(soft music)
The writer, Philip K. Dick,
has left North America only once,
when in 1977, he attended a conference on science fiction
in France that has now become a cult event.
The subject of this speech
is a topic which has been discovered recently
and which may not exist at all.
While the novelist almost never left
his California suburban home,
he invented extraordinary worlds
infused with science, philosophy, and religion.
Since his death in 1982, Philip K. Dick's 45 novels
and 120 short stories earned him a place
beside the greatest writers,
such as Kafka, Orwell, or Asimov.
I may be talking about something that does not exist,
therefore, I'm free to say everything or nothing.
(rock music)
In his novels, Philip K. Dick
blurs the line between reality and imagination,
the present and the future.
The United States must build its strength.
Throughout his books, true visions arise,
ecological disasters, artificial worlds,
global surveillance, destructive or empathetic robots.
Hollywood has embraced his life's work and turned many
of his novels and short stories into films,
such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall.
Philip K. Dick's stories are about us,
about our present and our future.
(typewriter clacking)
(diners chattering)
Like a lot of people, I become a fan
simply by reading one of his books.
You read one of his books,
you had to read all of his books,
so I scoured the used book stores of the Bay Area
and with a great deal of difficulty,
I found or at least most of his novels
and his short story collections.
I read them all and I wrote up a essay
discussing Phil's writing and he called me
out of the blue one day.
I picked up the phone and said,
"Hi, this is Phil Dick."
He told me how much he liked my piece
and I asked him if I could interview him.
So, I went down to Santa Ana, California.
We talked about his writing and we talked about his life,
which was just a wonderful conversation.
(tape squeaking)
I was never convinced that science fiction
was of less value than high literature.
In fact, in high school, I was working on a science fiction
story which I still have, so I was in a curious position.
I had read science fiction since I was 12 years old
and was really addicted to reading it.
I mean, I just loved it and I also was reading
what the Berkeley intellectual community was reading,
which would be Proust for example and Joyce,
so I occupied two worlds right there
which normally did not intersect.
(soft music)
When Phil Dick was writing his work,
science fiction was a very marginalized genre.
People wrote for a penny or two a word.
Phil would've been happy to get two cents a word
for a lot of this fiction that he wrote
in the 1950s and '60s.
It was written on pulp paper,
which was why they call it pulp science fiction,
and it had lurid covers of bug-eyed monsters
or BEMs, as they were called,
attacking beautiful, scantily-clad women,
and this is where Phil found the venue for his thoughts,
for his feelings about the world.
I went for high school to a full-time job
in a record store and a radio shop,
and working six days a week, I didn't get a chance
to do much writing.
I got married when I was 19,
and I suddenly began, I felt science fiction
was very important.
I had a mysterious quality in the universe,
which could be dealt with in science fiction.
(soft music)
I realize now that what I was sensing
was a kind of a metaphysical world, an invisible realm
of things half seen with supernatural powers.
(big band music)
That was Cooper and Reid Record Store,
and he worked there in the early 1950s,
(big band music)
and he froze up.
He had sort of a panic attack or an agoraphobic attack,
and that's what decided him I have to write full time.
That got him out of selling records.
That got him into writing fiction.
It's been a long road,
but science fiction offered me a route
by which I could publish the kind of thing
that I wanted to write.
I was reading Martian Time-Slip the other night.
Now that is exactly what I wanted to write,
the invasion of one person's world
by another person's world.
Phil began writing copious quantities
of science fiction stories,
and he sent them off, and he sent them off
and he got return, return, return, but eventually
one sold, Roog.
I believe that was his first science fiction story
that he sold.
(eerie music)
Roog, my first story, is a perfect example
of what I was trying to do,
and that was Jung's idea, not mine.
I was showing each person with a different world
and the contents of that world consisting,
to a large degree, of material from his own mind
and which he did not recognize as his own mind
coming back and from outside.
Now this is an idea that never left me.
(upbeat music)
Now if you look at Phil Dick's writing,
you see he repeats things from novel after novel,
but he buries them.
Sometimes it's a talking suitcase as a psychiatrist,
sometimes it's a machine you put coins in
that's your psychiatrist.
