Philip K. Dick alive and well at the library
Posted on Sun, Nov. 26, 2006 Philip K. Dick alive and well at the library JONATHAN SABIN Special to The Herald You may have missed one of the strangest stories of 2006: Science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's head went missing. Resting quietly in a carry-on bag, it was left behind in a plane's overhead luggage compartment - and 10 months later, the airline still hasn't located it. (I HATE it when that happens!) Now lest you get nervous about the possibility of making a grotesque find the next time you travel by air, rest assured that it was a fully functional ANDROID head that disappeared, and though its creator designed it to look exactly like Mr. Dick, it was not the actual head that once adorned the shoulders of the late author! Dick himself would probably be rather amused by the affair, as his writing tended to lean toward descriptions of a dystopian future. Are you familiar with his work? It is likely that you are without even realizing it, as a number of his novels were adapted to the silver screen. The 1982 cult-classic "Blade Runner" starring Harrison Ford was based upon Dick's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Set in Los Angeles in 2019, manufactured humans called "replicants" perform the tasks that are too dirty or dangerous for people to do. Some of them have escaped, and it is the job of "Blade Runners" to hunt them down and "retire" them. "Total Recall," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, is the story of a man who wants the vacation adventure of a lifetime - on Mars - but cannot afford the trip. He does, however, have enough to cover the cost of an "implanted memory." Things go awry during the implantation process, when it's discovered that he had actually been a spy on Mars whose memories of those events had been erased. The film is based upon Dick's short story, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," which can be found in the book, "Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick." Despite the fact that Dick passed away over 24 years ago, there is still some "new" work for his fans to look forward to. He wrote, but never published, "Voices from the Street" in 1952; it is set to hit the shelves in the next few months. Jonathan Sabin is the Information Coordinator for the Manatee County Public Library System.

Voices From the Street From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Voices From The Street is an early novel by the late science fiction author Philip K Dick, written around 1952-53. Unpublished at the time, it is scheduled to be released on January 23, 2007 by Tor Books (ISBN 0-7653-1692-7). As with many of his early books which were considered unsuitable for publication when they were first submitted as manuscripts, this was not a science fiction book at all, but rather a work of straight literary fiction. The manuscript was 547 pages in length. There is some speculation that the unplesantly-described marriage in the manuscript may be an attempt by Phil to sort out his own faltering second marriage to Kleo Apostolides, 1950-1958. Plot According to Lawrence Sutin's book, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, (Published 1989) the plot was as follows: "A young man, struggling with an unsatisfying job and a dreary marriage, falls into total despair when the supposed ideals of both politics and religion fail him...Jim Fergesson, the...owner of Modern TV Sales and Service, has a paternal, quarrelsome relationship with salesman Stuart Hadley, a would-be dandy in his mid-twenties who is, for all his pretensions, a lost and frightened soul whom Fergesson nicknames "Stumblebum." Hadley's wife, Ellen, with whom he has a son, bores him; once he has even struck her. Hadley adores his beautiful older sister Sally, who would protect him from the world if she could" (Phil's own idealized representation of his deceased sister Jane figures in this portrait) "His friends the Golds, a Jewish socialist couple, disgust him (Despite himself) with their victimlike ways. Hadley is drawn to strong, extreme types like Marsha Frazier, the tall, gaunt editor of the fascist literary quarterly Succubus, and Theodore Beckheim, the charismatic black preacher who heads the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus. Hadley has a bitter affair with Marsha, who resembles mother Dorothy in physique and forceful temperament." Eventually, "Fergesson fires Hadley when he wanders off on an identity quest once too often. This spurs a drunken spree (likely influenced by the "Nighttown" sequence in Joyce's Ulysses) and then disaster. Trivia Fergesson appeared briefly in Phil's previous novel, Gather Yourselves Together. Fergesson appears again in Phil's much-later post-apocalyptic Science Fiction novel, Dr. Bloodmoney (1964). Stuart Hadley also returns in Dr. Bloodmoney, rather inexplicably as a black man. (He was caucasian in Voices from the Street) Stuart Hadley also shows up in Phil's potboiler science fiction novel, The Crack in Space. (1966) In this novel, he is once again caucasian, and he works for Darius Pethel, who is essentially the same character as Jim Fergesson, only with a different name. While Voices From The Street is definitely a sequel or spinoff to Gather Yourselves Together, neither Dr. Bloodmoney nor The Crack In Space could really be considered sequels, since they are mutually exclusive, and the characters make no references to incidents that took place in either Gather Yourselves Together or Voices From The Street. This is more likely a case of an author re-using some unpublished characters he liked and knew well, rather than a linear continuation of their life stories. Some have suspected that these various Hadleys and Fergessons are alternate world versions of each other, which would tend to explain their lack of memory of other incidents as well as Stuart's abrupt race-changes, but there is no indication in any of the novels that this was Phil's intention, and in the case of Bloodmoney in specific, Phil appears to be attempting to be topical by having a sympathetic black character in the book, as was trendy at the time.