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The Library of America Interviews

Jonathan Lethem

about Philip K. Dick

In connection with the publication in May, 2007, of Philip K. Dick: Four

Novels of the 1960s, edited by Jonathan Lethem, Rich Kelley conducted this

exclusive interview for The Library of America e-Newsletter. You can sign up

for the monthly e-Newsletter at www.loa.org.

Of all the science fiction writers of the twentieth century, why is Philip K.

Dick the one whojudging from the reissue of his novels and the movies

made from his workhas most grabbed the popular imagination?

Hes popular in a different way than any other writer. I call him science

fictions Lenny Bruce. Coming out of the same tradition and using the same

materials as other science fiction writers, he was in a sense science fictions

answer to the Beat generation. He was the ultimate outsider, nonconformist,

dissident. At the time he entered the field, science fiction was preoccupied with

genuine scientific developments, space exploration boosterism, and a super-

rational cognition. Where everyone else was writing about extrapolation and

thinking hard about real possibilities, Dick was attuned to the unconscious, the

irrational, the paranoiac, the impulsive. His stories had a wildly hallucinatory

nature that he treated as if it were rational.

Now, the stories of the other science fiction writers were not as rational

as they claim. They were quite in the grip of a fabulating imagination or wish

fulfillment. They were writing fairy tales more than they acknowledge. But Dick

engaged in the most direct and distinctive way with the undertow of terror and

the irrational in contemporary technological society. Thats why science fictionwas important to begin with, because it addressed the fact that we were living

in a technocratic age when traditional arts, literary and otherwise, didnt have

much to say on this and didnt find a lot of vocabulary for acknowledging the

increasing rate of change and what it did to the experience of ordinary life.

Science fiction in its clumsy, mawkish, embarrassing way was taking the bull by

the horns.

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Was he alone in this role or part of a movement?

Early on he was more or less properly understood to be of a piece with a

group of writers known as the Galaxywriters because that was the magazine in

which they published. Robert Sheckley, Frederick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, William

Tenn, and a number of other writers were nudging science fiction to a greateruse of satirical, social commentary. They used satire to expose some of the

traps, paradoxes, and perversities of consumer capitalism.

Dick did participate in this movement and he continued to be an acerbic

critic of late capitalism. He saw what the advertising age could do to

consciousness and in many ways he was extremely prescient on the subject of

the invasive power of Madison Avenue, the way it was shaping the entire culture.

What Dick did was to take this movements tendencies toward social

criticism and add to them this almost unbearably personal, emotional, intimate

quality. His characters dont just live in these paranoid futures. They are utterlyat the mercy of them. As absurd and surreal as the images and ideas in Dicks

books could sometimes be, he always took them seriously. The predicaments of

his characters were never funny to him. They were overwhelmingly terrifying

and important. Thats what makes him so distinct, not only from other science

fiction writers, but also from other postmodern satirical writers that he could

be associated with, writers like Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald

Barthelme, and Richard Brautigan, all of whom also worked with absurdist and

fantastic materials. Dick commits to his visions with an emotional intensity

unlike any other writer. He digs deeper and makes a life or death commitment to

the situations in his novels. His books always have this doubleness. Theres a

layer of satirical or fantastical inventivenesshes one of the great idea men of

all literary historybut theres also this personal emotional stake. Hes always

putting everything he has at risk. The characters are deeply vulnerable, deeply

flawed, and at the mercy of their situations.

Is this because theres less of a separation between Dick and his

characters?

There is very little separation between Dick and his characters. This

goes back to the sense that Dick was a writer who in his process was impulsive,he was explosive, he was prolific and he was not utterly in control. And this is

the reason theres variation in the prose and is also the reason why some

people find his writing awkward in some ways. He was writing with a kind of

personal visionary intensity that didnt make time for some of the niceties,

some of the second thoughts and revisions that you might wish a literary writer

to be able to make.

Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick

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Many writersRobert Heinlein, Stephen Kingget this criticism: that their

ideas and plots are better than their writing. Yet Dicks prose seems to

have a special charge.

Hes such a deeply humane and intelligent writer, so committed, that the

prose conveys a tremendous amount of meaning, even at its most awkward. Iwould say quite happily that the four books collected in Four Novels of the 1960s

are among the most fully realized, the least infelicitous of his books. Ubik, which

may be his singular masterpiece, has in its earliest chapters some wheel-

spinning, some time-wasting material that can be a bit offputting to the

uninitiated reader. And this isnt to apologize for this but to acknowledge it and

just say this is there. For this reason Ive often had the experience in

recommending Dicks work to someone, that the second book they read is their

favorite. Forever. Whatever the second one is. They read one and say Oh, this is

a little odd, this is a little bumpy. I want to read more. Then they somehow shiftinto the gear he is working in and they become a devoted fan, the second one in.

