P.K.D. X 2

Neon Memes • Recently, my reading included not one biography of science fictionist Philip K. Dick but two: Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions and Emmanuel Carrère's I Am Alive and You Are Dead. Dick deserves such attention. Before his untimely death in 1982, he wrote such warped, visionary novels as The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Posthumously, Dick's reputation as a mad genius of American letters has bloomed almost beyond belief―within the past year or so, for instance, the prestigious Library of America has issued twin omnibuses of his work. Sutin's bio, which dates from 1989, does yeoman service in relating Dick's strange, turbulent life. Carrère's 1993 effort? No. The second paragraph of its first chapter sets the bio's analytical base line by describing Dick's father as "wearing a fedora, the kind later made famous by Treasury agents in films like The Untouchables"―revealing the author as one of those glib Frenchmen whose perceptions of American life derive solely from American pop culture. By the end of I Am Aghast and You Are Dreck, I wanted to smack Carrère hard enough to make his beret spin. ―Bryan A. Hollerbach, Managing Editor