h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Before the site went down and got taken over, I posted the following, which I now, maddeningly, can't find anywhere. I hope at least some of it might be of use to you.

-------------------------------

One of the most striking paradoxes in Phil Dick's work is that the wilder and more speculative his fiction appeared to become, the more solidly it reflected developments in his own personal life and mental state. Thus from the late sixties through to the early eighties, his characters' drug-taking becomes far more prevalent (and his protagonists had always smoked anyway), and male-female relationships become more and more strained and destructive, to the point where, in Our Friends From Frolix 8, the most powerful man on the planet, the President of the World, keeps being interrupted from his job of destroying his arch-enemy by his wife's divorce lawyer.

A Scanner Darkly is openly about the early 70's American drugs scene, for all that it pretends to be set in the future; while most of his subsequent books up to his death were attempts to come to terms with the vision and subsequent bizarre events which he had gone through from 1975 onwards.

The mid-70's short story Chains Of Air, Web Of Aether (which became the novel The Divine Invasion) depicts a relationship in which the man realises that the woman is only capable of bringing stultification and death; at the same time, he realises the futility of his own efforts to pull away from her. She's terminally ill, and is quite prepared to use her pathetic physical state to ensnare him. It's unsettling, to say the least, and does raise the question of exactly whom this situation was inspired by. (It's almost inconceivable that this fictional relationship wasn't moulded by Dick's own experience. The membrane between him and his work became tissue-thin: he was incapable of NOT reflecting the world immediately around him in his fiction.)

I thoroughly recommend The Shifting Realities Of Philip K Dick, an American edition which came out a couple of years ago, published by Vintage. It's a collection of various Phildickian writings and lectures from over the years, which would pretty much commend the book in itself, but it's particularly notable for its 30-odd page collection of extracts from Dick's own "Exegesis", the journal which he kept from 1975 until his death, in which he tried to explore the myriad possibilities concerning reality implied by his visions and experiences. It's mind-warping stuff, and after a while ploughing through this incredibly erudite but never-ending web of theology, sci-fi, mysticism, science, and manic creativity, you begin to realise that if this was what Dick was falling asleep to every night, with ideas and theories like these fizzing around his brain, then Valis and Radio Free Albemuth were only pale reflections of what he himself could see.

(My favourite PKD novel is The Man In The High Castle, followed closely by The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer - in my view the only two occasions (oddly, at the beginning and the end of his novel-writing career) where he truly achieved the subtlety and fluency in his writing which he always strove for.)

Personally I do not see how it is possible to have only 1 or 2 favourite PKD novels, because while there are a few weaker ones, I find all of his writings to be amazingly full of ideas, some developed, too many not, all which are harbingers of things that will come in each of our lives in one way or another. When I first encountered Phil in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" -- not the film Blade Runner -- I knew that I had finally met the person in my life who could describe what was going on around me better than me. He never disappointed.

I just wish Phil was still alive so we could see what he would have added to h2g2 had he still been around to post to it. Put Phil together with Douglas Adams and the results would definitely have been unforeseeable by us mere humans.

A bunch of us thought it would be a good idea to recover some of his stories in our failing memories. So we started a free-form thread on my space. Hope to see you there. Ani.