Moderated by Nicole Vandever and Paige Patterson, April 29, 2016, the Philip K. Dick Conference, CSUF
Vandever: Some background on our university in case you don’t know. As many of you do know our university has a unique history of science fiction.
Professor Willis McNelly, a professor of modernism and science fiction here at CSUF in the ’70s, worked really hard to collect various manuscripts for our university to give the likes of Frank Herbert’s Dune and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a home in our Special Collections, which has just been growing and is really awesome and you should check it out.
Included in that effort is not only various manuscripts and letters of Philip K. Dick, but in a sense Dick himself. Philip K. Dick had fallen on hard times living in Northern California, and asked McNelly if he might find a home in Fullerton. McNelly found Dick a place to stay here. Literally here … we could walk to some of his apartments in like twenty minutes from this very location, which I think is really cool.
A home was made for Dick in Orange County, which is also the location of A Scanner Darkly, and it’s CSUF where he would become a part of the academic life of a few students. Two of these students have so kindly come back today to share their own experience as students, writers, and friends of Philip K. Dick here at CSUF. Paige, did you want to introduce our writers?
Patterson: On my far left, your far right, we have Tim Powers. He is a science fiction and fantasy author, and alum of CSUF. His works have been translated into numerous languages. Perhaps one of his most popular work, Anubis Gates, won him the Philip K. Dick Award, and his later works would win two Locus Fantasy awards and three World Fantasy awards.
Right here, we have James Blaylock, also an alum of CSUF. He is the author of fantasy and steampunk and supernatural fiction. Blaylock has won the World Fantasy Award twice, and has written numerous books, many of which feature California and Victorian London as the setting.
Vandever: We’ll start off with some general questions. What was it like for both of you, learning from classes, from Philip K. Dick, from each other at CSUF? What was your relationship like, if you could recreate it here for our imaginations, specifically if you wanted to bring up the creation of “William Ashbless.” I think that was a great story.
Powers: I don’t know that we went to a lot of classes.
Out front of what used to be the Commons, there used to be a tree where there’s cement now, and we set up a table and chairs out there, and pretty much spent the day there. We would usually go the first day of class to get the mid-term and finals schedule and then go to class on those days, so you really only had to attend class twice a semester. Of course, we were English Lit majors—if we were Physics or something, it would be more serious.
We met Phil Dick through, as you say, Willis McNelly. Phil was in Canada and totally at the end of his rope. He had gone up to Canada to be guest of honor at a convention, and when the convention ended, he just didn’t go home.
He simply stayed on, because his house in Northern California had been blown up and the police had told him he wasn’t welcome, and so he figured he really had nothing to go back to there. He wrote to Dr. McNelly and said, “I got nowhere to go,” and McNelly read that letter to his class. Two of the girls in the class said, “Well, we just lost a roommate, he could come stay with us.”
McNelly relayed this to Phil Dick, and Phil said, “OK,” and got on an airplane.
I knew the two girls and they said, “Do you want to come to the airport and meet Philip K. Dick?” Luckily, I had not read much of his work or I wouldn’t have been able to speak, but I went along and we picked him up.
It turned out that they had only a couch for him to sleep on and wanted him to pay for all the groceries, and so very shortly he moved in with a guy who had just been divorced, right over here on Quartz Lane.
At that point, he was only like two blocks from the college. It was a relatively quiet period for him, living by the college, having a relationship with the college through the manuscripts and magazines that eventually the college did get from him, and talking in McNelly’s classes from time to time.
Vandever: Did you take classes he spoke in?
Blaylock: I had a science fiction class with Willis McNelly, I think when I was around nineteen years old, which would have made me a junior, let’s say. I had no idea of the existence of Philip K. Dick at the time. In fact, I had no idea before I signed up for the class that such a thing as modern science fiction existed, which I know is going to sound just a little bit strange.
I had grown up reading H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and Conan Doyle, and other ancient writers of nineteenth and early twentieth century science fiction. When I was through with their books, I stopped reading SF entirely. I signed up for Will McNelly’s class and we got the reading list of a dozen or so books that included Dune, Double Star, Childhood’s End, and Earth Abides—this long list of absolutely wonderful books, and I said, “Where have I been? How did this get past me?” At that time Phil was writing letters to Dr. McNelly, who read them in class.