Are these Dicks four best novels?

Its quite important to note that this volume is structured as Novels of the

1960s, which was my wish for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I want to

leave room for Novels of the 1970sthere are at least three or four novels from

that decade that would make a superb companion volume. If I had been forced

to make a single volume representing the entirety of his career, it wouldnt

necessarily have been these four books. If you had to pick a single decade to

represent his work, the 1960s is the one to pick. That is the summit, but in that

decade there are at least four other novels every bit the equal of the four here:

Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, A Maze of Death, and probably the book

that came closest to being included, Martian Time Slip. These are all superb

novels, singular and fully realized and all from the 1960s, an incredibly prolific

decade in which he wrote another ten or twelve books.

This volume is set up with the best introductory book by far. The Man in

the High Castle is the first book and that is a very happy arrangement. The

chronology demanded it but its perfect. Its the book that draws people in and

its the most embracing, particularly for a non-genre reader. It is also a work ofextraordinarily passionate and scrupulous scholarship. This is not the

daydream of someone whos just wondered what if the Nazis won the war. All of

the minor Nazi characters are thoroughly researched. Dick has written this

almost scholarly alternate reality.

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How do you account for his tremendous output? Was it just the speed?

He certainly took a lot of amphetamines. Thinking about Dick

biographically and thinking about his habits as a writer can be quite fascinating

and perplexing because no one fact could ever account for the torrential quality

of his work. There are several things you can point toall partial explanations.Amphetamines is one. There is also something very interesting to think about in

terms of his life. It can only be a speculation. He died eventually of a stroke. And

its likely he suffered other near-stroke experiences in the preceding years, but

there is some reason to wonder if he suffered from a rare neurological disorder

called temporal lobe epilepsy, which has associated with it involuntary and

overwhelming visionary experiences, and graphomaniafrantic writing,

compulsive writing. There is no way ever to ascertain this theoretical diagnosis

and I wouldnt want to sound too certain about it. But its very interesting to

compare him with other famous cases of temporary lobe epilepsy. Because thereare some striking similarities. And if you want to make some speculative

diagnoses, there are connections you can make with other famous mystics and

religious visionaries who are famous for their obsessive writing. St. Theresa of

Avila is one. She saw extraordinary visions and then spent years scribbling

endless explanations of these visions in fits of graphomania. Dick is a very

provocative figure to think of in these terms. Hes an exemplary character for the

strange, auto-didactical intensity of his work

You say that he was one of the Galaxy writers. Was that the onlypublication that responded to his work at the time he was writing?

He was placing stories in a great variety of magazines in the early and

mid-1950s. He was seen as a wunderkind at that point. He was part of the

second generation of great American science fiction pulp writers and the only

thing he didnt manage to doand its interesting to wonder if it would have

changed his approach and what would have happened if he didwas to place a

lot of stories with Astounding, which was seen as the leading magazine of the

time and had a very brilliant and imperious editor, John W. Campbell. To place a

story with Campbell was seen in science fiction circles as being analogous toplacing a story with The New Yorker. It was the place to be published and Dick,

for a number of complicated reasons, did not break into that market and didnt

receive the cultivation that Campbell gave to his writers. Isaac Asimov was the

principal exemplar of the Campbell style and Campbells protg. Looking at it

now, you would say this was a slightly old-fashioned, more optimistic style.

Campbells counterpart at Galaxywas Horace Gold, who was more literary. He


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was a New York Jew, and perhaps less sold on the great bold technocratic future

of this country, more inclined to notice the undertones and mixed messages.

In your essay forBookforum , You Dont Know Dick, you recount your

youthful experiences tracking down rare out-of-print copies of Dickpaperbacks in used bookstores in Brooklyn. Someone discovering Dick for

the first time in the Library of America edition is clearly going to have

quite a different experience.

Its an amazing thing to think about: the journey that this writer has

taken. You cant help but wish that he could somehow know this is happening.

It is a tremendous thought that hell be received by readers whose expectations

are canonical by definition.

The conditions of my discovery of his work are very much timebound.

