The Mumpsimus

Much of reading, particularly fiction, is a matter of faith -- ye olde "willing suspension of disbelief". Science fiction, when it is more than an adventure story outfitted with spaceships and Bug-Eyed Monsters, often requires a more specific type of suspension of disbelief, a type that can create a paradox: fiction that is markedly more imaginative than most suffers from a failure of imagination. This failure occurs when the reader focuses on the story's extrapolations, but decides that they are incomplete, or simplistic, or ridiculous. If the reader perceived the story as surrealist fantasy, this wouldn't be a problem, and might even be a virtue. If the reader didn't place much emphasis (in terms of having faith in the imagined circumstances of the story) on the story's probabilities and extrapolations, then the problem would be, at best, minor (thus, stories about alien canals on Mars are perfectly readable if we haven't invested our willingness to ...

It was Samuel Delany's birthday on April 1, and the Philadelphia Inquirer has very thoughtfully given him the present of a profile , including comments from Gardner Dozois, David Hartwell, Josh Lukin, Jacob McMurray, Gregory Frost, and others. The article even included a quote from Philip K. Dick that I don't remember encountering before. Dick reportedly called Dhalgren "a terrible book [that] should have been marketed as trash." Gave me a good chuckle, that did. I should also note that I discovered the profile via a particularly excellent collection of links posted by Ron Silliman.

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted: "Phil and Jack" , about the often-overlooked connections between Philip K. Dick and Jack Spicer. I wrote it a few months ago, but various factors out of just about anyone's control caused its publication to be delayed (it's surprisingly difficult to get long lines of poetry to wrap and indent in some types of HTML!). The column's a little bit scattershot, but that felt appropriate. And let me just say again that if you like poetry and haven't taken a look at My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer , you really owe it to yourself to do so. It's one of my favorite books of recent years.

The Jonathan Lethem/Philip K. Dick event at Cooper Union was a real delight. It began with Max Rudin , publisher of the Library of America , announcing that a second volume of PKD's novels will be released from the LOA in August 2008, also edited by Lethem. He rattled off the titles of the five novels quite quickly, but -- assuming I heard him correctly and nobody involved with the book changes their mind between now and then -- the included novels will be: Martian Time-Slip Dr. Bloodmoney Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said A Scanner Darkly Now Wait for Last Year Lethem then read some excerpts from his introduction to the selected stories collection from a few years ago (which, Lethem informed us, would not be released in paperback because the paperback rights to the stories are owned by somebody else) and the whole of his own story "Phil in the Marketplace" . Lethem then answered a number of questions from the audience. I took some notes, but missed as much as I got...

Jonathan Lethem is going to be at Cooper Union on Thursday night, and according to Galleycat he will be revealing the contents of the second Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick's novels. I'm going to try to be there, and will report as much as I can back here. For those of you in the NYC area, here's the info (from the Cooper Union website ): Jonathan Lethem: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s Lecture and book signing Thursday, September 27, 6:30 pm The Great Hall 7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue Free Acclaimed writer Jonathan Lethem is the editor of a selection of novels written by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick from the 1960s. Dick left behind more than 160 short stories and novels when he died in 1982. Many of his tales have become successful films, such as Blade Runner and Minority Report . Lethem bundled four of Dick's novels into one book to give a new generation the opportunity to discover Dick's futuristic visions. Jonathan Le...

On December 18, Warner Home Video will release the long-fabled full director's cut of Blade Runner in three different packages: a 2-disc basic edition, a 4-disc edition with all previously-released versions of the film and tons of extras, and a 5-disc edition that includes the original "workprint" version. I first saw the movie in my cousin's apartment in Chicago when I was probably much too young to be watching such things, but what are older relatives for if not to corrupt the minds of children? I watched it again after discovering Philip K. Dick , because for a time the only easily-attainable PKD novel was the movie tie-in version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , and at first it caused me to be angry with the film for having so little to do with the book, but soon enough I thought of them as the very separate entities that they are. I think I saw the first "director's cut" when it was released to theatres in 1992, and I know I later saw i...

Roberto Bolaño, from Distant Star : Bibiano's investigations in the United States were not, however, limited to the world of board games. I heard from a friend (though I don't know if the story is true) that Bibiano contacted a member of the Philip K. Dick Society in Glen Ellen, California, who was, for want of a better expression, a collector of literary curiosities. Apparently Bibiano entered into correspondence with this individual, who specialized in "secret messages in literature, painting, theatre, and cinema," and told him the story of Carlos Wieder. ... He had a wide range of friends: detectives, activists fighting for the rights of minority groups, feminists marooned in west coast motels, directors and producers who would never get a film off the ground and led lives as reckless and solitary as his own. The members of the Philip K. Dick Society, enthusiastic but discreet people as a rule, regarded him as a madman, but harmless and basically a good guy, a...