I didn’t actually meet Tim until 1972, when I was graduating. Going around in my mind was the question, “What am I going to do about graduate school?” because there was no way on earth I was going to go out into the hard world at that point. I was accepted at Riverside in UC San Diego into what would have been MA or Ph.D. programs. Tim and me were hanging out a lot by then, and my writing life was waking up, so to speak. I had a couple of friends at school who I surfed with all the time, and I thought, “You know what? To heck with those other schools, I’ll stay at Cal State Fullerton because I have a lot of friends here.” I don’t know whether I’d advise students these days that that’s a good reason to pick a graduate school, but it worked out really pretty well for me, and in the next couple of years I determined that I wanted to find a way to stay at the University forever, and so I became a teacher.
I did not meet Philip Dick, however, until 1975, when Tim introduced me to him, which meant that I’d been out of Cal State a year by that time. The first book of Phil’s that I read was Dr. Bloodmoney, which I followed in time with all of his novels, deciding that one after another was my “favorite.”
Patterson: Can you tell us a bit more about how you became interested in talking with Philip K. Dick? Could you talk a little bit more about that? How you shared interests with him?
Powers: I had grown up reading science fiction. Sort of opposite of Blaylock, I had not really read Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle. But I mentioned that I had not read Philip Dick’s stuff appreciably before meeting him, which was fortunate because I have met writers whose stuff I grew up on and when I do meet them I can never even speak. I have to kind of spit and stammer and sweat, and shake their hand and rush away. I don’t think they’re even flattered. I think they just wonder, “What was wrong with that guy?”
But luckily, with Phil, I was able to talk more—I was aware of his name like John Brunner, say, but little more than that. Then gradually I started—since here he was!—reading his books and cumulatively appreciating, “this is actual genius. This is probably the only genius you will ever actually know well.”
It was fascinating to… He was in a dormant period when he flew down here. He had had all kinds of terrible adventures in Northern California, and then in Canada he attempted suicide and so forth, and so, for the first year or so of being in Fullerton, he really wasn’t writing.
He was hoping to get royalty checks. Really none of the New York people, the science fiction world, knew where he was. It was fascinating to see him come out of that with books like Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and We Can Build You being reissued or coming out for the first time in book form.
It was, for Blaylock and I—and for K.W. Jeter too, a friend of ours who was in the picture—it was educational to see the life of an actual, professional, freelance writer, and that it was mostly being broke. In fact, I think the Phil Dick estate probably still owes me about 40 bucks.
He was always, like, “Powers, can you loan me 20 bucks?” “I already loaned you 20 bucks.” “Well, can you loan me another 20 bucks?” “OK, here we go.” It certainly took away any of the aspects of glamour we might have thought that career path had… But at the same time, it made it look achievable.
He’s got no car, no money, neither do I. This could work.
Blaylock: When I was hanging around with Phil, we didn’t talk about writing much. At the time I was writing what would probably become my first published short story or two, so I was really an amateur. I didn’t really want to suggest that I wanted to talk shop too much. Also, we were so busy talking about cats, and music, and food, and I don’t know…
Powers: What’s wrong with our cars.
Blaylock: Yeah. There was always something wrong with our cars. That took a lot of time up. Although, I did come away with a lot of useful stuff. I remember the very first night that I met Phil, who was living on Commonwealth at that time, right across the street from school.
Powers: Yeah, I think it was just a few blocks that way.
Blaylock: We sat talking until, maybe two in the morning, and I remember there was a bottle of Zinfandel that we polished off. There might have been two.
He convinced us pretty thoroughly that the Soviets had a madness ray that was impervious to the horizon, and that it was now angled through the earth toward Los Angeles and that we would wake up in the morning and everybody would be out of their minds, dancing around in the street and howling.
This struck me as terrible news and was pretty typical of conversations with Phil. The next day we’d be talking to Phil, and he’d laugh and say, “I really had you guys going last night.”
When you were talking to him, you could not tell whether he believed it to the point of abject fear, or whether he was just throwing out something because he had these two young gullible guys on hand and could hose us with some kind of story. I never forgot that madness ray. I loved the idea. I’m glad that the Soviets are not pointing it at my head anymore.
Powers: Yeah, that was a bad day.
Blaylock: Recently in a Steampunk book, several years ago, I decided that my evil guy would have a madness ray and be threatening London, in that exact same way. I stole it wholesale from Phil.
Powers: Do you remember the night he convinced us…?
Again, Blaylock and I were over there late at night with a bottle of Zinfandel, and Phil convinced us—he slid around and leaned forward to tell us this secret—he told us that archaeological evidence indicated that in San Diego, fossils showed that prehistoric man had one eye and two noses apiece. That these were the original Cyclops, and very scary creatures.