This was the late 1970s and early 1980s. We lived in a different, much lessDickian world then. Whats extraordinary about his work at the moment is how

incredibly relevant it can seem and how much the world has caught up with

him. Thats true in a general sense. The iconography of science fiction, the

kinds of materials and images and kinds of metaphors he was exploring are

quite commonplace in the culture now. Everyone is up to speed on what an

android is. Its not exotic. Its a question of whether you do something

interesting with it. No ones going to be overwhelmed, or struck, or confused or

put off. Its simply part of the vocabulary of culture. And that was not true thirty

or forty years ago. But also in intensely particular and peculiar ways Dicksvisionsthough he wasnt interested in being a predictive writer, and he wasnt

systematically trying to be predictive in his extrapolationshis instincts about

where the media, where commercial culture were headed were unerring. We live

in a world precisely full of the kind of invasive, mind-colonizing advertising,

viral marketing notions that he predicted when it seemed absurd to do so. We

really live in his universe, in his brain in a way. Its not just that now hes going

to be in a Library of America edition. Someone coming to read his work now for

the first time will feel bewildered by the copyright dates on these books. They

will be reading so much about the world we live in, in a peculiar and weird form,but finding it utterly relevant and fresh.

You say Dick did not see himself as a predictor of the future. What was

Dicks vision of himself?

His image of himself as a working artist is a very complicated question.

He had tremendous and thwarted aspirations to be recognized as a literary

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writer and he considered himself a failed writer in that regard. Yet in other ways

he felt that he had accomplishedand I think rightlygreat things in this

despised form and that they had gone unrecognized. He alternates between

thinking that he lost his chance and that he had seized his chance but that no

one knew. At other times he was defiantly proud of the genre of science fictionand felt it was an antidote to the conformity, the blandness and the tendency of

the mainstream not to examine the status quo. He felt like a rebel and was

proud to be one. He was not particularly interested in some of the usual things

that science fiction was thought to be meant to do, like prepare people for the

future or predict the future. He was a fantasist and a storyteller and his

extrapolations were satirical ones of the present rather than predictions. Yet

paradoxically, in their accuracy, their vividness, the hints of the reality he saw

embedded in the world of the 1950s and 1960s, by extrapolating and satirizing

them, he did accurately predict the future quite neatly.

Did Dick see himself as a stylistic innovator?

I think the radicalism in his work does not operate in the way writers or

critics usually think of as style, which is to say, the choices made sentence by

sentence. But there is a formal radicalism to his work in the way he structured

his novels, the way he composed scenes, the way he advances stories, the way

he conflates disparate kinds of material, different tones like despair and satire

thats the level at which there is a conscious and proud experimental, radical,

innovative effort being made. Its not exactly what one normally thinks of as

style. Its more a matter of form and motif.

Did Dick consider himself part of an American tradition of fantastic

writing, dating back to H. P. Lovecraft?

Its almost a parallel formation in American fantastic writing. When, in the

mid-1930s, science fiction writers began to articulate the genre, they derived

some strength from their comradeship or their awareness of the Lovecraftian

horror and fantasy writers. They also defined themselves somewhat in

opposition. Fantasy was a dark and dreamlike kind of writing and the science

fiction writers thought they were doing a lucid and optimistic kind of writing.This opposition may not seem so simple in retrospect. They were allied

traditions, allied by their distance from the mainstream of literary credibility.

They were also opposed to one another at certain fundamental levels.

Dick never made any specific comments about Lovecraft that Im aware of.

There are some deep native tendencies they have in common. Dick dabbled in

what the science fiction writers of the time considered the fantasy genre two or


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three times. There is one novel, The Cosmic Puppets, and several quite

accomplished short storiesin particular, The King of the Elves and The

Father Thingwhere Dick is deliberately writing as a fantasy or horror writer

rather than as a science fiction writer. Dick would have seen these as a conscious

migration across a membrane into another field of operations. These traditionsnow seem so interrelated that these distinctions dont seem that important.

Dick is so popular with filmmakers now. At the time he was working many

science fiction writersRay Bradbury, Rod Serlingwere having

teleplays produced on television. Did Dick ever try this?

That was a ticket he could never buy for himself. He tried a few times.

Because for a starving artist as he was it seemed like it might be a meal ticket.

But he didnt have the ability to shoehorn his wild visionary style into a 30-

minute television format. His few attempts were charmingly hopeless. He onlywrote one screenplay, an adaptation of Ubik. Again, it was charmingly hopeless.

It could never have been filmed in the form he wrote it. In his papers were found

a few synopses for TV shows where he was obviously trying to market himself.

Theyre much too interesting and eclectic and too full of stuff. His principal

misunderstanding is that he couldnt simplify to the level he would have had to.

