1979 Philip K. Dick interview with Charles Platt (Santa Ana, California)

SFFaudio Online Audio

This essential interview with Philip K. Dick, conducted by Charles Platt and recorded in 1979 in Santa Ana, California, is sure to be immensely important for Dick scholars. It was recorded for Platt’s book Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction.

Here’s the video converted back to audio, |MP3| and although it isn’t huffduffable, it is downloadable.

Notes:
-Dick was “plenty peculiar” because he read books
-he wasn’t gay despite his hanging around with gay friends
-Quakers were about the only group in the world Dick didn’t have some sort of grievance against
-Dick claims to have been kicked out of university for failing mandatory ROTC training
-Dick read The World Of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt and found in it great inspiration for his ideas about the perception of reality and reality itself
-Dick perceived his high school geometry teacher as a mechanism
Roog and other “interior projection stories”
-Dick’s fiction can be incomprehensible if you do not accept his premise (namely that “each of us lives in a unique world.”)
Martian Time Slip.
-When Dick went to a psychotherapist he was told he was an alcoholic (despite his being a teetotaler)
-“attack therapy”
-totalitarian communities
-why Dick writes about anti-heroes
-paranoia
-“I am inevitably persuaded by every argument that is brought to bare”
-private worlds
The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch
Time Out Of Joint
-artificial memories / false memories
-the influence of drugs on Dick’s writing was only in the output (using amphetamines he was completing 60 finished pages per day)
-Dick’s one real acid trip
A Scanner Darkly
-cats and cat curiosity
-Carl Jung and “the collective unconscious”
-John Belushi (on Saturday Night Live)
-WWI and the battle of The Marne
-Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky
-WWI and the battle of The Marne
-Dick’s father fought in WWI (in the 5th Marines) and told Philip the stories about it
All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
-“the god of this world is evil”
Maze Of Death
Ubik
Eye In The Sky
-WWII
-something is terrible is wrong (when everyone cheers a burning man)
-empathy for animals (human and rodent)
-the killing of a rat (haunted Dick)
-Buddha
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
-lambs and sheep
Valis (his then latest novel)
-standing on the shoulders of giants
-disorder (evil) -> order (benign)
-Dick claims to have been eccentric but not insane
-“it fired my agent, it fired my publisher” (it being the spirit that was possessing him)
-Dick’s letter to the Roman Catholic Church (about the miracle that occurred)
-conspiracies
-the Cumaean Sibyl informed Dick that the American Republic is in danger of turning into the American Empire (in 1974)
-PKD on censorship (he’s against it, unless you aren’t)
-the War Of The Spanish Lowlands
-Congressman Charles E. Wiggins got letters from Dick (written while he was possessed by the spirit of the Cumaean Sibyl)
-the Nixon tape transcripts were forgeries (according to Dick’s Cumaean Sibyl)
-the Paul Williams article in Rolling Stone on Dick
-Dick’s tutelary spirit promised to return Dick to a garden upon his deathbed
Diana
-Norman Spinrad
-“I’m in the Portuguese States Of America”
-a Chinese finger trap
We Can Build You
-Platt: “Do you recognize the possibility that you were talking to yourself?” Dick: “Yes.”
-multiple personalities
-Archimedes principle
Faith Of Our Fathers
-Ursula K. Le Guin thought Dick was crazy
-pre-socratic philosophy

Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction

[via SFSignal.com and youtubemp3.tv]

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Planet Savers by Marion Zimmer Bradley

SFFaudio Online Audio

LibriVoxMarion Zimmer Bradley is best known as the author of The Mists Of Avalon, but her most long running series is set not in a fantasy middle ages of Earth, but rather on a far future Earth colony called Darkover. There are more than 40 books in the Darkover series. We have the very first one now available, thanks to LibriVox.org and the laudable narrator Mark Douglas Nelson!

The story’s pretty cool too, it’s told in first person by Dr. Jay Allison, an amnesiac. Allison shortly discovers that he is the only doctor on the planet qualified to solve the coming medical crisis, a “48-year fever” that’s a planetary pandemic that recurs at 48 year intervals. Making things even more difficult, we soon discover that his amnesia, is actually being caused by his multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder).

The Planet Savers was first published as a “short novel” in a 1958 issue of Amazing Science Fiction magazine. In 1962 it became immortalized as one half of one of the famed Ace Doubles series (# F-153):

ACE DOUBLE (F-153) The Planet Savers by Marrion Zimmer Bradley

LIBRIVOX - The Planet Savers by Marion Zimmer BradleyThe Planet Savers
By Marion Zimmer Bradley; Read by Mark Douglas Nelson
4 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 3 Hours 11 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 28, 2010
The Terran colony on the planet Darkover faces imminent destruction by a plague of the deadly Trailmen’s Fever. The only hope is to develop a serum in time, but this requires the cooperation of the elusive native Trailmen, the brilliant parasitologist Dr. Jay Allison, and his split personality. First published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, November 1958.

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/4246

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3|

Here is a map of the planet Darkover (created for Wikipedia by David Speakman):

Map Of Darkover

[Thanks also to Betty M. and Diana Majlinger]

Posted by Jesse Willis