Often, people claim to remember past lives; Philip K. Dick once told an audience of admirers in France, where he was considered a literary genius, "I claim to remember a
different, very different present life." The notion that he lived two separate and simultaneous existences, one conscious, the other glimpsed in moments of disorienting revelation akin to LSD flashbacks, was only one of many delusions that beset him in his relatively short, tortuous life. His first novel was called Time Out of Joint, and its title, in retrospect, seems self-
fulfilling
Like J.G. Ballard's, Dick's reputation rests on the creation of dystopian fictions that foresaw a world something like the one we now live in, a world of conspiracy theories, clones, untrammelled consumerism, viral terrorism and virtual reality. His most widely known story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, crossed into the mainstream via Hollywood, where it was retitled as Blade Runner by director Ridley Scott and given a happy ending wherein Harrison Ford, a surviving human, rides off into the nuclear sunset with his android lover.
When the movie money started rolling in, Dick, who had survived four marriages and a prolonged bout of amphetamine psychosis, was almost at the end of his tether. He emerged from one of his many spells in rehab, convinced that a spirit guide was responsible for his late financial good fortune, and began giving the money away to Christian-run charities.
Like L. Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction writer who founded the Church of Scientology, Dick's life sometimes seemed weirder even than his fictions, while his obsessions and neuroses found their way into stories that redefined the genre.
Emmanuel Carrere has written what he calls "a very peculiar book, a kind of imaginative biography which purports to depict the life of Philip K Dick from the inside." Sometimes, it appears almost novelistic in its rendering of Dick's thoughts, its re-creation of his love affairs and its litany of anecdotes concerning his pharmaceutically fuelled lifestyle in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
One chapter, entitled "Freaks," is made up of such recollections, each one beginning with the phrase, "Another time...," as in, "Another time, someone got the idea of painting all the windows in Phil's house black," or "Another time, a girl who had lived with them for a week went into a coma during a bad acid trip."
The effect here is conversational, almost throwaway, intentionally so, though to what end I am not altogether sure. Perhaps Carrere wants us to experience the myth of Philip K. Dick, the terminal stoner, the way he experienced it, in a wealth of remembered anecdotes, hazy and cumulative.
More ominously, there is nothing here in the way of an index or footnotes, none of the usual evidence of deep research that gives a biography the solid stamp of authority. And though Dick was the subject of several marathon interview sessions, most notably by Rolling Stone magazine journalist Paul Williams, and, towards the end of his life, by science-fiction critic Charles Platt, we seldom hear his voice or see his words appear directly on the page.
For all that, though, I Am Alive and You Are Dead is an intriguing read, well-paced and packed with evidence of Dick's eccentricity, which was of the obsessive and neurotic kind and must have made him impossible to be around for any length of time.
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