He convinced us that the world had not seen the last of these creatures. I remember Blaylock and I driving home in absolute terror. I was keeping a journal in those days, so I was able to see what day it was he told us this story.
And then recently I was looking at his Collected Letters, and in one of his letters, a week before he told us that story, he told some correspondent, “I read the thing you sent me about the prehistoric man with the two noses and the one eye—what a bunch of nonsense!”
I think, “You wouldn’t know that was his opinion when he was telling us about it.” I think my wife remembers real well, too, how he would sometimes, late at night, lean forward and say, “My researches have revealed … .”
He was researching all these Neo-Platonist, pre-Socratic, obscure Gnostic scholars. He’d say, “My researches have uncovered a fact which has only been known to twelve people in the history of the world … each of whom died within twenty-four hours of learning this fact, and I want to tell it to you.”
I’d be like, “No. I’m not listening. Shut up.” I think this is why a lot of interviewers, and people with a hasty look at Phil Dick, conclude that he was crazy. They hear these things once, and the come away with, “that guy’s nuts.” They don’t go back the next day, to see him ridicule the idea.
Blaylock: I remember the night that we were there, the infamous Cyclops that they apparently dug up in a ditch that was being excavated near San Diego.
Powers: Yeah, San Diego.
Blaylock: But the government had suppressed…
Powers: Of course they did.
Blaylock: …the find. Yeah. That’s why I love the government so much, they suppress all these cool things that you later hear about. Suppressed things are particularly fun simply because they’re suppressed.
Also, I remember being stricken with fear when he was telling us that only twelve people had learned this terrible business, and that Ambrose Bierce had been one of those twelve people. The official story is that late in life he wandered into the Mexican desert and died, but actually he was taken out by the infamous organization that was orchestrating the Cyclops thing. I think it had to do with KGB also, didn’t it?
Powers: How could it not?
Vandever: Thank you. That actually, perfectly, leads into another question we wanted to ask. Philip K. Dick wrote an essay called, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” and had the following to say about science fiction: “Science fiction writers, I’m sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”
In terms of these ideas about science fiction and reality, I’d like to ask, as writers of science fiction, conspiracy theories, supernatural occurrences, all of that … when you have these worlds that you’ve created, how do you make what you write real and believable, even though, inherently it’s not, these elements are not?
If it weren’t real on some level, we’d just throw the book out the window at some point. How do you make it real and believable?
Powers: I find that the trick is to picture it very thoroughly. Like I frequently postulate some sort of secret conspiracy that’s been going on for a long time in history.
What I do is I look at actual history and try to find enigmatic or inexplicable or irrational events, and say, “against what supernatural back story would those not be irrational? Against what sort of back story would they in fact make total sense?”
Then it’s like being a cold case detective. You look for clues. I’m convinced that I could read a biography of Beatrix Potter and, if it was a very thick biography, and I approached it with this kind of honorary paranoid squint that I adopt when I do research, I bet I could find a lot of stuff in the life of Beatrix Potter that would make you think, “Ah-ha, here we have evidence of…” God knows what. Something supernatural!
I wouldn’t do that, just because I like Beatrix Potter and it would be unkind to find weird meanings behind Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and all. But I do think it’s real important that you trick the reader into thinking it’s happening in a real place, ideally, this here very world, to real people in a real time.
The more you can staple your fantastic elements to stuff the reader’s familiar with, the easier it’s going to be to get the reader over that speed bump of incredulity. Because, as you say, always the risk is when you’re writing science fiction or fantasy that the reader is going to say, “Wait a sec, this is all crap.” Which, of course, it is.
But yeah, you want to make the theater flats and the backdrops as convincing as possible to try to stave off that realization on the part of the reader.
Speaking of Phil Dick, he was very good at that in… I think of books like Now Wait for Last Year or Dr. Bloodmoney which have worlds very different from our own, post-apocalyptic and so forth. But by showing us the day-to-day life of ordinary little people trying to run a cigar store or something, those mundane details in the foreground tend to validate the weirdness in the big background.
They always had worried about their rent. Phil Dick’s characters are always worried about their jobs and their rent.
Blaylock: Everything Tim said is right on the money. I actually go about it two different ways. In the books that I’ve written that had to do with California and had some sort of fantastic theme, I tend to write only about places I know absolutely well. I was born in Long Beach. I grew up in Anaheim. I’ve lived in Orange County all my life as did my father and my grandfather for a good part of his.
