Above: PKD with Ridley Scott after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was optioned for Blade Runner (via Tim Powers)
Author Philip K. Dick was an enormous influence on popular culture, including the evolution of virtual worlds/the Metaverse — both for writing the book that inspired Blade Runner and stories like "The Trouble With Bubbles", which Matt Ball credits (among many) for helping inspire the concept. One of my own favorite PKD novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), has a depiction of a drug-induced virtual world that eerily resembles the avatar-based Malibu that Second Life eventually became.
All that said, here's a fascinating online conversation going on now that fellow PKD admirers should check out:
Philip K. Dick, The Last Ten Years: A Conversation Between a Dark-Haired Girl and Tim Powers
It's a public conversation thread on The WELL, the pioneering online community, with participation by PKD friend and acclaimed sci-fi author Tim Powers, along with commentary by literary giant Jonathan Lethem, who edited the Library of America's Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.
Most specially, they're joined by Linda Castellani (nee Levy), one of Philip Dick's "Dark-Haired Girl" muses. The memories they share of PKD are hilarious and moving, but also, disturbing and sad, as the author struggled (and sometimes lashed out) amidst mental torments, poverty, and drug abuse, just before the cusp of his breakthrough with Blade Runner.
You can read and participate in the whole thread here, and I've excerpted some key passages below. First, from Lethem, commenting on these bruising memories of PKD:
At a moment where readers of this thread may be somewhat stunned into silence by the revelations about "our hero", I'll say that I'm thinking a lot about this stuff in light of my current renewed researches on PKD before the Festival this coming weekend, where I'll try to put some of this in the context of his writing life. I want to say something that I hope will not seem flippant or odd: The cruelty and coldness you experienced from Dick may not have been so much a bug as a feature.
That's to say, the argument about android v. machine in him was also taking place in his life, in his body, in his own choices and responses. Even if he failed to accept this and instead projected it onto others — and so often, and tragically, he projected it onto a woman. A dark-haired girl.
So when you say "she was a redhead", what you're saying is that in a very sad way, hair-color was a kind of dumbed-down Voight-Kampf Test he was applying. Without understanding that he was actually looking in a mirror. So, that the coldness he thought he detected in you was a terror-vision of the empathy-devoid android self he most feared in himself. So — perhaps the same thing he processed so powerfully for us in his art (even if processed incompletely, by definition) was inverted into a nightmare in his behavior.
As for those "revelations", Linda shares some of them, such as a time she was driving with the author, who'd already declared his unbridled adoration of her:
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 