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A review by xmagicanderson
Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Philip K. Dick, David Streitfeld
5.0
Great collection of interviews here. Very interesting and illuminating. What an intriguing mind PKD had. Here are some of the statements that really resonated with me.
"One reason he (PKD) was so prolific—forty-five novels in thirty years, plus five fat volumes of short stories—was because his characters offered companionship he could find nowhere else."
"In July 1981, in the middle of middle age, exhausted by life yet thrilled by the prospect that Blade Runner would deliver a bigger audience and better opportunities, he wrote his agent that “a whole new phase of my life is beginning.” Less than a year later, he was dead and his true fame began."
"But in science fiction, you read it, and it’s not true now but there are things that are not true now that are going to be someday. Everybody knows that! And this creates a very strange feeling in a certain kind of person—a feeling that he is reading about reality, but he is disjointed from it only in temporal terms. It’s like all science fiction occurs in alternate future universes, so it could actually happen someday."
"Martian Time-Slip is exactly what I wanted to write. It deals with the premise that was, to me, so important—not just that we each live in a somewhat unique world of our own psychological content, but that the subjective world of one rather powerful person can infringe on the world of another person. If I can make you see the world the way I see it, then you will automatically think the way I think. You will come to the conclusions that I come to. And the greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world."
"If I were strong myself I would probably not feel this as such a menace. I identify with the weak person; this is one reason why my fictional protagonists are essentially anti-heroes. They’re almost losers, yet I try to equip them with qualities by which they can survive. At the same time I don’t want to see them develop counter-aggressive tactics where they, too, become exploitative and manipulative. "
"However—if my view that each person has his unique world is correct, then if you say Chinese food is good, in your world it’s good, and if someone else says it’s bad, in his world it’s bad. I’m a complete relativist in that for me the answer to the question “Is Chinese food good or bad?” is semantically meaningless. Now, this is my view. If your view is that this view is incorrect, you might be right. In which case, I would be willing to agree with you. "
"My outlook is based not on faith but on an actual encounter that I had in 1974, when I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane. Now, I have actually thought of that as a possibility, that I had been psychotic from 1928, when I was born, until March of 1974. But I don’t think that’s the case. I may have been somewhat whacked-out and eccentric for years and years, but I know I wasn’t all that crazy, because I’d been given Rorschach tests and so on. This rational mind was not human. It was more like an artificial intelligence. On Thursdays and Saturdays I would think it was God, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial, sometimes I would think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmitter."
"One reason he (PKD) was so prolific—forty-five novels in thirty years, plus five fat volumes of short stories—was because his characters offered companionship he could find nowhere else."
"In July 1981, in the middle of middle age, exhausted by life yet thrilled by the prospect that Blade Runner would deliver a bigger audience and better opportunities, he wrote his agent that “a whole new phase of my life is beginning.” Less than a year later, he was dead and his true fame began."
"But in science fiction, you read it, and it’s not true now but there are things that are not true now that are going to be someday. Everybody knows that! And this creates a very strange feeling in a certain kind of person—a feeling that he is reading about reality, but he is disjointed from it only in temporal terms. It’s like all science fiction occurs in alternate future universes, so it could actually happen someday."
"Martian Time-Slip is exactly what I wanted to write. It deals with the premise that was, to me, so important—not just that we each live in a somewhat unique world of our own psychological content, but that the subjective world of one rather powerful person can infringe on the world of another person. If I can make you see the world the way I see it, then you will automatically think the way I think. You will come to the conclusions that I come to. And the greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world."
"If I were strong myself I would probably not feel this as such a menace. I identify with the weak person; this is one reason why my fictional protagonists are essentially anti-heroes. They’re almost losers, yet I try to equip them with qualities by which they can survive. At the same time I don’t want to see them develop counter-aggressive tactics where they, too, become exploitative and manipulative. "
"However—if my view that each person has his unique world is correct, then if you say Chinese food is good, in your world it’s good, and if someone else says it’s bad, in his world it’s bad. I’m a complete relativist in that for me the answer to the question “Is Chinese food good or bad?” is semantically meaningless. Now, this is my view. If your view is that this view is incorrect, you might be right. In which case, I would be willing to agree with you. "
"My outlook is based not on faith but on an actual encounter that I had in 1974, when I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane. Now, I have actually thought of that as a possibility, that I had been psychotic from 1928, when I was born, until March of 1974. But I don’t think that’s the case. I may have been somewhat whacked-out and eccentric for years and years, but I know I wasn’t all that crazy, because I’d been given Rorschach tests and so on. This rational mind was not human. It was more like an artificial intelligence. On Thursdays and Saturdays I would think it was God, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial, sometimes I would think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmitter."