Philip K. Dick appreciation-society member David ‘The Total DickHead’ Gill in conversation with R.U. Sirius (feat. incidental nits picked by Chris Hudak)
We often concern ourselves, as all ostensibly-sentient beings should, with the current well-being, the workaday meat-space realities and the personal tastes (especially the personal tastes!) of our friends, associates and fellow weirdos. So when my friend Ted Hand turned up in the Bay Area to invite me to an evening of fine dining followed by a local cover-band gig, I welcomed the chance to chill out and catch up—and to hear more about the mysterious ‘interesting event’ later in the week that he wanted to tell me about. When he announced the ‘cover band’ in question was, in fact, a Rush cover band—it was named ‘Rash’, because of course it was—I found my Dubious Sense tingling just a bit. Further, Chris Hudak, who would also be joining us for dinner along with a handful of others, was alarmingly stoked at the prospect of seeing a Rush cover-band… further making me warily question the very nature of the various, interlinked personality-constructs around me; surely, I can find a way to gracefully beg off from this proposed evening of shrieky excessive pretentious but-not-in-a-good-way Prog-Rock-, can’t I? I… I do really know these “people”... don’t I?
The point of which is simply this: It was an objectively-ideal state of mind in which to learn that the ‘interesting event’ heretofore hinted at was in fact an informal gathering of Philip K. Dick enthusiasts in the Oakland hills — and yes, they call themselves ‘The DickHeads’ because, again, of course they do. It was an appealingly chill, welcoming evening of burgers, wine (plus possibly other, comfortably shackle-canceling substances) and community appreciation of all things Philip K. Dick. It was also my first substantial, face-to-face interaction with David Gill (the ‘Total DickHead’ himself, as well as sometime Featured Guest of the the DickHeads Podcast), who proved to be a veritable High Castle treasury of broad and insightful illuminations on the life and works of the man who has by turns been called ‘The Prophet of the Simulacra’, ‘The Divine Madman of Santa Ana’ or simply, as his affectionately-familiar fans oft dub him, ‘PKD’.
R.U. SIRIUS: The DickHeads are a diverse group, but how would you characterize them if you could?
DAVID GILL: What are the DickHeads like? I think the single defining characteristic of the really serious Philip K. Dick fan is that they have felt some kind of alienation in their life. That is to say, that they have been made to feel fundamentally different from those around them— whether in their home, or at school, or in the wider world.
Dick talked about how when he worked at a record store as a teen, the blue collar guys he worked with couldn't believe he was living with a couple of gay, beatnik poets—and the gay beatnik poets couldn't believe he was reading pulp sci-fi, and that his mother disapproved of all of it. No port in the storm. When I was a grad student at San Francisco State University and looking for an advisor twenty years ago, I had a professor ask incredulously [of my intention to write my thesis on Dick]: "Isn't he just a science fiction writer?"
So, Dick's life and work are like this little treasure for us, and it's absolutely imperative that not everybody get it, and that he's kinda looked down upon. Everywhere you look in Dick's life, you can see this profound alienation. He not only endured financial, emotional, romantic, and artistic struggles, but he transformed that suffering into the centerpiece of his fiction, the abyss about which his characters and plots revolve. So DickHeads, as a clan, have this special bond—fellow fish, swimming against the stream. It's also mostly guys.
RU: What are one or two examples of the way Dick deals with the social and psychological implications of imagined future technologies (that are mirrored by existing tech today) which most intrigue you and other DickHeads?
DG: The first one that comes to mind is Large Language Model-style AI, which he predicted in The Penultimate Truth. I wrote about this for Salon. In that novel, Dick posits this ‘Rhetorizor’ which builds persuasive political rhetoric from simple prompts ("Squirrel and Genocide", for example). In that story, the rhetorizor is used to convince the population living underground after a nuclear apocalypse to continue building robots for the war effort. In fact, the surface of the planet is fine, and is being enjoyed by the elite. So in addition to the AI stuff, the book, and Dick's work more generally, captures the ‘pissing on our leg and telling us it's raining’ quality of life under Late Capitalism.
