The one thing that I am very happy about is that I don’t have to sit and write any longer in the exam setting. Timed typing has destroyed my finger-wrist-arm assembly: 28 pages in 5 hours on the major exam, 21 pages in 4 hours on theory, and 27 pages in 4 hours on PKD. Not to mention the mental numbness that sets in toward the end of the exam. In fact, I began to feel like an android by the end of each exam. Running through my tape, one instruction followed by another, and another datum passed through the memory banks and into the output. Dawn Lashua, the graduate student secretary, caught something that I had not perceived in my flurry of typing today. I was not consciously aware that I had wrote the last sentence on my last exam so that it  concluded: “the end.”

In June 2010, I will take my three PhD exams in the Kent State University English Literature PhD program.  For these exams, I convened a committee of trusted professors, each administering one exam. I choose to take my exams in these areas: 20th Century American Literature (administered by Kevin Floyd), Postmodern Theory (administered by Tammy Clewell), and the Philip K. Dick Canon (administered by Donald “Mack” Hassler). Below, I have included my Philip K. Dick reading list. Go here to read my Postmodern Theory exam list, and here to read my 20th Century American Literature exam list.

PhD Minor Area Exam:  Philip K. Dick’s Fiction and Non-Fiction, and Critical Works

Director:  Donald “Mack” Hassler

Novels by Philip K. Dick, organized by date of composition.

1. Dick, Philip K. Gather Yourselves Together.  1950.  1994.
2. —. Voices from the Street.  1952.  2007.
3. —. Vulcan’s Hammer .  1953.  1960.
4. —. Dr. Futurity.  1953.  1960.
   
5. —. The Cosmic Puppets.  1953.  1957.
6. —. Solar Lottery.  1954.  1955.
   
7. —. Mary and the Giant.  1954.  1987.
8. —. The World Jones Made.  1954.  1956.
9. —. Eye in the Sky.  1955.  1957.
10. —. The Man Who Japed.  1955.  1956.
11. —. The Broken Bubble.  1956.  1988.
12. —. Puttering About in a Small Land.  1957.  1985.
    
13. —. Time Out of Joint.  1958.  1959.
    
14. —. In Milton Lumky Territory.  1958.  1985.
15. —. Confessions of a Crap Artist.  1959.  1975.
    
16. —. The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.  1960.  1982.
17. —. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland.  1960.  1986.
18. —. The Man in the High Castle.  1961.  1962.
    2009/12/2
19. —. We Can Build You.  1962.  1972.
    
20. —. Martian Time-Slip.  1962.  1964.
    
21. —. Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb.  1963.  1965.
    
22. —. The Game-Players of Titan.  1963.  1963.
23. —. The Simulacra. 1963.  1964.
24. —. The Crack in Space.  1963.  1966.
25. —. Now Wait for Last Year.  1963.  1966.
    
26. —. Clans of the Alphane Moon.  1964.  1964.
27. —. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.  1964.  1965.
    
28. —. The Zap Gun.  1964.  1967.
29. —. The Penultimate Truth.  1964.  1964.
30. —. Deus Irae.  1964.  1976.  (Collaboration with Roger Zelazny).
31. —. The Unteleported Man.  1964.  1966.  (Republished as Lies, Inc. in 1984).
32. —. The Ganymede Takeover.  1965.  1967.  (Collaboration with Ray Nelson).
33. —. Counter-Clock World.  1965.  1967.
34. —. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1966.  1968.
    
35. —. Nick and the Glimmung.  1966.  1988.
36. —. Ubik.  1966.  1969.
    
37. —. Galactic Pot-Healer.  1968.  1969.
38. —. A Maze of Death.  1968.  1970.
    
39. —. Our Friends from Frolix 8.  1969.  1970.
40. —. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.  1970.  1974.
    
41. —. A Scanner Darkly.  1973.  1977.
    
42. —. Radio Free Albemuth.  1976.  1985.
43. —. VALIS. 1978.  1981.
    