Sometimes the door gives you rough therapy.
The door refused to open.
It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets.
No more coins, nothing.
Form the drawer beside the sink,
Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife.
With it, he began systematically to unscrew
the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
"I'll sue you!" The door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door,
"but I guess I can live through it."
A lot of his work is really, really funny.
There's some really hilarious things
in various of Philip Dick's novels.
He never tried to write for popularity,
he never tried to write a bestseller of any sort.
He just wanted to write what he wanted to write.
Although he aspired to write literary fiction,
he tried endlessly to write literary fiction,
he wrote 11 literary novels in the 1950s
that were unpublished.
No one would touch them.
When I purchased my first published story,
somebody said to me, "Do you read that kind of stuff?"
And I said, "Madame, I not only read it, I write it!"
And people would say to me,
well, why don't you write something serious?
Why do you write science fiction?
Write something serious.
By that, they meant important.
Nevertheless, I did as well as I could.
I wrote the most profound, the most imaginative novel
I could and just floated it out into the world
and hoped that eventually, it would receive an audience.
Phil wrote 35 novels, 40 novels, something like that.
35 of them are good to excellent.
Five of them are duds.
All right, okay, sure.
That's a pretty good ratio.
Well, they're rioting.
It's barbarism come back again.
If they smash up that infernal gun,
then honor is satisfied and you needn't go.
They won't smash the gun.
(gun banging)
One of the depressing things about cheap science fiction
is it always shows the feature either a dystopia
or an apocalypse or whatever new thing has happened,
you only look at a few people,
the great Big Brother
and the protagonist fighting the enemy.
You never look at common people
and how their lives have changed
but Philip K. Dick was different.
He liked to see how average people,
how their lives would be changed.
Philip K. Dick didn't write horror
as much as he wrote about the creepy sensation
that all certainties stand upon sand.
(eerie music)
Phil Dick was not afraid of exploring his fears.
This was a man who had real fears.
He lived in an American middle-class life,
but we all know that that's no guarantee
against the sensation that there's a monster under the bed,
there's a monster in the closet.
Some of the great science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury,
Stephen King, Isaac Asimov all had this notion,
things are too good.
The worries in my head are as powerful
as any invading army.
How real is that?
I think we have the central question there.
It would explain my sensation of passing my hands
through matter, through the dashboard of my wheel as I did,
that very unpleasant sensation that nothing around me
was substantial, that I inhabited a world of shadows.
(soft guitar music)
(eerie music)
I've always said he wrote like gold,
but unfortunately he lived in just the opposite.
Wanna keep this PG-rated, but his life
was just a mishmash of just,
seemed like one crisis after another.
He had the books to go home to, to write to escape,
which is, I guess, a luxury for most people.
In hindsight now, I could say he really doesn't fit
the American diagnostic criteria
'cause he had a little bit of everything,
certainly had a large, depressive part of him
and then he had the creative side.
At night in his condo writing,
he was in control of his world,
but when he came out of that world
and had to deal with just the mundane catch a bus,
go to a restaurant, those were things he couldn't do.
Definitely an agoraphobic tendency.
He could just stay in his apartment
if he was left alone.
(eerie music)
Welcome to drug.
Hey. -: Asshole.
His apartment was his escape.
That was the last fortress of Phil Dick
and he didn't wanna come out.
(tense music)
He's a person that lives inside his mind.
He's a person who has, over the years,
built up this protection mechanism
because he doesn't necessarily
understand the world outside.
It's again, this person moving away from society,
observing society, not being part of society.
(tense music)
(wings flapping)
He struggled a lot, and yet he produced a lot
during this period of time.
The writing was, really, sustained him.
(typewriter clacking) (tense music)
One of the novels that he wrote very, very quickly,
as far as I understand it,
was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
because he wrote it, again, in this hovel place
at the bottom of his garden,
and in it, he not only downloaded very, very quickly
the idea of the storyline and everything else,
but he also had experiences like,
he did see a huge eye in the sky
when he was walking back one day
and he then put that in his novel.
