Philip K Dick is Dead, Alas – Michael Bishop (1987)
It is 1982. The United States has a permanent Moonbase. Richard M. Nixon is in the fourth term of the “imperial presidency.” And an eccentric novelist named Philip K. Dick has just died in California.
Or has he? Psychiatrist Lia Pickford, M.D., is nonplussed when Dick walks into her office in small-town Georgia, with a cab idling outside, to ask for help. And Cal Pickford, a longtime Dick fan stunned by the news of his hero’s death, is electrified when his wife tells him of the visit.
So begins a sequence of events involving Cal in the repressive Nixon regime, the affairs of an aging movie queen, a hip but frightened Vietnamese immigrant and an old black man who works as a groom–all leading up to a fateful confrontation between Dick, Cal, and Nixon himself on the moon.
Blurb from the 1988 Grafton edition
Michael Bishop’s tribute to Philip K Dick is a marvellous if less frenetic pastiche of Dick’s work, rich in irony and sly humour. Rather as Dick did in VALIS, with a late post modern twist, real people appear, albeit in a dystopian parallel universe of America in the Nineteen Eighties.
In VALIS of course, Dick included fictionalised versions of people such as his friend KW Jeter and David Bowie, disguised through the medium of fictional names, but it was a conceit waiting to be discovered, much like Easter eggs in video games, given that the narrator of VALIS is Dick himself, hidden behind the name Horselover Fat (Philip in Greek is Lover of horses. Dick is German for Fat).
Here, the book begins with Dick’s death, and his resurrection as a ghost, on a mission to gather a team to alter Earth’s reality to one which provides a better level of happiness to everyone.
Cal Pickford is an ex cowboy (a horse lover in fact), now employed in the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium. The shop is visited by a woman Cal is nervous about, who purchases two genetically modified Russian guinea pigs, known as Brezhnev Bears.
Meanwhile, his wife Lia is visited by the temporarily corporeal Philip K Dick who can not for the moment, remember who he is.
In this alternative US, Richard Nixon has stayed in power for four terms running an authoritarian regime. Black people have for the most part been repatriated to Africa, and non-whites and dissidents are subject to cultural programming under the Americulturation process.
Cal has reason to be nervous, as he is a fan of the late Philip K Dick, and has a collection of his banned titles locked away in his house, possession of which is a felony.
Bishop includes Dick’s semi-regular trope of a domineering and/or psychotic woman, here in the form of ex film star Grace Rinehart, now the powerful wife of a senator, dedicated to the implementation of Nixon’s authoritarian policies.
To add to the VALIS ‘Horselover’ connection, we also have the character of Kenneth ‘Horsy’ Stout, a black dwarf working in a stables who gets ‘possessed’ by the spirit of Dick and transported to the moon. ‘Stout’ is another word for ‘Fat’ and there is the initial K in the first name.
Written not too many years after Dick’s actual death, this is a warm, clever and often funny tribute to his life and legacy, although disturbingly Bishop’s US dystopia is not a million miles from our US of 2020.
Recommended
We Can Build You – Philip K Dick (1972)
It was as good as a real Abe Lincoln…
Or as bad, if you looked at it that way. Maybe going into simulacra production wasn’t the obvious step for a firm hitherto devoted to the manufacture of electronic organs, but the organs weren’t selling as well as they used to. It was a creative leap, admittedly: a creative leap suggested by Pris Frauenzimmer, and Pris had been a schizophrenic — but that didn’t mean the simulacra was a bad idea.
It just meant a takeover bid by a millionaire huckster, a project to colonise the Moon with fake people to keep up real estate values — and either madness or love for Louis Rosen. Even the Federal Bureau of Mental Health couldn’t tell which…
Blurb from the 1988 Grafton Edition.
Although published later than ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, the manuscript was written in 1962 and can easily be seen as preparatory sketches for DADOES. We have discussion of the mood organ for one thing, and then there are the androids themselves.
We follow the narrative through the eyes of Louis Rosen, a partner in a firm that manufactures electric organs and spinet pianos.
Louis is in love with his partner’s daughter Pris, a highly talented and beautiful young woman, but one who seems unable to return his love as she is schizophrenic, only recently released from a psychiatric facility. She is however highly intelligent and instrumental in creating the first item in a new line for the company, animated Civil War politicians.
Dick claimed one of his influences to have been AE van Vogt, and one thing they both employed was an occasional healthy disrespect for practical considerations and unstretched credulity, but somehow with both of them, it never seemed to matter.
Here, for instance, within the context and reality of the novel, it seems perfectly feasible that a small team in an electric organ factory should be able to create a mechanical man who could not only sail through the Turing test but pass easily in the world as a living breathing man.
I am also wondering if ‘electric organs’ was meant to inject some metaphorical humour.
Their first prototype is Civil War politician Edwin M Stanton.
Pris, a functioning schizophrenic, is fixated on the millionaire businessman Sam K Barrows, having already approached him for a job and been turned down. She believes that with Barrows’ backing, the simulacra can be a huge success. One concept that foreshadows Martian Time Slip is that Artificial families could be created as fake Moon and Mars Colonists to help ‘real’ humans settle into life on an extraterrestrial colony.
The company then embark on building an Abraham Lincoln who, in one of the central ironies of the book, exhibits more human empathy than its designer.
It’s a novel of two halves and one in which Dick attempted a hybrid of a mainstream and SF novel.
The second half of the novel details the breakdown of the narrator into schizophrenia and his treatment at the Kasanin Mental Health clinic, where he experiences a subjective reality of a lifetime married to Pris.
The SF elements are, as has been pointed out, mere devices to highlight the lack of humanity in some of the other characters.
Fakes and masks abound. Sam Barrows, whose public face is that of an altruistic social hero, is a ruthless businessman and slum landlord.
Pris, having defected to Sam Barrows, adopts the new name of Pristine Womankind and appears in society magazines and newspapers at prestigious events, playing the role of what we would term today as ‘a celebrity’.
There are the simulacra themselves, which are often Dick’s most obvious fakes. Interestingly, Dick’s choices of subjects are interesting since Stanton was known to be excessively paranoid and Lincoln, so it suggested, was himself schizophrenic.
It is an underrated novel, and one which is recommended for those who wish to study the evolution of Dick’s work
Death Robots From Mars 
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