Philip K. Dick: Essays of the Here and Now, ed. David Sandner. www.McFarlandBooks.com
When I learned about this new book of essays on the work of legendary sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick, I was intrigued. The title, especially, caught my attention. Essays of the Here and Now. It’s always tempting to cast any good sci-fi writer as a futurist or fortune teller, but it seems to me that many of these authors have simply written timeless stories about human potential and humanity in extremis. Their work can be set in the future, in some imaginary world or alternate reality, but their ideas illuminate the here and now.
Case in point: I read Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS for the first time in January 2017. I was well aware of PKD before then, but for some reason I had never taken a deep dive into his work. So there I was, reading the author’s fictionalized account of a visionary experience that had re-wired his mind in February 1974. I’m not going to try to sum up the plot VALIS because trying to sum up any PKD novel is a fool’s errand, but let me draw attention to one intriguing detail that appears in the novel. There’s a story within the story that says “God” used an “information-firing satellite” to remove President Richard Nixon from office, thereby preventing a cataclysmic World War III. Because the story within a story exists, it seems that someone “remembers” that alternate future. Philip K. Dick himself claimed to have experienced that alternate future America in real life.
Now back to 2020: I’m reading all of this in the days leading up to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. For me, the fact that Trump was elected president seemed (and still seems) like the stuff of dystopian science fiction. In that here and now, PKD’s story made sense to me in a profoundly affecting way. The barrier between fiction and reality seemed to have broken down—and, in our new “facts don’t matter” political milieu, the breakdown continues.
In his introduction to Essays of the Here and Now, editor David Sandner writes, “The surprise is that [PKD’s] paranoia, decades after his death, should remain something that feels frighteningly relevant, here and now. American society has become only more anxious and uncanny since he wrote.” Although the essays in the book all come from an academic conference that took place in southern California in the spring of 2016, this statement—about epidemic paranoia, anxiety, and an inescapable sense of uncanniness—is increasingly timely. 2016 was a simpler time. Before President Trump. Before Covid. Before January 6th. Before the threat of a new Cold War.
The work of Philip K. Dick was of course relevant in 2016, but perhaps in a less urgent way. Unfortunately, the early essays in Here and Now seem to me the least urgent and the most tiresomely academic. Things pick up a bit with Richard Feist’s essay “Voices, Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind,” which examines PKD’s 1974 visionary experience within the context of his philosophical influences and studies in brain science. Feist recognizes that Dick “was not, strictly speaking, a scholar.” He was an obsessive autodidact who explored ideas for deeply personal reasons, in a rather haphazard fashion. When he wrote VALIS, he trying to explain his own experience and thereby address some of the biggest questions in Western religion and philosophy. His mission took him down a deep rabbit hole, into a brilliant and perplexing mental Wonderland, which he documented in an 8,000-page literary experiment he called the Exegesis.
Here’s the thing: If the work of Philip K. Dick speaks to you, you have to take the leap. It’s obvious that the essayists who contributed to Essays Here and Now have taken the leap. I only wish they had written more about why.
While I was obsessing about PKD in 2017, I zipped through several of the major novels (Time Out of Joint; The Man in the High Castle; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Ubik; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), along with major essays in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick and David Sutin’s biography Divine Realities: A Life of Philip K. Dick, on my way to Jonathan Lethem’s 800-page edit of the Exegesis. I got lost in that Wonderland for almost a full year. I don’t know how to sum up PKD’s effect on me during that year except to say I found myself continually thinking “This is crazy…. but also brilliant… In fact, it’s so brilliant that I might be crazy too, because I’m starting to understand it.”
Back to those key words: paranoia, anxiety, uncanny.
Although Philip K. Dick has some shortcomings as a novelist, I fell under his spell like a kid in a cult. I can’t remember the last time an author had exerted such a powerful influence on me. Then a strange thing happened. I finished reading the published version of the Exegesis and hit a wall. In 2019, I circled back to PKD and read his early novel Eye in the Sky, but it wasn’t the same. The drug had worn off. I picked up Essays of the Here and Now because I was looking for help explaining PKD’s allure for a reader like me. What I found was a mixed bag.
The first half of the book spoke to my intellect but not to my gut-level obsession with the author’s spiritual journey. There’s no question that the essayists gathered here are passionate about PKD’s work—and their work has prompted me to seek out a few PKD titles that I didn’t previously know much about. One essayist defines Galactic Pot Healer as “a novel written by a PKD who fervently longs to stop being PKD.” That made me curious, so I ordered the book. I was also intrigued by Gabriel Cutrufello’s explication of Dick’s early mainstream novels, especially The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike: “Instead of using cognitive estrangement to present problems in a way that creates fresh perspectives for the reader, Dick takes the familiar and illustrates how it is already science fictional.” That’s exactly what I loved about PKD’s novel Time Out of Joint, which is firmly grounded in 1950s America—so much so that it seems like a John Cheever story—until it morphs into mind-bending sci-fi, making the new “unreality” feel maddeningly real.
From an academic perspective, perhaps the most valuable essay in the first half of the book is Gregg Rickman’s breakdown of an outline for a PKD novel that was never written. Sadly, it reveals that not only can’t we read the novel but we also can’t read the outline, because the Philip K. Dick Estate has suppressed it. For die-hard fans, then, Rickman’s breakdown is a privileged glimpse into the unpublished work.
For me, the real gold is the second half of the book, which consists of transcriptions of four panels that took place at the 2016 conference, featuring several of PKD’s friends and fellow writers, as well as dedicated archaeologists of his work. Super-fan and Exegesis editor Jonathan Lethem gives a lengthy history of his discovery and editing of the Exegesis, as well as an entertaining insider history of PKD fan culture. This guy is a national treasure. Back in 2017, I stumbled upon a recording of a speech he gave at the Los Angeles Public Library, which fueled my new obsession. (Listen here: https://www.lapl.org/books-emedia/podcasts/aloud/exegesis-philip-k-dick)
Authors Tim Powers and James Blaylock remember Philip K. Dick as a friend, highlighting his eccentricities in hilarious and humanizing ways. A trio of other authors (including the author of the definitive book about Blade Runner) offer insider observations about Hollywood’s forays into the Phildickian universe. Finally, in a conversation with Samuel Sousa, Lethem muses on the semi-fictional, real-world setting of PKD’s later life and novels—and casually reveals that PKD worked with author Ray Nelson on the short story that went on to inspire John Carpenter’s film They Live.
Mind blown.
Essays of the Here and Now isn’t quite the book I was looking for but it’s a worthwhile jumping-off point for deeper dives into PKD’s haunting and awe-inspiring view of the semi-fictional here and now, where reality is always being written and rewritten.
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