Once I decide I’m going to set a piece somewhere, whether it’s in my own neighborhood or the beach or up in the canyons of the Santa Ana Mountains, the question comes to mind, “if some fantastic thing were to happen here in this place, given the people who live in this place and the kind of weather that we have in this place, and what it looks like, etc., what would it be?” That narrows things down a lot.
I wrote a book called, All the Bells on Earth that is actually pretty claustrophobic. It’s set not only in my neighborhood in Old Towne, Orange, but within a four-square-block area. I think somebody gets three blocks out of the neighborhood at one point in the book, but they come straight back again.
I was impressed by that everyday aspect of Phil’s books, too—to have average characters, working stiffs, whoever it might happen to be, going about their business, except that something strange is going on that draws them in, until they’re up to their ears in the supernatural. In Bells it was a vaguely satanic thing that was happening in the neighborhood. My character, despite his own best efforts to avoid it, got drawn into it, and had to deal with it to his peril.
When I write Steampunk stories, I go about it a different way. I made a conscious decision back in about 1985 that if I would write a book set during the Victorian era, when science was largely imaginary and there were still lost cities in the jungle…. Even in the early twentieth century, when The Lost World came out, the Conan Doyle film, people believed in what they were seeing on the screen, that there were dinosaurs living in South America on a big plateau.
I figured, if it’s 1875, the sky’s the limit. If I needed a madness ray, then I’d put in a madness ray. Everybody believed in rays back then. Heaven knows what they didn’t believe in. That was an open door to work the novel in any way I wanted to work it. Sometimes it required a lowball sense of humor. Sometimes, if the plot was particularly serious, then I’d cut the humor and tell a straight story. But mixing in imaginary science. I simply had to make it plausible. Often it was plausible, because I said, “1875.”
Powers: You said, “Lord Kelvin.”
Blaylock: Lord Kelvin helped, although he was an imaginary Lord Kelvin. And it always worked to add a machine. The word “machine” is…
Powers: How plausible do you want it?
Patterson: With the genres of science fiction, fantasy, why do you choose to write about a place like Fullerton? Is it simply because it is familiar? Or do you ever find yourself having to step outside of your comfort zone? How do you go about doing that?
You sort of answered it already, but I’m more focused on the aspects of Fullerton and what it means to you. Because Philip K. Dick wrote a lot of works that revolved around this area. Do you think that influenced your writing at all?
Blaylock: Well, real quick I’ll say, “Yeah, I think it influenced my writing.” I’m not sure that I ever slip over the city line into Fullerton. I usually stick to Orange. I have to say in answer to your question, I’m often happy staying within my comfort zone, which means close to home. I tend to write about people I know in the places I know in my own experiences of the world. I’m willing to believe that other people have other experiences that I don’t understand well enough to write about them myself, so I’m quite happy to stay in my own neighborhood so to speak.
Maybe this is because I’ve lived for so many years in this area, but I’ve always found Orange County to be an interesting place. I’ve seen some very strange things here. There’s something about it that strikes me as being right on the edge of the borderland. I think that comes through in my fiction. People say, “well, here’s Blaylock creating this Orange County that doesn’t exist.” I want to deny that, and say that the Orange County that I create when I write is the Orange County that I live in.
If you live in a different Orange County than I do, that’s fine and dandy. Maybe there’s something Phil Dickian in that, that we all live in a slightly different universe.
Powers: Yeah. I’ve written a number of short stories that take place in Orange County, largely because, for twenty years, my wife and I lived in Santa Ana … and so I don’t need to research Orange County very much. Or if I do, I can just drive around and look at it. I don’t, in the case of a short story, want to have to invest in becoming an expert in eighteenth-century Austria.
In novels, I do generally go further afield. I’ve had novels in Los Angeles and San Francisco and Las Vegas, but most of them have been set in England, Germany, Russia, etc. Though I do try to emphasize that it is this world, it’s not some alternate Germany, alternate Los Angeles. It’s this one you could get on the phone right now, because I do want as much as possible to solicit, seduce, trick the reader’s credulity. If I say, “no, it’s an alternate Los Angeles,” I’ve instantly ceded a whole lot of ground when it comes to credibility.
Thinking of, “Have I used Cal State Fullerton much?” In one of my books [The Anubis Gates], the protagonist was a literature professor at Cal State Fullerton. He soon gets marooned in 1810 London, but at least he started at Cal State Fullerton.
Blaylock: One thing I’ll say just about writing Steampunk and, God knows, the sort of historical things that Tim writes, is that there’s a lot of work in them. I probably spend four to six months doing research in order to be able to start writing with the knowledge that I can make the story plausible.