Theyre quite overcomplicated and brilliant and nothing like the 1960s science

fiction television that we remember.

The Library of America volume includes your notes. May we assume that

nothing like these appeared in the original novels, no translations of

foreign phrases?

Yes, the notes are all brand new and the phrases were untranslated in

previous editions. I added a few cultural references. Some things I never

completely understood and some things seemed quite specific and needed

explication. Just as a Dickens novel has to be annotated for things that would

have been completely lucid to readers of his time, these are starting to be older

novels and there are some cultural references the reader might like some help

identifying. Radio comedians of the 1930s might have seemed easy names to

drop in the 1960s. Fifty years from now we can hope Jim Carrey will be a difficultname to recall.

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Copyright 2009 The Library of America

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The Library of America interviews

Jonathan Lethem about

Philip K. Dicks Later Novels

In connection with the publication in Summer 2009 of Philip K. Dick: VALIS

and Later Novels, edited by Jonathan Lethem, Rich Kelley conducted this

exclusive interview for The Library of America e-Newsletter.

(Click here to read the previous interview with Jonathan Lethem, conductedin May 2007 on the occasion of the publication of the first Philip K. Dick

volume published in The Library of America.)

Sign up for the free monthly e-Newsletter at www.loa.org.

VALIS and Later Novels, the third Library of America volume of novels by

Philip K. Dick, collects A Maze of Death (1970) and his last three novels,VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1982), and The Transmigration of

Timothy Archer(1982). What connects these four novels and how do they

differ from his earlier work?

The latter three are his last three composed novels, and the last three

published during his lifetime. Theyre most strongly linked for that reason, even

beyond the deep thematic crosscurrents among them, and its worth pointing

out that nowhere else in the LOA volumes have I happened to select three

books in a row from this very, very prolific writer. These three have come to be

known as The VALIS Trilogy, a notion Dick consented to at least in passing(though he was awfully prone to contradicting himself on such matters), and

theyre all closely related to the background of theological study and specula-

tion that dominated the latter part of his life. Lets get back to this aspect of his

work later.

A Maze of Death is a significantly earlier novel, and somewhat of a dark

horse in generalrarely listed among his greatest by critics, or heavily studied
http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=305http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=305http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=305http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=305http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=252http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=252http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=305http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=305http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=252


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Lethem on Philip K. Dick (Later Novels)

in academia. Its probably the furthest afield Ive gone from the canon within

Dicks work, apart from Now Wait For Last Year. Aside from the fact that I like it

a lot, I chose it for the relationship to these later books, which are too often

taken as an anomalous part of Dicks career by those who favor the 1960s work.

In Maze we see Dick exploring motifs of paranoid theology (to coin a phrase),

many years before his interest in these matters is supposed to have begun. And

then theres the luckan editors luck, Id call itof the mention of Bishop Pike

in the authors note, which seems to tie things together.

As with Ubik and Eye in the Sky, A Maze of Death uses the classic science

fiction motif of following a group of colonists arriving on a planet and

being tested physically, psychologically, and philosophically by their expe-

riences. But its also equal parts murder mystery and cosmic meditation.

How would you compare what Dick accomplishes here with his other

efforts with this plot device?

Yes, in some ways it makes a third entry in a secret trilogy of novels, does-

nt it? The design is reminiscent of Agatha Christies archetypal And Then There

Were None. And if Eye is the friskiest and freshest version, typical of Dick at the

start of his career, and Ubik the most committed and somber and disorienting,

characteristic of his 60s peak,Maze may in some ways signal a degree of exhaus-

tion and cynicism in his approachthough the book is nothing if not mordantly

hilarious. Several critics have pointed out that it appears that Dick is attempting

to do away with his usual cast of characters, as if hes frustrated with themnot

unlike Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions. In both cases the writer in ques-

tion would never write in exactly the same way again afterwards.

The narrator in VALIS delivers the disturbing and often-quoted line, It is

sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. He then says,

I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain

much-needed objectivity. But he doesnt write in the third person. The I

converses with Horselover Fat and together they explore the concept of aVast Active Living Intelligence System, or VALIS. Does Dick want us to

believe that the narrator is insaneor is this dual-personality Dicks way

of getting the many contradictory voices inside his head into the novel? Its

unsettling and oddly intimate at the same time.