So literally, he was incorporating his experiences
as they were happening actually into the novel,
(tense music)
and I think this is how Phil wrote things.
It just came to him, and that's why his writing
is so enthralling because you're with him
as he's experiencing and discovering the book
he's writing in front of him.
He would almost imagine the novel
and he didn't know where he was going with the novels.
This is why some of his novels
are very, very confusing.
(tense music)
In the early 1960s, Phil was married to Anne Dick,
and Anne had three daughters from her previous marriage
and the little girl were old enough,
played with Barbie dolls, ad he observed their play
with Barbie dolls, and he used that play with Barbie dolls
to inspire the way that people would play with dolls
in his future world of The Three Stigmata
of Palmer Eldritch.
♪ You make me feel ♪
♪ My Barbie doll is really real ♪
The colonists on Mars used drugs to translate themselves
into a virtual reality of living as dolls,
and was a way that the Martian colonists
escaped form their miserable lives,
by playing at dolls.
♪ Beautiful Barbie, I'll make believe that I am you ♪
(psychedelic music)
We do know that Phil used to take a lot of illicit drugs,
but mostly amphetamines.
Now I believe the concoction of drugs he was taking
and the medication he was taking and the vitamin C
that he was taking all facilitated the opening of his mind
to see the world behind the world.
I never thought of him
in terms of whether there was some brain damage.
I just didn't see any of the clues
that I normally look for.
Phil got there all on his own.
He didn't need LSD to get there.
I was being paid so little per book
that I had to churn out a very large number of books.
I churned out, I think, I published 16 novels in five years
at one point and I had an extremely expensive wife,
extremely expensive children,
and I just wrote like mad, and the only way
that I could write that much was to take amphetamines,
and these were prescribed for me.
I did 60 finished pages a day.
(upbeat music)
I finally stopped takin' 'em.
This is not something that I used to say in the '60s
when drug taking was more popular.
I used to talk like I was really into acid,
but the fact of the matter is,
I took acid two times.
(men laughing)
Phil was 43 and I was 18, but to me,
he looked like a little lost puppy,
he he pretty much was.
He was broke, on his own,
no really close attachments,
and hundreds of miles from the Bay Area,
where he had expected to spend his whole life.
Phil and I were pretty much stuck together 24 hours a day,
seven days a week and very soon,
stuck together with a baby 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
Frankly, it's really difficult to live with a man
who never leaves the house,
and since he worked alone, as a writer,
he didn't have any contacts at work.
He just sat there at his typewriter.
(whimsical music)
There's just the TV image after all,
the illusion of the media, and behind it,
behind her, another group entirely rules,
a corporate body of some kind,
but who are they and how did they get power?
How long had they had it?
Will we ever know?
(faint speaking) We came so far,
we almost seemed to know what's really going on.
The actuality behind the illusion,
the secrets kept from us all our lives.
He was impossible to live with, but so am I,
so I guess that was a perfect match.
Women were important to Phil in the sense
tha the kept going back to them,
but he kept picking dying women,
very ill women, flawed women.
Classically, we'd call that the rescuer.
The lifeguard is trained to go out
and save the drownding person, but if you resist,
the lifeguard is also trained to hit you
across the jaw and knock you out.
Phil, in some ways, was the lifeguard,
but he hadn't been taught that last step
when the person still pulls you under.
(tense music) (water bubbling)
I wanna put him net to his dad.
Let's see, find a good one.
Just put a beard on Edgar and you have Phil.
He was a Marine in the 5th U.S. Marines,
and he came back and then when I was a little kid,
he used to show me his military equipment,
including his gas mask, and his eyes would disappear
and his face would disappear and he would tell me
about the battle of the mind,
the horrors that he went through.
He would tell me about men with their guts blown out,
and he was telling a little four-year-old child
what it was like to fight in World War I.
(heavy breathing) (eerie music)
But in the brief instant,
Ted Walton's face lost all familiarity.
Something alien and cold gleamed out,
a twisting, wriggling mass.
The eyes blurred and receded as an archaic sheen
filmed over them.
The ordinary look of a tired,
middle-aged husband was gone.