While I’m writing, attempting not to reproduce Victorian language, because if I try to write like Charles Dickens or something like that, (A), I couldn’t do it and, (B), I might not have any readers. But to try to contrive a language that is plausibly Victorian, I suppose, but still sounds like me, requires constant attention to big dictionaries that tell me whether I’m using an Americanism or not, or when a word came into popular use—whether the word “dirigible” is OK at a particular date, for example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve twirled around in my chair to open that dictionary.
Earlier, when I was suggesting that I wrote Steampunk because I could get away with making things up, that was only half true. Some things, and not just language, require accuracy, and if you lace a piece with historical people and events, it adds to the reality of the thing.
Powers: I think your science in the Steampunk stuff is more plausible than you say.
Blaylock: Me, too.
Powers: Not a lot more, but … more, yeah. You talk about Newton and Kelvin…
Blaylock: Oh, yeah.
Powers: …and the behavior of gases under pressure. Science fiction is supposed to be not quite accurate science.
Blaylock: Actually, what I do is I think, “OK, I want to have a madness ray. I want it to involve, perhaps, a big precious stone.” I don’t know how to make any of that sensible at all. I call Powers on the phone and say, “I want to put in a madness ray involving a gigantic emerald.” He says, “Think in these terms,” and I furiously take notes…
Vandever: You said that you write what you know. Philip K. Dick had a more touching way of saying that.
He said, “I want to write about people I love and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.”
You mentioned his ideas. They were kind of ephemeral and they would change day to day. But he had these visions of the world. He was, in some ways, amazed by the world; in some ways, not happy with it. He was definitely an outsider, and that kind of comes into his work, the outsider, the other.
My question is “what is the other?”
Powers: I think, personally, the value of writing science fiction fantasy … people sometimes have asked me, “why don’t you write a real novel sometime?” Meaning mainstream. I think if I was to try to write something about a handicapped boy coming of age in Pittsburgh—mainstream, that is—it wouldn’t be chapter two before he started getting phone calls from his dead grandfather.
It would just seem inevitable. It’s always seemed to me that writing mainstream fiction would be like being given a palette of colors to paint with, but not blue. Or a composer being told to compose a symphony, “but not those three keys.” It seems like an arbitrary and artificial restriction to, say, “write a story about people with their emotions and crises and all the adventures they have but not this kind.”
I would say, “well, what if I want to use blue in my canvas? I want to use those keys in a composition I write. What’s wrong with them?” They’d say, “Well, they don’t exist. They aren’t real, the science fictional fantasy things. Unlike the pickup trucks and the credit cards and the Big Macs, those things aren’t real.”
I would say, “Who cares? Everybody still has the circuitry in their heads to respond to it.” I know people that say, “I’m not scared of ghosts or vampires. I’m scared of nuclear war and urban gangs.” I think, “Sure, it’s noon, there’s a lot of people around, say that.” But you know if that person was the only person in an empty house at 3:00 a.m. and they heard something dragging downstairs, they’re not going to say, “I bet that’s an urban gang member!” They know exactly what it is. It’s a werewolf.
Since the circuitry does still exist in our heads to resonate to this type of story, I think, why deprive that circuitry of a chance to resonate?
Blaylock: I don’t know if this answers the question, but every once in a while, you come across a story and think, “I didn’t know that could be done with words.” Sometimes it changes entirely the way you view storytelling and how you want to write, or whatever it might happen to be. That happened when I was in Will McNelly’s class and read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin.
I don’t know that the themes in the book could have been dealt with in that way, except as science fiction. I’ve always admired science fiction and fantasy because writers, if they’re good enough, they can do that…
Vandever: We have one more question. Then we’re going to open up for everyone else’s questions. Kind of a closing thought. Obviously, Philip K. Dick’s body of work is still relevant, still important. That’s why we’re all here. It continues to be translated, adapted into various medias, discussed critically, enthusiastically.
As friends of his who have watched his works become so important in the SF canon, what do you think his legacy is? How has he influenced science fiction writing, or society in general?
Blaylock: I’m not positive how Phil’s work influenced science fiction writing. I’m not a science fiction scholar by any means. I know how it influenced me, but I’ve already talked about that. I was a little bit amazed when it dawned on me that Hollywood was buying up his stories and novels for large sums of money at an astonishing clip when much of it was too strange to be filmable, or so I thought. Obviously, he’s had a big effect on the world, and as is generally the case, it might be years from now before we know quite how big that effect was.