Well, Im not sure I can account for the skewed narrative strategies in the

book any better than youve just done, but unsettling and intimate are cer-


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tainly good words for it. Whats amazing is how natural the method can seem to

a sympathetic reader whos not struggling to find some framework for the

approachits more than intimate, Id call it weirdly congenial. And, of course,

as a method for drawing us into material thats more than outlandish in its con-

spiratorial and reality-shattering implications, its terrifically sly. Dick disarms

our skepticism by outflanking it: you sometimes find yourself rooting for

Horselover Fat to prove the narrator wrong.

You mention in your notes that Dick wrote VALIS in a mere two weeks in

November 1978, but its composition had a longer foreground and that it

incorporates material that Dick has rehearsed in his Exegesis, an exten-

sive journal project. I gather that the Exegesis spanned some 8,000

pages upon Dicks death. How does the material in it differ from what he

includes in his novels? Is VALIS the only novel that includes work from it?

Will all of it ever be published?

To take the simplest question first: VALIS is the only novel that includes

language from the 8,000 (largely handwritten, unstructured, repetitive, digres-

sive, and often dull) pages called the Exegesisand, in their clarity and com-

pression, these passages are far from typical of the whole. Some other (still

comparatively finished) sequences from those pages are collected in In Pursuit

of VALIS, edited by Dick biographer Lawrence Sutin. The challenges in organizing

and transcribing the lions share of this material are being slowly approached by

the Dick estate, with the help of some conservators and scholars, even as we

speak. So, if youre really excited about the prospect of reading the entirety, for

the first time theres a project to root for. But be warned: it shows no prospect

of being some lost masterwork, nor even particularly readable.

Anyone hearing the plot of The Divine InvasionA hapless recluse shep-

herds the MS-afflicted virgin mother of Yahwehs son to Earth so that he

can reclaim Earth from the evil Belial, but the savior is born with amne-

sia . . .would suspect this to be a comic novel. Yet Dick writes this sequelto VALIS in full earnest. Dorion Sagan has hailed it as having instanti-

ated Gnosticism in fiction with entertainment and story-telling acumen,

imparting lodes of theological information along the way where others

have failed. Do you see Dick the philosopher and Dick the storyteller

being in harmony here or at odds?

Lets call it a high-wire act. I do think theres a fascinating tension as Dick


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attempts to ground so much of his obsessive theological material in terms that

(somewhat) resemble his indigenous storytellers instincts, and most particu-

larly in the pop-iconography of his science fiction. Whats so interesting to me

is how little Divine Invasion really resembles Dicks own SFits more like an

image of how his work might have developed if hed been more committed and

lucid in his use of those materials all along. Thats to say, in reaching for an ade-

quate container for the VALIS materials in this, his third attempt (thats count-

ing Radio Free Albemuth, which well get to), hes begun to remember the kind

of more grounded and prosaic fiction hed set out to write in the 1950sthe

realist novels. And this reaches an even fuller fruition with The Transmigration

of Timothy Archer.

Many articles have been written about Dicks fascination with Gnosticism.

The term Gnosticism encompasses the beliefs of many Judaeo-Christian

sects from the first centuries of the Common Era. Most of them share a

belief in what William Irwin Thompson calls an inversion of Hebrew

mythology where the world is created by a demiurge and the serpent in

the garden is the Savior. Gnostic elements recur in VALIS and The Divine

Invasion. Was Dick any more committed to Gnostic beliefs than he was to

Taoism (with his frequent use of the I Ching) or Buddhism or Hinduism?

A discussion of Gnosticism is where, alas, you plumb very definite limits

in my knowledge. Most of what I know about Gnosticism I learned through the

very peculiar means of reading Dicks novels, his letters, and the studies of his

work that bring that information to bear on it. Dicks commitment is another

matterno testimony has ever persuaded me that his commitment to a given

belief system was ever embracing or permanentit seems he tried them on and

off as frequently as he changed clothes. I didnt know Dick personally, but from

the accounts of his friends and family, it wasnt any easier to pin him down in

person than it is as a reader.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is unusual in several ways: Wheremost of Dicks novels follow the stories of several characters via a third

person narrator, Transmigration tells its story through a single narrative

voiceand its female. Why did Dick chose this form for his last novel?

He barely ever used the first-person voice. The only other prominent

example is VALIS, where that use is, as youve pointed out, deeply complicated.

Dicks notion of what fiction could do, what it was meant to do, was tied up in


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the idea of multiple subjective perspectives on reality. Transmigration is a great

last-minute departure and, I believe, a triumph of both craft and wisdom

grace, if you will. How in the world he arrived at this simple formal choice,

which enabled the book in so many ways, is a complete mystery to me.