44. —. The Divine Invasion.  1980.  1981.
    
45. —. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.  1981.  1982.
    

Short Fiction by Philip K. Dick, needs elaboration by individual stories.

1. The Philip K. Dick Reader.  1997.
2. Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities:  The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.  Eds. Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg.  1984.

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick.  2002.

Non-Fiction by Philip K. Dick

1. Dick, Philip K.  “The Android and the Human.” Vector:  Journal of the British Science Fiction Association 64 (March/April 1973):  5-20.
2. —. The Dark Haired Girl.  1988.

Critical Works

1. Fitting, Peter.  “Ubik:  The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF.” Science Fiction Studies 2:1 (1975).  19 October 2007 <http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/fitting5art.htm>.
2. Haney, William S. II. Culture and Consciousness:  Literature Regained.  Lewisburg:  Bucknell University Press, 2002.
3. Kucukalic, Lejla. Philip K. Dick:  Canonical Writer of the Digital Age.  New York:  Routledge, 2009.
   
4. Mackey, Douglas A. Philip K. Dick.  Boston:  Twayne Publishers, 1988.
5. Palmer, Christopher. Philip K. Dick:  Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern.  Liverpool:  Liverpool UP, 2003.
6. On Philip K. Dick:  40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies.  <more information>.
7. Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick.  New York:  Carroll & Graf, 2005.
8. Suvin, Darko.  “P.K. Dick’s Opus:  Artifice as Refuge and World View.” Science Fiction Studies 2:22 (1975).  19 October 2007 <http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/suvin5art.htm>.
9. Vest, Jason P. The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick.  Lanham, MD:  Scarecrow Press, 2009.
10. Warrick, Patricia S. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980.
    
11. —.Mind in Motion:  The Fiction of Philip K. Dick.  Carbondale and Edwardsville:  Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

In Science Fiction Studies #5 (1975), Stanislaw Lem wrote an article, translated from the Polish by Robert Abernathy, describing, analyzing, and challenging the work of Philip K. Dick (up to that point). Titled “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” it is a rich essay that has much to say about Dick’s work and the work of the critic.

Lem says that Dick, like other science fiction authors, takes from the “warehouse which has long since become their common property,” or what Damien Broderick later theorized as the SF mega-text (57). One of the themes that Dick relies on is the catastrophe, but unlike most other science fiction authors, the catastrophes in Dick’s fiction occur for unascertainable reasons, i.e., the uncovered causes are deferred to the end. The common denominator in all of Dick’s fiction is a world beset by an unconstrained and monstrous entropy that devours matter and even time. Following his instincts, as Patricia Warrick would later say of Dick that he is understood intuitively, Lem says of Dick that he does not go in for rational explanations, but instead, confounds both the plot and the conventions of the science fiction genre itself. Of this, Lem demonstrates that genres have conventions, but those conventions were formed by previous breaking of convention to make the genre thus. Dick does this to science fiction, changing it to meet his own needs and creativity. Coupled with his genre breaking is the fact that Dick is a bricoleur, though this is not the word Lem uses, but it is very much what he is describing. Lem describes Dick’s work as something offered for sale at a “county fair,” having been made from a variety of concepts and ideas, but making the new creation solidly his own. Dick is not a futurologist, but rather representing the very idea of futureshock in his stories. Dick is not an extrapolator who changes one thing and leaves all the rest unscathed. He shows how civilization goes on, progress forward, but having been changed radically by the events presupposed in his stories. He acknowledges that history cannot be rewound. The fusion of the natural with the artificial, a point also raised by Warrick, Leo Marx, and Sharona Ben-Tov, means that there can be no more talk of a return to nature. In this, Dick does question progress, but not by chucking the concept. Instead, he complicates it, and again, confounds it. For Dick, our technological labyrinth prevents us from returning to nature–again, connections with Warrick, Marx, and Ben-Tov. Lem conjectures on this as something beyond the scope of Dick’s work, but nevertheless should be taken into account. He thinks about how the “irreversibility of history, leads Dick to the pessimistic conclusion that looking far into the future becomes such a fulfillment of dreams of power over matter as converts the ideal of progress into a monstrous caricature” (64). It is this carrying Dick’s ideas further in his criticism that Lem attempts to practice the very thing Dick practiced in his writing. And most importantly, in his short engagement of the novel Ubik, Lem, a good structuralist, avoids the author’s interpretation of the work, and instead considers how the thing ‘ubik’ and its combination of the old and philosophical with the modern and consumer culture resulted in such a powerful metaphor and not a futurological or technical artifact (66).

