The Rehabilitation of Philip K. Dick continues

A friend of mine alerted to me to an article in the New York Times, A Prince of Pulp, Legit at Last, or as she put it, ‘the hagiography goes mainstream’. Apparently our favourite paranoid visionary is to be published in the Library of America Hall of Fame series. I’m not American, so I don’t quite understand the cultural significance of this, but I’m happy if it means more people get to read P.K. Dick.

The NYT wonders if “a wary, hard-core Dickian might argue that the Library of America volume is just a diversion, an attempt to turn a deeply subversive writer into another canonical brand name.” They probably have a point, but one of the reasons why Dick has always been an outcast writer is that most people simply don’t get it – the new volumes are unlikely to change that. Admittedly, I’d hate to see a reanimated Dick grinning from the pages of Sunday supplements, touting Readers Digest-ed versions of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Martian Time-Slip. On second thoughts, he might have liked that.

The best case scenario is that he gets the wider audience he always craved, and that people try to get to grips with his obsessions, as they have done with films like Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly, based on his novels (even Total Recall, if I’m stretching the point a bit). These movies, like Screamers, Minority Report and the recent Next (I haven’t seen it yet- is it any good? It’s crap, apparently) have all helped to gently nudge Dick into the peripheral vision of movie-goers and critics alike. The NYT article is a worthwhile read, although I disagree with the ‘prince of pulp’ tag – I assume the sub-editors haven’t read any of his actual novels.

I’m waiting to hear what Total Dick-Head makes of the news. He recently posted that Blade Runner might be in the process of re-shooting …

Philip K. Dick (electricwarrior.com)

[Cheers Brenna, for the news about your idol. I owe you vodka.]

Update: Total Dick-Head has indeed written about this now, so go read why he hated the NYT article. His post includes this excellent section:

Perhaps Dick would be amazed that the pinnacle of literary respectability in someone’s eyes is a hard cover edition issued by a particular publisher. Imagine, it’s not a aerosol spray that fights entropy, it’s a fancy book binding that magically elevates the status of the author, making him – once and for all – a legitimate genius.