Dick loves to skewer the banal optimism with which hegemony grinds us down. Like ‘Go to college so you can be successful’ is a wonderful message — but when it's wielded by large cultural institutions in a society of decreasing social mobility and an absolute glut of unemployed or underemployed degree holders, it's a grift. "A new life awaits you in the Off-World Colonies. The chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure," as they say in Blade Runner. Somehow, you just know: The ‘Off-World Colonies’ should be avoided at all costs.
One other really prescient gizmo in Dick's work is the Penfield Mood Organ in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It's a combination musical instrument and mood controller. You can dial in moods like ‘the desire to watch TV no matter what's on.’ I like this, in part because the device is named after pioneering neuroscientist Wilder Penfield, who was my grandmother's uncle, but also because as a device it stands in for the way we allow technology to control us. The irony of the book is that android-hunting human protagonist Rick Deckard is acting just like a robot when he programs himself "for his usual business-like attitude." The power of the critique is that it shows how insidious technology is, as a vector of control. We think we're using these machines to make our lives easier, but the price we pay for this convenience is the outsourcing of our human agency to a systematized way of thinking and living.
RU and CHRIS HUDAK: The vast, vast majority of PKD’s bibliography is still out there in stasis, ripe for contemporary adaptation & exploration: Now that works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [Blade Runner], Minority Report, The Man In the High Castle, and A Scanner, Darkly –and hell, even The Adjustment Bureau and Paycheck — have managed to shoulder their respective ways forward into various degrees of arguably ‘mainstream’ recognition… what are some of the other, perhaps ‘lesser-sung’ PKD works that you and other DickHeads would most like to see either faithfully adapted, or perhaps more liberally ‘fleshed-out’ (so to speak) — in a similar vein to what writer/directors like Mike Flanagan have done in recent years with their ‘expansive’ takes on the works of Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, etc.?
DG: Dick once said the only reason he'd ever open a letter from Hollywood would be to look and see if there was a check inside. He was wary of Hollywood's penchant for dumbing down science fiction… while he was also desperate for the exposure that adaptations of his work would enable. He was so unpredictable in press interviews prior to the release of Blade Runner (which he of course didn't live to see) that his agents and film's producers were fearful of giving press too much access. He'd pan the movie and everyone involved in one interview, and praise the film to the high heavens in the next.
I kinda think Dick would be a little disappointed with the adaptations, truth be told. Especially the action-movie-out-of-short-story-with-cool-ideas like ‘Adjustment Team.’ [which was adapted as The Adjustment Bureau]. But everyone from David Cronenberg to John Lennon has wanted to adapt Dick's masterpiece, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which was optioned quietly by Netflix recently. I'm most excited about rumors swirling around a Charlize Theron and Alfonso Cuaron project I wrote about for Reactor called Jane that would focus on Dick's twin sister who, in the universe depicted in the movie/series, didn't starve to death tragically at six weeks of age, and instead lives on to get her brother out of wacky situations.
CH: On the morning directly following the Dickheads’s super-chill, burgers-and-beers evening meetup in the Oakland Hills, there had been arranged (well, scheduled, anyway) what struck me as an extraordinarily Mainstreamer-friendly—dare one go so far as to say, even relatively Normie-coded?—‘group excursion’ bound for a grand tour of some of the various abodes in which PKD had taken up, over his rather turbulent career. I mean a real, admirably comfy-sounding affair—a snazzy little Tour Bus, presumably some form of Timetable to keep, everything but wine and cheese in the cup-holders was how it sounded to my ears; it was, still, a little too much and too early in the Normal Human Hours for my Mondoid-forged tastes, personally, but: I’m wondering A) How it came off, overall, to the die-hard Initiated PKD aficionados in attendance, and, B) what some of the highlights might have been?
DG: I've been touring Dick's homes and haunts in the Bay Area since I moved here 25 years ago. Perhaps it's a little bougie to imagine that these locations (often now in much fancier and respectable hoods than when Phil lived in them) offer up some real knowledge of the author, but Dick fictionalized his life, and so these locations are a jumble of biography and literary mise-en-scène. For instance, his house in Berkeley where he lived in the 1950s is where the dog barks at the garbage men in Dick's first science fiction sale, ‘Roog,’ where the missing light cord inspired his novel Time Out of Joint, and where he and his second wife Kleo lived with a family of mice as depicted in his short story ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.’ So without getting too woo, or too HGTV, I do think there is something to be gleaned from going to the places where he lived and worked and freaked out.
