The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

As you may remember from our interview with Erik Davis, I’m a pretty big fan of Phillip K Dick. I find his dark futuristic renderings a kind of fictional re-imaging of Alvin Toffler’s Futureshock, only just as prophetic.

One of the most fascinating aspects to Dick’s life, is the ‘Pink Laser incident’, in which he had some kind of divine revelation and/or a breakdown. The result of this experience, was his ‘Exegesis’.

The Exegesis has only been available before in fragmented portions, but luckily for us, it’s coming out later this year as a thousand-page book:

Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick’s brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called “2-3-74,” a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe “transformed into information.” In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick’s life and work.

I can guarantee you we will be getting our grubby SittingNow mits on this as soon as it is available. I can only begin to imagine the playful madness, and sparks of genius within.

Ken Eakins