Certainly the narrator is one of his greatest characters, bar none, and the fact

that shes female is a real gift for those readers uncomfortable with Dicks depic-

tions of women even in some of his finest works (there are many of us).

The Episcopal Bishop of California, James A. Pike, was a close friend of

Dicks andTransmigration is based in part on Pikes life. A charismatic tele-

vangelist, Pike famously died searching for Gnostic scrolls in the Israeli

desert in 1969. What drew the two men together and why did Dick choose to

use Pike for a basis of a character more than a decade after Pikes death?

From what I understand there were very few conversationalists who

could fully contend with Dicks full obsessional outpouring of scholarship,

imaginative leaps, and bullshit gambits; James Pike was obviously one who

could, and so it was a match made in heaven. As for Dicks decision to portray

him in a roman clef, I cant testify as to Dicks thinking, but in a sense such a

choice is a fairly typical one for a 20th-century novelist (think, for instance, of

Saul Bellow, whose sources for characters among his most charismatic and

famous acquaintances are often very easily discernible). So, perhaps we can

agree that this was Dick reaching for a relatively traditional method.

Some time over the next year a new movie, Radio Free Albemuth, starring

Alanis Morissette, is due to be released. The movie is based on a novel Dick

wrote before VALIS and originally entitled VALISystemA (it was published

after his death as Radio Free Albemuth). The novel VALIS includes refer-

ences to a science fiction movie Valis, which recapitulates the plotline

of Radio Free Albemuth. Did Dick intend for all of these works to be inter-

twined? Can you help us sort the threads?

Im not familiar with the movie project, apart from what youve heard, soI cant predict how faithful or satisfying it might be for readers of VALIS or the

other related works. The novel that the movie takes as its source, Radio Free

Albemuth, is an odd duck in Dicks shelf of published works in the sense that it

was actually an earlier draft of the VALISmaterial, submitted for publication by

Dick and then reworked so completely in the writing of VALIS that it appeared

to his posthumous editors as a legitimate work of its own. It has champions


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some who even prefer it to VALIS. I cant agree, myself. It seems a fairly pedes-

trian and cautious feint at the materialreadable, perhaps, but not essential.

VALIS, meanwhile, is one of Dicks great masterpieces, so Im awfully glad that

Radio Free Albemuth was written, if only to be rejected and rewritten.

You have a new novel coming this fall, Chronic City , and many of its

themesparanoia, drug use, alternate realitiesecho those of Dick more

than any of your recent novels. Did editing the three Library of America

volumes influence your writingor is Dicks influence like a centrifugal

force that becomes simply irresistible at some point?

Good spotting. Ive certainly had a very full refresher course in Philip K.

Dick over these last few years, and thats unmistakably had its effect on Chronic

City, yes. Yet I think your image of a centrifugal influence is also right, and it

feels to me that Id been swinging back in this direction for a long whileandId conceived of many of the images and sequences that would become Chronic

City as much as ten years ago. The odd thing about writing novels if you write

them as slowly as I do (as opposed to the breakneck speed of Phil Dick) is that

you often can barely remember their point of origin by the time youve finished

them.


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Jonathan, the five novels in Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s

were written between 1962 and 1977. During that time Dick wrote some 20

other novels, including those collected in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the

1960s. Why did you choose these five for this second collection?

Lethem: If there is a loose canon of eight or ten novels within Dicksenormous list of titles, most critics and scholars would agree that the splendid

Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, A Scanner Darkly, and Flow My Tears are as

near to the center of it as the four books I selected for the first volume. Each of

those four has its detractors as wellits in Dicks nature that each of the

novels is imperfect. Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney, though written in

the same period as the first volumes Man in the High Castle and Three Stigmata,

were, unlike those two books, published as paperback originals, and so their

profile was a little lower. But over time their excellence has become unmistak-

able. Paperback-original publication exemplified Dicks marginal fate as a writer,so to see these titles in the LOA provides perhaps an even deeper vindication

of his career. A Scanner Darklyand Flow My Tears were published later, each in

hardcover, and were each received with a measure of genuine critical acclaim,

as well as with relief. By then, Dick not only had growing cachet as a cult author,

but was also seen as resurgent after a period of wasted years. The jury for the

1975 John W. Campbell Memorial Award gave Flow My Tears one of Dicks few lit-

erary awards.