One thing that always strikes me is the utterly ordinariness of these locations: Anyone could've lived there. But the fact of the matter is that a really weird science fiction writer lived there once upon a time, and imagining that juxtaposition is a lot of fun and helps you walk away with a better understanding of the guy.
The highlight of this particular tour was traveling to Portsmouth Square Park in San Francisco where Mr Tagomi fondles a piece of silver and falls into another universe in Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle. The park still has much of the vibe described in the novel, and reading the scene—which is really poetic and evocative—at the actual location instantiated some of the novel's power for all who attended.
RU/CH: It’s tough (and maybe even counterproductive, or at least disingenuous) to discuss any aspect of Dick’s IRL existence without inadvertently boomeranging back around to Reality Vs. Perception; and in that realm, could you talk about some of the most pervasive conceptions about PKD in the popular culture i.e. PKD the poverty-stricken writer; PKD the paranoid visionary’ PKD the countercultural icon, etcetera. If you could comment on whether these assessments are fundamentally correct or incorrect and what are the ones that particularly rankle you and the other members of the DickHeads? What are the ones on which you would like, definitively, to correct The record for the straights, the normies, the mundanes and the muggles?
DG: The answer to this question could, and should, be a book. But I will break down the big controversies in very short order, and let you know what side of the ledger I come down on. Other Dick-Heads will have different answers. One of the pillars of Dick-dom is that you can never be sure. The pull of self-delusion is strong, and on top of that, Dick was a pathological liar who never told the same story twice.
A) Was he a drug addict? Dick took increasing amounts of amphetamines from the early 50s through the early 70s. Speed took its toll on PKD both mentally and physically. While Dick occasionally trotted out a story about speed being metabolized by his body before he could get high on it, much of his lifetime of paranoia can be chalked up to amphetamine abuse (many of Dick's ‘symptoms’—mania, paranoia, hypergraphia, and messianic thinking—match up with amphetamine psychosis as suggested by William Gibson, among others).
B) Did he write on acid? This is an easy rumor to dispel, started by Harlan Ellison's assertion in the intro to Dick's story ‘The Faith of Our Fathers’ [in the landmark New Wave SF anthology Dangerous Visions], that the story was written under the influence of acid. In reality, Dick only tried acid a handful of times and never wrote under its influence. Some of his most psychedelic stuff (like Three Stigmata) was written before Dick ever even tried LSD.
C) Was he a Christian? Dick started out as a liberal materialist, like most of his Berkeley counterparts. He held his mother's bizarre beliefs (including her enthusiasm for Scientology and ‘automatic writing’) in contempt, but seems to have gradually become increasingly spiritual as he aged. He was baptized in Saint Columba's Episcopal Church in Inverness (near Point Reyes Station) sometime in the early 1960s. From there his devoutness seems to have grown, and by the 1970s he was a pretty standard “Freaky Christian", as Erik Davis describes it. That is to say, Dick's interest in the church coincided with a revival of more liberal, hippie-inspired Christianity.
D) Was he contacted by God? Dick certainly thought so. Personally, I see a lot of the skepticism he deploys in VALIS and in The Exegesis (the notes he wrote about his "mystical experiences" in 1974) as sort of performative, and the occasional doubt he expresses ultimately serves to kind of sell the authenticity of his "religious experience." That said, the big claim that he was given special knowledge of his son's life-threatening birth defect seems to have been, at the very least, an exaggeration.
E) Was he schizophrenic? Probably, at times. Though the most insightful thinking on this comes from Dr. Orin Bigman (known colloquially as ‘Dr. Larry’ in Dick-dom). Dr. Larry was not only a trained psychiatrist, he met Phil briefly near the end of his life. Dr. Larry thinks Phil suffered from bi-polar disorder, which his amphetamine abuse would have exacerbated (all of Dick's ‘symptoms’ line up with this diagnosis, at least enough to satisfy me).