Powers: I think he had a real big effect on science fiction since say, 1980. I think before Phil Dick in the science fiction field you didn’t see as much of the high-tech low-life. The shabby future where huge developments have happened, enormous technological advances, but a scrabbling, shabby type of life is going on nevertheless.
I think of the huge expansive space travel in A Maze of Death, but the characters are what? Squabbling about the ice cream or something. In Now Wait for the Last Year, a character who builds very sophisticated brains for some kind of spacecraft or something, some of the brains are slightly defective, but instead of throwing them in the trash, he puts them on little carts so they can scoot around. In the city you’d see these things backing into alleys as you made noise approaching. I remember at one point, in a heavy rain, one of the little creatures has backed its cart into a box to get out of the rain. That picture of the kind of seamy deteriorated aspects of an otherwise glamorous future show up in cyberpunk, certainly William Gibson’s Neuromancer, all the way up to books like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which certainly has that ostensibly advanced future, but if you look more closely, you see the sad stories.
Of course, you see that in the movie, Blade Runner, which had not a lot to do with Phil Dick’s actual book, but you see the huge impressive pyramids, while down on the street level there are lots of weird little noodle stalls and torches.
Vandever: Thank you for everything. We’re going to open it up now to questions from everyone. There’s already one, cool.
Powers: Talk really loud.
Audience Member: As friends, drinking buddies, and writing students, I wonder what was the experience of seeing yourselves reflected perhaps as composite characters but nonetheless depicted in a book like VALIS?
Powers: Phil Dick’s book, VALIS, was largely autobiography. In fact, the first half of the book is simply autobiography—and then the savior is reborn as a little girl, and it becomes science fiction fantasy. Yeah, there is a character in there that was based on me, David, the Roman Catholic young man.
I remember reading it and there is one part where the Phil Dick character says to me in the midst of some crisis, “Could you not tell us what C.S. Lewis would say about this situation? Could you please do us that one favor?”
I told him, “I don’t always quote C.S. Lewis!” In another place, when the savior has been reborn as a little girl, it says, “David,” that’s me, “had zoned out into some sort of comatose state. The Catholic Church had taught him how to do this, how to withdraw when confronted with evidence that threatened his faith.”
I said, “Phil, what the hell is that? What is this Catholic Church zombie-out business? Where did you get that crap?” I remember he said, “Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee.”
Actually, it was a lot of fun. There were a couple of real-life characters that he also used in that book who probably didn’t have such a good time reading the book. I was overall pleased to… You’re nervous reading it, “what are you going to say next? Don’t go crazy. Come on, man.” It was fun.
Of course, K.W. Jeter was also a character in that. He was the character, Kevin, who kept wanting to confront God with the fact of his dead cat. The fact that his dead cat disproved all of God’s claims to omniscience and omnibenevolence.
I remember Phil said that at the last judgment Jeter was going to whip out his dead cat from under his coat: “it would be stiff as a board, he could hold it up by the tail and say, ‘Never mind judging me, how do you explain this dead cat?’”
Audience Member: I was just curious about whether or not Philip K. Dick talked about, because you mentioned that he was doing research, did he talk much about philosophy and his readings in those areas? It does show up in quite a bit of his work.
In like, A Scanner Darkly, he has some pretty interesting reflections on the notions of personal identity, consciousness, things that define the philosophical tradition and I’m wondering did he talk much about that stuff?
Blaylock: Yeah, he would. It was certainly no secret that he read philosophy. I can’t remember him really carrying on a whole lot about it when I hung out with him. He was usually too busy telling wild stories.
Powers: Also, he always assumed you were as erudite as he was. He’d say, “You remember what Plotinus said about this.” “Oh, yeah, remind me?”
He would come up with these… He was researching every damn thing, Kabbalah, what have you. He would come up with these, especially late at night, astonishing theories. I remember he, at one point, said he had concluded that the Holy Spirit lives in retrograde time, like Merlin in The Once and Future King.
The Holy Spirit knows, that is, remembers, the entire future, but has no idea about what, to us, is the past. He’s moving the other way and for one long evening Phil had me half-convinced that it was true.
Then, of course, next day, I’d say, “Phil, I’ve been thinking about that business about the Holy Spirit.” And he’d say, “That was a bunch of nonsense, Powers, I mean what the…? I can’t believe you’d take that seriously.”
