the novelization offer was made in 1981. According to DollarTimes's inflation calculator, the inflation rate since 1981 is 3.15%; so $400,000 in 1981 is equivalent to $1,045,988.41 (let's not forget the 41 cents!) in 2012.

So, my question to you: Would you be willing able to turn down a million-plus dollars to maintain the integrity of your novel, your writing? Sorry, but I don't think so, not in this day and age of me, me, me....

In the end, in 1982, Del Rey Books released a mass market paperback movie tie-in version of the novel, featuring the Blade Runner title and promo poster on the cover, with the subtitle -- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- in parenthesis. And on the copyright page the following blocked text was added:

Philip K. Dick & Rudy Rucker's Warez

I've been reading Philip K. Dick's stories and novels ever since I learned to read and think at the same time. Seriously, I've been reading (and collecting) PKD's work for many years. On my bookshelves, I have all of his more esoteric "mainstream" novels, including Confessions of a Crap Artist (Entwhistle Books, 1975), The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (Mark V. Ziesing, 1984), In Milton Lumpky Territory (Dragon Press, 1985), Puttering About in a Small Land (Academy Chicago, 1985), Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (Victor Gollancz, 1986), as well as a few others, in addition to the 5-volume Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, edited by Paul Williams¹ and published by Underwood-Miller in 1987.

I was a member of the PKD Society beginning in the mid-1980s, and as I wrote in a previous blog post, I used to help out at the newsletter mailing parties at Paul Williams' San Francisco home. And it was this involvement with PKD and the PKD Society that led me to attend my first Armadillocon in Austin, Texas: Armadillocon 10 in October 1988. K. W. Jeter was the Guest of Honor, and when I learned that James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers were also scheduled to attend -- all three former members of the "Thursday Night Gang"² -- then I knew this was one convention that I simply could not miss.

During that convention, Jeter, Blaylock, and Powers held a panel discussion entitled "Memories of Philip K. Dick;" the panel met at midnight, but I don't recall on which night, Friday or Saturday. I recorded the entire discussion on a mini-cassette recorder, obtained the three panelists' permission to reprint the content in the PKD Society's newsletter, and then sent the tapes to Paul. He transcribed the tapes himself, and the highly edited panel discussion³ was included in issue #20 of the newsletter, April 1989, under the title "The Phil Wars."

A Philip K. Dick Quote

While working on my new blog post, which covers some Philip K. Dick territory, I came upon this quote by the man, and just had to post it here. Given the political times in which we now live, this is probably one of the most apropos quotes I have ever seen, especially when one considers that it had to have been spoken, or written, prior to March 2, 1982, when PKD passed away.

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." ―Philip K. Dick

February Links & Things

I back up my working data automatically every half hour to a USB drive; specific files and folders (all working data) are backed up nightly to a stand-alone external drive; and the entire "My Computer" (essentially my entire PC) gets backed up to that same external drive once a week. Well, during my weekly backup I have begun to receive bad sector errors, so I ran a disk check upon startup Saturday morning and received four different "File record segment is unreadable" error messages. Disk check fixed the errors so that I was able to then complete the "My Computer" backup, but I'm afraid my hard drive is headed for HDD hell. I have a couple projects that I hope to complete within the next two days, and then I suspect I'll have to replace the hard drive and reinstall the entire "My Computer," and hope that there hasn't been too great a loss of data due to those unreadable file records. Sigh....

Following are my links and such for the month of February. I've listed them here, all in one post, and with additional detail and comment. You can receive these links in real time by following me on Twitter: @martyhalpern.

• Recent reviews of books from two different authors with whom I worked as editor:
  
  Canadian author Nathalie Mallet's second book in a series has recently been published by Night Shade Books. Colleen Cahill, in her review on SFRevu, writes: "In her first book, The Princes of the Golden Cage [2007], Nathalie Mallet took a pass at fairy tales and brought us a new version, with the Prince being locked away rather than the Princess. In her second book about Prince Amir, The King's Daughters [2009], we are again in a medieval fantasy setting, but this time we move from the Arabian Nights to a North Eastern European arena. The good news is Mallet continues to bring us a piece full of fascinating characters and intriguing plots, all presented in a compelling style; the bad news (for Amir) is that while the Prince might be out of the cage, life is not getting any easier.... This book is a good read for fans of medieval fantasy, especially those who want something that does not follow the standard plot. You need not have read the earlier work to enjoy this book, but I recommend both of them. On a cold winter's night, you can't do better than snuggling in with The King's Daughters."
  
  And...Mark Teppo's Heartland, the second book in The Codex of Souls, also from Night Shade Books, is reviewed by @MadHatterReview: "Teppo doesn't suffer the sophomore slump at all with Heartland. In fact, the same level of cleverness and knowledge of the occult still clings to Teppo's prose as this man is a knowledge bucket of the arcane and manages to make it fresh and undaunting.... The Codex of Souls is without a doubt one of the most original Urban Fantasy series going right now. It has stepped away from the pack and embraced a different type of magic and a very different sensibility worth checking out."
  
  You can read my earlier blog post, entitled "Mark Teppo's Codex of Souls Seeks the Light," on working with Mark on The Codex of Souls series.



• Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, writes a sharp and critical analysis -- nay, a rebuke -- of the literary magazine, its writers, and the colleges and universities that sponsor them: "Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature -- not even the writers themselves.... To pull out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes -- and quick.... young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I'm not calling for more pundits -- God knows we've got plenty. I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ's sake, write something we might want to read." Bravo! As of this writing, there are more than 120 comments. (via @Catherine_Asaro)



• As a follow-on to the above link on the demise of literary journals, is this article (rant?) in the Los Angeles Times Book Section from Dani Shapiro, guest editor for the anthology Best New American Voices 2010, the latest volume in a long-running series, which is coming to an end because the publisher can no longer justify its publication due to declining sales. Shapiro criticizes MFA programs because "creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score.... The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry -- always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media -- has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all." If you've often heard other writers say (or have said this yourself, or at least thought it): "So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?" -- then you need to read this piece.



• Author @JasonSanford blogs about a website he just discovered: "Selecting and aggregating content from the 'independent' publishing world, FictionDaily presents three new stories each day -- a short, a long, and a genre story. Excerpts of stories in each of these categories are presented without reference to the author's name, the title, or the story's publication. If you're interested, you click over to the original publisher to read the story.... To get a sense of the site's goals, I asked FictionDaily's editor David Backer a few questions." If you're into reading online short-fiction, but don't have the time to search out all the sites and stories, then let FictionDaily do the work for you. I think you'll be amazed as to just how much short fiction is being published online: I counted 54 magazines on the list, and that was only through titles beginning with numbers and the first three letters of the alphabet! And enjoy Sanford's mini interview with David Backer, too.