F) Was his house broken into by secret government agencies? While Dick speculated endlessly and publicly about the break-in of his house in 1971, it seems much of his speculation (which made up a big part of the Rolling Stone profile of Dick) was overheated. I personally believe Dick was selling drugs, and that the break-in was either instigated by a supplier who felt he'd been cheated, or was arranged by a young woman Phil had fallen in love with (the character of ‘Donna’ in A Scanner Darkly). I think it's possible that she encouraged Phil to make a large buy, or simply informed some criminal associates that he had a lot of supply on hand.
RU/CH: Any creative who ever found a significant piece of him/herself in the retrospective sights of the public has that one anecdote or attributed (or misattributed) quote that lingers, that maintains some momentum through critical circles or even through distinct generations of readers, viewers, or what have you. Are there any particular, standout aspects or artifacts (beyond his various domiciles of course)—we’re talking specific journal entries, letters, weird-ass memory-holed interviews—that you would say best (and most fairly) spotlight the most significant themes of PKD’s work?
DG: Less than six months before he died, Phil claimed to have a vision of the Messiah, a child living in Sri Lanka (or nearby) who suffered chemical burns all over his body. Phil wrote a passionate letter describing the child, whom he called ‘Tagore’, as having taken on the wounds of the planet as his own. The letter is stark in its description of impending ecological doom, as well as humanity's role in protecting ourselves and our planet. Many of the roughly 80 recipients to whom Dick sent the letter thought it was yet another sign that Phil Dick was "slowly going crazy in Southern California" (as Ursula Le Guin quipped at a science fiction convention).
But, given what we know about the state of the planet now, the letter seems incredibly prescient. (I'd encourage your readers to read the whole thing here.
The other super-prescient piece of nonfiction from Dick is his speech from 1978, ‘How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later’, which distills his fears about technology and captures our current dystopian zeitgeist perfectly. Here's a taste: "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."
RU/CH: If an absolutely-’uninitiated’ reader—we’re talking one who peripherally knows about this Blade Runner business, and found that one blockbuster with Tom Cruise more than a little interesting—wanted to grok not merely PKD’s writing, but his worldview in toto, could you talk about the reading pathway you would curate for them, given the opportunity? A reasonably-constricted initial list that would track how PKD’s ideas evolved, and how various works converse with each other? Why those particular works, and why in that order (if any?)
DG: This is a tough one, as everybody is a little different. My recommendations work a little like a decision tree:
Are you a science fiction reader ready for robots and Martians? Great—read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Martian Time-Slip.
Are you versed in postmodernism and all kinds of Lit-Crit theory? Read the sci-fi novels listed above, along with Ubik.
Do you hate science fiction? Read VALIS, and Dick's best mainstream literary novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist.
If your tastes run more to Golden Age science fiction, try Dick's early short stories, as well as his novels Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint. I think Lethem's Library of America selections are spot-on, but the books are funner if you can find cheap pulp editions with lurid cover art.
Finally, I think if you really want to appreciate Dick's work, you've got to read Lawrence Sutin's fantastic biography Divine Invasions.
RU: What in PKD’s broad oeuvre, if anything, would you characterize as the closest analogous techno-societal concept to ‘The Singularity’?
DG: I can’t think of an example of a ‘singularity’ (which the AI I just consulted defines as ‘a point where established rules and models break down, leading to unpredictable and profound changes, most notably in physics and technology’). Dick is absolutely not interested in some future quantum leap. The sci-fi elements in his work exist in a world that is otherwise fully recognizable as the 20th century. I don’t think this is a lack of imagination.
I could see a story in which Dick depicts a group of people imagining that technology could somehow fundamentally change the human condition as being deluded and detached from the vitality of being alive. This is not to say that technology has not dramatically altered the human condition in countless ways. But Dick is definitely not interested in writing about a human condition that doesn’t have to wake up, go to bed, get tired, etc. Maybe there’s a short story where a society gets everything it wants through technology that I should be coming up with. But even if there were, I’d bet you anything that the characters would still come home from the technological Utopia to throw their keys wearily into a dish by the door and sigh to themselves in resignation.