A few months before the science-fiction writer Philip K Dick died in 1982, he spoke at length to journalist Gwen Lee. These are the edited transcripts of those conversations, though they play more like monologues, which is a treat because we get Dick in full flight, cadences intact as the editors have left in the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’. You can feel his mind racing as he chases after an idea and links it to another, and then another. It’s an exhilarating read, Dick expounding on music, colours, golden sections, the Fibonacci series, the Bible (he learnt Greek so he could read it) and philosophy, though the reader does sometimes get lost in the tangled web of his thoughts – albeit in a good way.
In February and March of 1974, Dick had a profound visionary experience in which a pink beam of light revealed reality to him. He talks here a bout how this ‘presence’ stayed with him for eight years and saved the life of his son Christopher. Now, if you apply Occam’s razor – as Dick himself advises – mental illness is the most likely explanation, particularly given Dick’s history of drug use. But that hardly feels satisfactory once you’ve read his lucid account – I, for one, found it genuinely unsettling.
There’s a surprising amount about what Dick thought of the film ‘Blade Runner’ (based on his story ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’), considering he never lived to see more than a 20-minute segment and a 90-second teaser. Most of it is tremendously positive: ‘The opening is simply the most stupendous thing I have ever seen in the way of a film,’ he declares. It’s good to know that even geniuses have blind spots. The man who wrote ‘A Scanner Darkly’, ‘Valis’ and ‘The Transmigration of Timothy Archer’ likes Meat Loaf (the stodgy singer, not the foodstuff) and, surprisingly, doesn’t know the word ‘synaesthesia’.
‘What If…’ is a fantastic insight into how Dick thought and wrote, though in terms of the interrelationship between the life and the work you’ll be left wondering, as Dick’s analyst was, what is cause and what is effect.