Two other things that I would like to leave with you from this essay is Lem’s idea about the relationship of the critic to a work–as defender rather than prosecutor–a way that I have tried to work in my own scholarship and reviews: “I think, however, that the critic should not be the prosecutor of a book but its defender, though one not allowed to lie: he may only present the work in the most favorable light” (60).

And I would like to quote at length, Lem’s concluding paragraph, in which he gives a honest, gracious, and thoughtful tribute to Dick’s writing. Lem says:

The writings of Philip Dick have deserved a better fate than that to which they were destined by their birthplace. If they are neither of uniform quality nor fully realized, still it is only by brute force that they can be jammed into that pulp of materials, destitute of intellectual value and original structure, which makes up SF. Its fans are attracted by the worst in Dick–the typical dash of American SF, reaching to the stars, and the headlong pace of action moving from one surprise to the next–but they hold it against him that, instead of unraveling puzzles, he leaves the reader at the end on the battlefield, enveloped in the aura of a mystery as grotesque as it is strange. Yet his bizarre blendings of hallucinogenic and palingenetic techniques have not won him many admirers outside the ghetto walls, since there readers are repelled by the shoddiness of the props he has adopted from the inventory of SF. Indeed, these writings sometimes fumble their attempts; but I remain after all under their spell, as it often happens at the sight of a lone imagination’s efforts to cope with a shattering superabundance of opportunities–efforts in which even a partial defeat can resemble a victory (66-67).

I am also under that spell and happily on the battlefield, a little the worse for wear, but with kit in hand. At least, I thought I was on a battlefield until I realized that I was sitting at a desk in front of a computer wildly typing away on this very blog. I suppose the battlefields, like ontologies, can change unexpectedly and for inexplicable reasons.

Image of Lem at the top of the post is from the Wikimedia Commons, details here.

I just cracked open the copy of Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint that I requested via interlibrary loan for my PKD exam. I noticed that it arrived at the Kent State Library from the Watson Library at Wilmington College in Wilmington, OH, but I didn’t register where I had heard of Wilmington before. It has a colorful cover by Roy Colmer that portrays Phil Dick sitting with book in hand next to an old radio and eclipsing a distant planet in the background, but the real treasure was just inside the front cover:

This copy of Time Out of Joint used to belong to Mary Kay Bray, the science fiction scholar who was active in the Science Fiction Research Association and whose name is honored with her memorializing SFRA award: the Mary Kay Bray Award for Best Feature, Essay, or Review in the SFRA Review. She taught at Wilmington College. After her death in 1999, her close friend Professor William L. Andrews of UNC, Chapel Hill funded this award in Bray’s name. I was honored with the 2007 award for two reviews I wrote: one on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and one on Ian McDonald’s Brasyl. Since then, I have served on the awards committee two years. See the other award winners here.

I was already looking forward to reading Time Out of Joint, but I am even more eager to do so now knowing that this particular copy of the novel belonged to a distinguished scholar and teacher with many friends in the SFRA. I only wish that I had had the chance to meet her in person. As it is, we are connected through time by science fiction.

