Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #308489 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01-30
• Released on: 1996-01-30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.02" h x .84" w x 5.23" l, .75 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Amazon.com
A collection of largely unpublished or out-of-print essays, journals, speeches, and interviews on issues from the merging of physics and metaphysics to the potential influences and consequences of virtual reality by the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. Non-fiction.

From Publishers Weekly
In this posthumous collection of adventurous essays, journal excerpts, autobiographical sketches, plot scenarios and interviews, science fiction writer Dick (1928-82) ruminates on parallel universes, the Jungian connective principle of synchronicity (meaningful coincidence), mind as energy field, his LSD trips, the I Ching, telepathy and "fake realities" manufactured by the mass media. Dick, who in one piece describes himself as a "pre-schizophrenic personality," plunges readers into altered states of consciousness. He claims, for example, to have retrieved buried memories of alternate realities; in another piece, he recalls having been a secret Christian in ancient Rome, awaiting Christ's return from the dead. Sutin, Dick's biographer, in his useful introductory essay, interprets Dick as a philosophical and spiritual thinker with affinities to the Gnostics of the early Christian era. Included are two completed chapters of a proposed sequel to his novel The Man in the High Castle; they conjure a Nazi-controlled post-WWII world in which Hermann Goring runs a Luftwaffe base in Florida in 1956.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Twelve years after his death, Dick and his oeuvre--much of which went out of print while he was alive--are enjoying remarkable critical acclaim. Examples of Dick's newly elevated status include many movies based on his stories (most recently, Total Recall), a front-page feature in the New York Times Book Review, and new editions of his more than 50 books. Sutin, Dick's biographer (Divine Invasions[1991]), taps his previously unpublished nonfiction to afford a closer look inside the far-reaching mind of the ingenious author. Essays, speeches, interviews, screenplay outlines (including notes for a Mission Impossible episode), two chapters of a sequel to Dick's 1963 Hugo winner, The Man in the High Castle, and selections (focusing on the hallucinatory revelations Dick experienced during two months in 1979) from Dick's voluminous and mind-boggling journal, Exegesis, all appear. Even in writings never intended for publication, Dick's uniquely witty style and phenomenal range of ideas demonstrate why his renewed popularity is entirely justified. Carl Hays