I remember one time he called me up and said, “Powers, yesterday my research researchers indicated to me that I have the power to forgive sins.” I said, “No kidding. Who have you absolved?” He said, “Well, nobody. You weren’t at home, and Jeter got all huffy and said he didn’t want his sins forgiven, so I just forgave my cat’s sins.”
Audience Member: From your perspective, being friends with Phil, what were some of his favorite science fiction novels, or short stories, or writers?
Powers: Good question. He liked Clark Ashton Smith, I recall. He had at least one of the old Arkham House collections of Clark Ashton Smith. He was crazy about A.E. Van Vogt, The World of Null-A, The Weapon Shop… Do you recall another case?
Blaylock: Maybe J.G. Ballard?
Powers: Yes. J.G. Ballard, yes.
Blaylock: Which isn’t surprising. And he was a big fan of The House at Pooh Corner.
Powers: Yes.
Blaylock: It’s only a little bit science fiction, maybe the part about factors and making a suction pump.
Power: He was a big fan of the Pooh books, that’s true.
Blaylock: Yeah, in fact he convinced me that book was one of the ten great books.
Powers: Which I think it is.
Blaylock: Well I hadn’t read it, and I went home and read it, and I thought, “oh my gosh, he’s right.” I don’t think he was kidding with that one.
Powers: No, when he would quote the bit about “the place at the top of the forest where a boy and his bear would always be playing,” he was practically in tears.
Blaylock: Yeah.
Powers: As anybody with a heart would be.
I can’t think of any others… There were a lot of science fiction writers he liked. He was great pals with Norman Spinrad. He thought very highly of Robert Heinlein, partly because Heinlein loaned him money one time when he was really broke. Which he admired Heinlein for doing, because politically, they were at odds. I’ll think of some later. But certainly Clark Ashton Smith and Van Vogt…
Audience Member: What did he have to say to you, if anything, about The Lem Affair and his problems with Stanislaw Lem?
Powers: Yeah, yeah, background on that. In the mid ’70s, I guess, Science Fiction Writers of America decided to give an honorary membership to Stanislaw Lem, ostensibly because Lem wouldn’t be able to pay for a membership because the only money he had was Polish zlotys. They said, “Lem, unlike the rest of us, gets to be a member honorarily.”
There was one other, I think J.R.R. Tolkien had been made an honorary member. As soon as this happened, Lem wrote an article saying that all American science fiction writers were frauds and hacks and had no value, and just couldn’t state emphatically enough how worthless their work was.
Everybody in the SFWA, Science Fiction Writers of America, said, “How come we’re giving this guy an honorary free membership when he thinks we’re all a bunch of losers?” Everybody said, “Yeah, how come we are?”
Philip José Farmer and Phil Dick said, “We quit if you’re going to give a free ride to this guy, who thinks we’re all a bunch of clowns.” I remember Jerry Pournelle was President of SFWA at the time and he said, “Good point. Let the guy buy his own damn membership if he wants.”
They told Lem, “You can be a member but you’ve got to pay, like everybody else.” Lem said, “Why would I want to hang out with a bunch of losers like you anyway?” Lem stopped being a member of SFWA and it was largely Philip K. Dick and Philip José Farmer who led the ‘Ditch Lem’ movement.
Blaylock: I think I’m on their side. Why should he get a free ride?
Audience Member: Although Lem did say that Dick was the one exception.
Powers: A little louder.
Audience Member: Lem said that Dick was the one exception to the losers.
Powers: True.
Audience Member: But that wasn’t my question. To what extent did you see the paranoia that a lot of people ascribed to Phil, that he was paranoid often, sometimes, or never?
Powers: Phil as a paranoid author?
Audience Member: Paranoid person. That came up in the Lem business. Not related to Lem, just … that’d be when he thought that Lem might have been in cahoots with the KGB or something… I know people say that Phil was paranoid and I was wondering…
Powers: I think Lem was in cahoots with the KGB.
I bet we could both come up with examples of Phil having paranoid reflexes. But to a large extent I think his paranoid reflexes were valid. Maybe at that point it’s not paranoia anymore. When he was living in Northern California where he had a whole lot of his most affecting experiences, somebody really did blow his house up in the weirdest possible way.
He came home one day after the police had told him that if he didn’t leave town he could expect a bullet in the back or worse. Leaving him wondering, “what’s worse?” He came home one day and every window in his house was busted in, and under each window were heavy duty army-type boot prints and stacks of plastic bags, sealable plastic bags.
When he went in, I’ve seen photos of all this, every open container of perishable food was missing. If he had two boxes of Cheerios and one had been opened, the opened one was gone, as if because of exposure to something. His locked filing cabinet had been exploded open, packed first with wet towels, to muffle the sound.
