Philip K. Dick: Legit!

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Maybe you know Philip K. Dick as the guy who wrote the book that Blade Runner is based on. Or maybe you know him as the guy who wrote the books behind some really bad, bad movies (hurry now and you might still be able to check out Next before it goes straight to laserdisc!). This week, though, Dick is going to be enshrined in the literary canon with a Library of America edition of four of his greatest works.

. . It’s hard to know what Mr. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability. Four of his novels from the 1960s — “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Ubik” — are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper. He might be pleased, or he might demand to know why his 40-odd other books weren’t so honored. And what about the “Exegesis,” an 8,000-page journal that derived a sort of Gnostic theology from a series of religious visions he experienced during a couple of months in 1974? A wary, hard-core Dickian might argue that the Library of America volume is just a diversion, an attempt to turn a deeply subversive writer into another canonical brand name.

The Library of America, founded in 1979, has published 173 volumes from writers such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Henry James. With this edition, Dick becomes the first writer from the “pulp” tradition to be enshrined with his own volume (two editions of “Crime Novels” were published in the 90s featuring several authors). So why did they choose P.K. Dick? To be honest, his prose is often stiff and unwieldy and he wasn’t very prescient about the future. What he was, however, was remarkably earnest in his investigations of what it is to be human, and what it is to be real. The characters in his best novels strive to find out what is real in worlds where almost nothing is. Their desire to find meaning and authenticity is what drives the plots, rather than the gimmickry of other pulpy science fiction writers.

The Man in the High Castle, which won the Hugo award in 1963, is perhaps Dick’s best-written book. Set in a world where the Allies lost World War II, it is more than just a simple alternative history novel. In the book, characters are also reading an alternative history where the Allies won and the reader is left wondering which world is the real one. The other three novels featured in the edition are Dick at his speculative best, the most famous of which is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for Blade Runner. Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are similar stories, albeit with much different tones, where characters have to sort out the difference between hallucinations and reality.

So what would Dick think of the attention? First the news that there is a biopic in the offing, and now literary respectability? Well, he’d probably think that it was all a put-on, or that he was a character in some film, or maybe that he isn’t really dead at all, and that he was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

The Library of America edition of Four Novels from the 60s by Philip K Dick will be available on May 10th.

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