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I came across this in What if Our World is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick a few days ago. It looks like he was quite successful in a unintentional and sometimes unfortunate way at magical narratives. (p.46-53)
Dick: So evidently, you know, there’s some interaction between my actual life and my characters but what’s causing this effect I don’t know. I mean, I’ve actually read books of mine where I could not tell, literally could not tell, if the women were based on women I had known, or – what the sequence was. I mean, reading one book and there seemed to be a description of one of my wives in there, and, uh, down to the length of hair, and verbal mannerisms and kinetic build, you know, body build, the type of body.
And it went on and on and on and I thought, I certainly used an awful lot of that particular wife in this book and discovered that I’d written the book five years before I met her. Which is really scary. I mean, that’s super scary, because when I met her I didn’t remember, it’d been five years since I’d written the book. So I didn’t make the connection, and then the book – it took a long time for the book to get published and when it finally got published and comes out and I read it and I think, golly, that’s a description of this particular woman, and then I discovered, looking through my files, I wrote the book before I met this particular woman. I
n fact, there was one, one book that I did that was just incredible. I do not understand this at all. Uh, I described this girl, I gave her age, her name, her hair colour, her job, the name of her husband, and two months later I met –
(tape ends)
....
Dick: The same age, the same name. She had the same occupation.
Lee: As in the book?
Dick: As in the book I had written but had not even done the final draft on. I had written the book and put the manuscript away. And, uh, it was, the thing, was incredibly strange, that is simply unbelievable – it cannot be, but it is – is that in the novel, the woman appears to be doing something illegal and then finally we discover that she is a police informant. I met this girl, same name, same age, boyfriend the same name, and she appeared to be a drug dealer. And after I had known her for about a year – just pure accidental circumstances – uh, she had to admit to me that she was a police informant. That’s exactly what the girl in the book turns out to be, a police informant. Now I could have gone back to my own book and looked it up and found out this girl was a police informant – if I just saw, you know, the parallel with the book, but I had forgotten.
And only when I finally went to do the final draft did I notice that it was the same name, the boyfriend – in the book it’s a marriage, it’s the husband – has that name. But in real life it was the boyfriend. The boyfriend is the same name. And the age of the woman is the same. Details – and detail after detail is the same. In fact, I’ve even been-
Lee: But there must be some term, you know, there’s precog-
Dick: That’s the term, yeah-
Lee: Remembering your-
Dick: Precognition, yeah. That I’ve been accused of actually showing precognition. Uh, for instance, I had one book where I described, that I wrote in the 60s- where it talks about, you know, Nixon being president of the United States and everything like that. Of course, there were ones where I was completely messed up, I even had the FBI and stuff like, I tried all the different combinations- but, uh, I do sometimes describe characters that I have yet to meet.
And, I, you know, I now no longer tell whether the characters that I have written about are based on people I have know, or whether it works the other way, or how it works, but there is some connection, some essential connection between my characters and actual people. |
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