One of the very few things stolen was a page of Latin he had written while under the influence of LSD, even though he wasn’t consciously able to read or write Latin. That may have been the whole purpose of the break-in. I’m talking a little paranoid myself here.
But enough weird stuff had happened to him that I think his reflex was not unjustified. In the ’70s he had become the hero of a fair number of Marxist behind-the-Iron-Curtain writers and Western writers of a very Marxist slant, like Darko Suvin. It was not unreasonable I think for him to be a little ill at ease at being so heavily endorsed by this particular crowd.
We are now post-Cold War so it’s not all that easy to put ourselves into that perspective. I think I would have been a little uneasy too.
I remember getting letters from readers in Russia and they would arrive very looked-over and with a lot of evidence that the government was aware we were getting letters from behind The Iron Curtain. I’m thinking, “I don’t know this guy, what are you looking at me for? I’m a Republican, come on.”
Blaylock: My memory of the ’60s is that they were a paranoid time. Contemporary writers were writing paranoid books and I think lots of people wrote stories about their fears. Also, I’ve got the original Rolling Stone article about the break-in in Phil’s place. It’s a great article. I think it posits like seven different explanations.
Powers: Paul Williams.
Blaylock: Pardon?
Powers: The interviews with Paul Williams?
Blaylock: Yes. They were really good. Space aliens on one hand, the Army, the Black Panthers.
Powers: They had the CIA, military groups living in the hills around the Bay Area.
Blaylock: He was not paranoid to such an extent that he was focused on one group and was certain he had the answer. I think he was playing with the idea that there were potentially many answers and actually developing an interest, maybe even a “writerly” interest in what had happened to him as well as being fearful that it could end badly.
Powers: That’s true. In fact you do want to keep in mind that, when these things would occur to him he would be thinking partly, “I wonder if this is some sort of trouble that I should be aware of?” But also at least as strongly, “I wonder how this would fit into a book. I wonder how you could put a science fictional spin on this.”
His Exegesis, which is non-fiction philosophical ramblings, a lot of it sounds crazy until you read the whole context and realize, “OK, he’s stopped doing philosophical extrapolation by this paragraph. Clearly he has begun outlining a possible novel.” You don’t want to start taking this as him saying, “I believe this is true.” It’s more, “Look, he’s shifted into novel outlining.”
In fact, one thing I do want to say before this all shuts down, there’s a sort of caricature picture of Phil Dick that you get, from just hasty cultural references, of him being a drug-addled crazy hermit who believed all these mystical William Blake type things.
Actually, while that’s a handy sketch, it’s not at all a realistic picture, it’s a caricature. In fact, as you’d know from reading VALIS, he was the most humorous and skeptical guy you could imagine. Also, probably the funniest guy I’ve ever known and very generous and kind.
I remember we used to say that you could call him up and say, “Phil, I’ve been evicted. I need 400 bucks and somebody to help me move my couch.” He’d say, “OK, I’ll be right over—oh—who is this?”
Audience Member: Just following-up on the Paul Williams interview.
When you were talking about the way he would come up with these weird stories, and then take them back. I knew Paul Williams briefly in Encinitas, where he lived at the end of his life.
I had a copy of “Only Apparently Real,” which was the collection of those interviews he did in Rolling Stone. He’s spewing out all those different theories about what had happened to his house in Marin.
What’s wonderful is it all ends when Paul asks him, “Are you actually paranoid?” Then Dick goes into this long explanation, and then he ends with all these different theories, then he says, “I realize all this was supposed to describe why I wasn’t paranoid… So all you had to do was ask that cop I was avoiding about the guy walking on his hands and knees across the street.”
It was jokey at the end of this whole thing. Spitting out all these things he comes up with this punch line. You think about the two Phil Dicks, Horselover Fat and Phil Dick in VALIS: there’s the crazy half. Then there’s the completely rational half, the Phil Dick character who’s describing Horselover Fat as crazy.
Powers: He was always way quicker to make fun of his paranoid theories than we would be. He’d explain why the CIA is probably across the parking lot right now, with a sniper scope on a rifle. We’d be thinking, “oh my God, we’d better run down the stairs crouching.”
Before we could ever find flaws in his conspiracy theory, he would’ve smashed it to bits, himself, “Well, no, that wouldn’t work because of this and, blah, blah, it’s ludicrous.” “Oh, I guess it… I kind of liked it, but I guess you’re right.”