Though he's thought of as a Bay Area writer, Philip K. Dick spent 10 happy and productive — and sometimes difficult and hallucinatory — years in famously conservative Orange County. What happened to him in the O.C.?
This new LA Times story, by yours truly, traces this strange and contradictory period in the writer's life, which included his visitation by God and his writing of VALIS and Timothy Archer. (Any moment now, the first installment of a director's cut of the story will be posted on the Hero Complex blog.)
Dick will also FINALLY get an American festival devoted to his life and work, sometime this summer — date still TBD — in Colorado, where the author is buried. (Dick died in 1982, right before Blade Runner came out, while living in Santa Ana.) David Gill writes about the festival and its importance on his Total Dick-Head blog.
Here's what he told io9: "While there have been a couple conferences dedicated to Philip K Dick, they have been mostly academic in nature, and all have taken palace on the far side of the Atlantic. This year's Philip K Dick festival is being organized by David Hyde, aka Lord Running Clam (and if you recognize the reference you should attend) who has written and self-published a very helpful guide to Dick's work, Pink Beam. While this event will provide a forum for PKD scholars like myself to give lectures and so forth, the festival is designed for Dick's broader fanbase rather than just the ones that have read the hyperbolic studies of Dick's oeuvre. This three-day festival offers a unique chance to meet a bunch of Dick-heads..."