The Shifting Realities of Phillip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings

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. (Feb.)