Gadgetory

five days a week that Morris made the long commute back and forth and he has holding his job between Earth and his moon sci-fi radio presents an adaptation of Philip cadence sales pitch philip k dick is a great American novelist of the 20th century he wrote over 40 novels and a bunch of other stuff he is usually associated with science fiction not wrongly he spent most of his career published in that field and a lot of his work includes aliens and other planets and rocket ships but he also is one of the most typical examples of how a great writer transcends category because his work seems to connect to a critique of contemporary society it's a metaphorical absurdist surreal you mind if I smoke it won't affect the test he was the source for the movie Blade Runner which came out shortly after he died and in retrospect was the very very first salvo in what became a kind of slow recognition and legitimation of his efforts and all his books are now in print and he's very famous so it's that very rare happy ending in literary history where the forgotten writer or the marginalized writer becomes really important to a lot of people and very widely studied and and read and enjoyed and unfortunately he wasn't around to be part of that well I first discovered philip k dick when I was living with a friend at 18 years old she gave me a copy of Scanner Darkly and oh my god there's sex and drugs and it's for adults and it's science fiction and I just didn't love it was just the best thing ever I felt like I was being spoken to and I did that thing that the kids do they go and they buy a giant stack of books and they read it like in a month but it wasn't actually until I went to college I had a teacher taught to end regime of Electric Sheep in American literature class and he taught it right alongside TS Eliot's the wasteland and F scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as if it was a equally worthy work of art and that had the same themes and when I saw that I was hooked and I realized that not only did dick speak to me as a person as an individual but that he had his finger on the pulse of what was important in literature in the 20th century which was basically coming to grips with our newly secular and cold world and and how to stay human in the face of encroaching technology my first encounter was a when I was in college I was studying literature at Harvard and reading great literature and my escape from it was reading literature that was considered not so great like science fiction when I eventually got into the film business one of my dreams really was to do philip k dick material what really mattered to me was the movie not just take a central concept from one of his works and turn it into an action movie but that it capture all of the dimensions of philip k dick swerve i mean we could go to a Tolkien fest and we would find people equally entranced by Tolkien we could go to a TS Eliot fest I'd be there maybe all be equally infatuated ideas but there's a unique nourishment that people seem to get from Dick's work of a kind different relationship we don't I think celebrate the man I think we celebrate a construction man but I think that construction tells us a lot about what we want what we want is somebody who is on the edge who has been not so high in the thin air that they've seen over the mountain but they're also dizzy you know they're also have some altitude sickness he became my model for what sort of novels I wanted to write and I wanted to be funny and scary and strange in exactly the same measures my first aspiration was really I kind of sit almost it's you know embarrassingly silly that I just thought if if my books were just taken to be like the next best thing since he's not around you know it kind of you know okay like B+ philip k dick novels that was gonna be good enough for me I just wanted to write more of what he did I was pretty selfish person at 18 and 19 at 20 I'm not sure I'm not sure how unusual that is a nothing particularly unusual but it really was a slap in the face this this work to say you know what what are you doing are you living your life I I credit my marriage to Philip get dick in the sense that it gave me the ability to be empathetic enough to have a quality relationship I credit my ability as a father to philip k dick again my dad wasn't particularly present and Philip he takes on a particularly good surrogate dad but his books are his art is a very good moral teacher during the 60s there used to do this thing that if you took LSD your brain would change forever and you could never go back it crosses so many barriers of your involvement it really sucks you in to reality that there's no distance there's no aesthetic distance between it as you're reading it that's a kind of literature that really interests me literature that changes the way we live