The dark horse in this second volume is Now Wait for Last Year. The book

is a personal favorite of mine, and Im not completely alone in championing it as

a major work. But it was largely rejected by the SF reviewers at the time of pub-

lication, and its reputation never completely recovered from that attack. The

book shows some signs, especially in the early going, of the slipshod construc-

tion and unrevised prose that dogged Dick throughout the 1960s, but the human-

ity in the novel runs very deep, and by the second half I think the book has

asserted itself as a tour de forceundeniable on its own (very unusual) terms.

All nine of the novels in the two LOA collections have a somewhat similar

length, each running more or less 200 pages. What determined the length

of Dicks novels? Was it the paperback format he was writing for?

Lethem: Thats a good guess in some cases, though it was also typical of

the length of material that a writer could push out in the sort of exhausting

dash-to-the-finish-line, often fueled by amphetamine abuse, that was typical of

Dicks manner of work. Then again, its worth crediting the fabulous results, and

giving Dick credit as a conscious artistthese novels attain a very complete

and satisfying relationship of form to material at the length they were written,

Interview with Leslie and Lethem

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so who are we to guess that they might have been, or ought to have been, any-

thing other?

Laura, if I follow the chronology in the LOA volume and in Divine

Invasions , Lawrence Sutins biography of your father, you were born in1960, your father separated from your mother when you were three and it

wasnt until 1977, some 17 years later, that you were able to spend any

extended period of time with him, yet you remained close because you

were in constant communication through letters and phone calls. Is that

an accurate description? How did you manage to stay so close?

Leslie: My father and mother did separate when I was three. For a variety

of reasons including periods of chaos in my fathers personal life, his own emo-

tional challenges, and geographic separation, we saw each other only a few times.

When I was 12, my father reached out to me via a wonderful letter and webegan corresponding and talking on the phone regularly until his death in 1982.

He wrote incredible letters, sending me envelope after envelope filled with

pages typed single-space, sharing what was going on in his life and his latest

writing project.

Although we were physically separated there was an intimacy to our rela-

tionship that at the time I took for granted. Thinking about it now, I marvel at

the closeness I felt between us. His letters made me feel special and loved. I

knew he thought and cared about me. The tone of his letters was at times child-

ishly playful but he also wrote to me in adult terms about adult issues. In many

ways, he was like a close friend and confidant as well as a dad.

The notes for 1978 in the LOA Chronology say that your father is thrilled

when daughters Laura and Isa finally meet. You were 18 then and Isa 11.

Do you remember the circumstances of that meeting and how you felt?

Leslie: My sister, Isa, and I met at the memorial service for our fathers

mother, our Grandmother Dorothy. Isa was absolutely adorable and I cherished

my little sister from the moment I met her. We have been very close ever since.

She is a very important part of my life and the best thing about being Philip K.

Dicks daughter is that I have this wonderful sister.

The works collected here were written between 1962 and 1977. What can

you tell us about your fathers writing habits during that time?

Leslie: I can only tell you what my mother told me. She lived with my

father from 1959 until 1963. My father liked to write at night and might write

through the entire night, typing furiously. At that time he was writing so fast

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that he might finish a novel in as little as two weeks, writing night and day.

Because my mother brought her three daughters with her into their marriage

and my birth added a fourth, she wanted to have a more traditional family life

where my father worked during the day and then joined her and the girls for a

family dinner. At her urging, while they were married, he changed his writinghabits to accommodate his new family life.

Jonathan, this reminds me of what Thomas M. Disch once wrote. As you

know, Disch was a fellow underappreciated science fiction writer and a

good friend of Dicks. In 1982, the year Dick died, Disch founded The Philip

K. Dick Award for the best original work of science fiction published in

paperback in the previous year and the Philip K. Trust has been support-

ing this award since 2005. In his introduction to Solar Lottery and Other

Works , Disch noted that Dick was more an improviser than a composerand that he made his experience of the creative act the focus of his art

with no turning back to rethink, rewrite, or erase. Do you find this descrip-

tion accurate and is this what explains the uncanny phenomenon of Dick

churning out 140 pages of Flow My Tears in 48 hours?

Lethem: I think Dischs description is an apt and lovely one, and captures

one of the pleasures of Dicks work that can be most elusive and difficult to

quantifythe pervasive sense that his writing was affectively reciprocalthat

is, the writer seems to be overwhelmingly, emotionally altered by his workby

the process of discovering the fates of his invented characters during the

process of its composition, leaving evidence of this trail of empathic intensity

everywhere in the pages.

Laura, the months of February and March 1974 are known to mark a

major turning point in your fathers life. What can you tell us about what

happened during that period?