TITLE: A County Darkly:  Philip K Dick in the OC

TIME:  Friday, May 21, 12-2 PM

PLACE: Humanities Gateway 1030, University of California, Irvine campus

PARTICIPANTS:

Science Fiction Authors:
*Gregory Beford
*Tim Powers
*James Blaylock

Science Fiction Critics
*Rob Latham
*Jeff Hicks

Moderator: Jonathan Alexander

ABOUT: This panel presentation will consider the inter-relationship of
Philip K. Dick’s work and his life in Orange County.  Spending the last
ten years of his life in the OC, Dick composed some of his most important
SF works here.  In many ways, the OC is a peculiarly Dickian space, with
managed communities and a veneer of the unreal.  Conversely, Dick’s late
novels (A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer)
seem at least partly inspired by Dick’s life in Orange County.  Our
panelists will explore such connections, bringing the work of the
century’s most noted SF author to bear on our cultural imagination of
Orange County, while also bringing our imagination of the OC to bear on
possible interpretations of Dick’s work.

A light lunch will be served.
Please RSVP to Ms. Iveta Cruse at icruse@uci.edu by May Monday, May 17, 2010

The School of Literature, Communication, and Culture

and the Science Fiction Collection at Georgia Tech present

science fiction studies scholar

Jorge Martins Rosa

Thursday, April 1, 2010, 11:00 a.m.

“Stars in My Pocket”

FREE PUBLIC LECTURE

The Neely Room

Georgia Tech Library and Information Center

The trope of space exploration, which has attracted so many writers of genre science fiction, still remains one of its hallmarks. Professor Rosa, however, questions the true centrality of this trope within science fiction as it has evolved beyond the space operas of the so-called Golden Age. Perhaps, as David Hartwell argues in Age of Wonders in regards to the Moon landing and other achievements from the American space program “When it comes true… it’s no fun anymore.”

While establishing the truth of Hartwell’s hypothesis may be difficult to undertake within the limitations of a single talk, Professor Rosa will look at the peculiar way Philip K. Dick approached the trope of space exploration in his own fiction. In particular, he will explore how Dick anticipated the exhaustion of this trope—or rather, its substitution for a more inner (should we say “virtual”?) approach to space.

Jorge Martins Rosa is Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, where he teaches courses including the post-graduate seminars “Fictional Modes:  Fiction and Technology” and “Cyberculture.”  His research interests involve the connections between literature, science, and digital culture. His visit to Georgia Tech is part of a research project on “Fiction and the Roots of Cyberculture.”

I hadn’t done a full OS reinstall on my MacBook since I originally got it, so I decided last night to remedy the situation with a clean nuke-and-pave of MacOS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard. As you can see from the screenshot above, I am back up and running with 10.6.2. NeoOffice and CS4 along with a handful of other software goodies are reinstalled, and my files are restored to their rightful places on my hard drive. One thing that I decided to do differently, that I had never tried before, was to encrypt my home folder with FileFault. I know that this can cause a real problem when something goes wrong, but I backup my files often enough that I hope it won’t turn into a nightmare if the FileFault system develops a problem. So far, I haven’t noticed any performance hit or problem by using FileFault, despite copying back many files to my internal SSD.

While everything was being done, I finished Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. I will read A Scanner Darkly next and then switch back to some postmodern theory.

Today, I received a letter from the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding my recent Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (FOIPA) request for their files on the science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Unfortunately, I was informed that:

Based on the information you provided, we conducted a search of the indices to our Central Records System. We were unable to identify responsive main file records. If you have additional information pertaining to the subject that you believe was of investigative interest to the Bureau, please provide the details and we will conduct an additional search.

This is a puzzling outcome considering other folks have successfully accessed the FBI files on PKD (Willis Howard published some of the files on his 1999 dated website here).

In my previous request, I included his full name, Social Security number, dates of birth and death, an obituary, and cities of residence. In my appeal, I have included additional information from Sutin’s biography of Dick, a printout of Howard’s website, and information about Dick contacting the FBI about Thomas M. Disch, which Norman Spinrad writes about in the April/May 2009 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

My request goes in the mail tomorrow. I hope that I have better luck this time receiving what others have already found.