Leslie: My father did not share this experience with me in his letters from

that period or in our phone conversations of the time.

Jonathan, the Chronology in the volume notes that in February and March

of 1974 Dick experienced a vision that obsessed him for the remaining

eight years of his life. One of the novels included here, A Scanner Darkly,

was written after this experience. Did Dicks writing change after 1974?

Lethem: It certainly did, and Scanner reflects his altered perspective in

some degreebut together with Flow My Tears, Scannerforms a watershed, or

perhaps a bridge, between the earlier style and the spiritual and autobiograph-


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Leslie: I cant speak about other peoples experiences meeting my father

for the first time. I can only speak about my own experiences with my father.

When I was very little he did seem big and imposing, with a big booming

voice. As an adult, when I visited him in Santa Ana, I found he wasnt much taller

than I was at five foot seven. He didnt seem imposing or big then. Finally, whenI saw him in the hospital, after his stroke, he had worked very hard to lose

weight for an upcoming trip to France. He seemed to me to be much reduced;

while not frail, he was no longer a robust man.

In a 2006 interview Richard Linklater, director of the movie version of A

Scanner Darkly, quotes you and your sister, Isa, as saying in one of your

meetings: You know, if it wasnt for drugs, our dad would still be writing

today, instead of dying in 1982. Did you ever have any discussions with

your father about his use of drugs?Leslie: I was very much in the dark about my fathers use of drugs until I

read Paul Williamss article in Rolling Stone [The Most Brilliant SF Mind on Any

Planet] in 1975.

We never spoke about this directly. When I was an adult, after he had put

drugs behind him, he did periodically refer to his prior drug use in a historical way.

There have been many movies made of your fathers works: Total Recall,

Blade Runner, Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, Next.

Which of those do you think captures your fathers work most faithfully?

Leslie: The film that captures my fathers work most faithfully is A

Scanner Darklywhile Blade Runner, although not as faithful to the novel itself,

captures the spirit of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, exploring the ques-

tion of what makes us human.

Have you licensed any other works for movies that we should be looking

forward to?

Leslie: There are actually quite a few projects in the works. Several years

ago, before we formed ESP, Dale Rosenbloom and John Alan Simon acquired the

rights to Radio Free Albemuth, Valis, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. The

first film, Radio Free Albemuth, written and directed by Simon and starring

Alanis Morissette, is now in post production.

ESP is producing with HBO and Picturehouse a biopic, The Owl in

Daylight, with Paul Giamatti as the lead actor and producer and with Tony

Grisoni ( Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ) scripting. Disney/Pixar recently

announced plans to adapt The King of the Elves as an animated film to be


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released in 2012. And we recently entered into a first look arrangement with

The Halcyon Company (producers of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles)

and hope to be making an announcement soon related to that.

In an interview on NPR you once said that youve read all of your fathers44 novels and 120 or so short stories. Are there any passages that have a

special resonance for you as his daughter?

Leslie: Identifying particular passages that resonate for me has always

been a challenge. Every novel includes so much autobiographical information

that I relate to his books in a different way than I do to any other author.

Reading my fathers work, recognizing the characters and the settings, results

in a unique dynamic. The issues he explores remind me of the time in his life

when he wrote the novel and what was going on with him then. Some of his

themes are so familiar that I joke that they are in my DNA. (I thought everyonesfamily talked about alternate realities and was very anxious when Nixon was

elected.)

However, I do really appreciate and enjoy the advertisements for Ubik at

the beginning of each chapter of that book. I love the concept of the Penfield

Mood Organ in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I find The Three Stigmata

of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik to be really frightening. Reading A Scanner Darkly

makes me incredibly sad for my father, knowing that this depicts a really dark

time in his life. These are just a few points of connection with my fathers works;

I could go on and on.

Laura, what do you think your fathers reaction would be to having his

novels collected in these editions published by The Library of America?

Leslie: Ive made it a policy never to speak for my father and never to

speculate on what he would have thought. However, in this case, I know with

certainty that my father would have been elated and extremely proud. Having

his works included in the LOA would have been a defining moment in his life as

an author.

My father longed for literary recognition his entire adult life. Living in

Berkeley, he was surrounded by literary figures who dismissed SF as a worth-

less genre. In addition, he was very poor and found that he had a special knack

for turning out SF short stories so quickly that he was able to earn a living being

paid pennies per page. Writing to make money instead of to create art was

frowned upon then. He was doubly damned: for his chosen genre and for the

speed with which he cranked out stories and novels.

Recognition was a lifelong dream my father harbored until his death. For

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