Phil and I both wanted to disconnect from our old friends
and from our families.
There was too much dysfunctionality
in these people who were close to us
and in particular, Phil had a problem with his mother
that when back to early childhood.
In some sense, he felt that she blamed him
for the death of his twin sister.
Phil, throughout his life,
felt that he was only half created in the sense
that a part of him had died
and that part of him had already been buried
and was already in the grave.
Now what is intriguing about this
is that he would've known that there was a grave
on a hillside in Colorado waiting for his name
because the original grave that Jane was buried in
in 1929 actually had her name on it,
and underneath, it was waiting for Phil's name,
and ultimately, when Phil died,
he was buried with his sister.
It's a common theme in my writing
that a dark-haired girl shows up at the door
of the protagonist and tells him
that his world is delusional,
that there is something false about it.
Well, this did finally happen to me.
I even knew that her hair would be black.
I had an actual complete sense of what she would look like
and what she would say.
I saw a little hard, heart-shaped face
with a widow's crown, black hair, and due to her odd makeup,
eyes outlined in black, a harlequin effect
and almost purple lipstick.
The whole color scheme made her appear unreal and doll-like,
lost somewhere back behind the mask
which she had created out of her face.
In his mind's eye, she was the dark-haired girl,
and Phil, throughout his life, had the search
for what he called the dark-haired girl,
and if you look at the women in his life,
they were a very much of a similar type,
and this is the type that he imagined Jane would have been,
so he was searching for Jane all his life.
He was searching for this lost sister,
this emptiness in his life,
and it must have made him feel instinctively lonely.
In some novels, she's Rachael,
in other novels, she has other names,
but she's the same pattern, the same template,
the same woman.
(crow cawing)
My sister is everything to me.
I'm damned always to be separated from her,
and with her in an oscillation.
I have her in me and often outside me,
but I have lost her.
She did appear.
She was a total stranger,
and she did inform me of this fact,
that some of my fictional works were,
in a literal sense, true.
A couple of times, I pushed him on family issues,
his growing up, childhood.
I got some stuff.
His mother was a Communist.
They lived in Berkeley, and if you reached a point,
it just, he stopped, and it was like no,
I'm not gonna talk anymore, and it was very clear.
He had some very strong boundaries in some areas,
and then in some others, he was just all over the place
kind of loose like a Rubik's Cube in a way.
You just keep flipping up new sides.
(eerie music)
We area living in a computer programed reality,
and the only clue we have to it
is when some variable is changed
and some alteration in our reality occurs.
We would have the overwhelming impression
that we were reliving the present.
Time and time again in Phil's writing,
you get this simulacra,
you get somebody discovering that they're a machine,
not knowing that somebody's a machine.
There's a classic sequence in Martian Time-Slip
where one of the characters is talking
to the personnel manager of his mind
that he's working in, and suddenly he realizes
this man could be a machine,
that he could almost see the cogs working.
Now this was based upon an incident in Phil's childhood
when he suddenly thought that one of the teachers
was an automaton.
(tense music)
I was looking at her one day
and she was rattling away in this high-pitched
clackity-clack shrill voice,
and suddenly I had the impression
that she was not a human being,
but a mechanical creature
and that all of a sudden, her had would fall off
and a spring would be visible,
and once the idea got into my mind,
I couldn't get rid of it.
Who are you?
What is the essence of you?
At least a dozen Philip K. Dick novels
dealt with this question of what are the boundaries
of the individual?
Actually, this android has the sequence schemes
and we also have some mechanism
for making the facial expressions,
and well, and then we have a software,
it's a very special software,
that would raise,
indeed, well, to control the lip movement.
What is it to be human?
Is it empathy that makes us human?
And of course, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,
we find that in fact, the people that kill the replicants
are in fact less human than the replicants
in many, many ways
because they don't show empathy.
And his androids, in many ways, had more soul
than some of the humans in his novels.
These androids were not, strictly speaking, mechanical.
Most of them were organic, as in Blade Runner,
which was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
(digital music)
Blade Runner's not about Androids, not at all,
not at all.
It's about us and it's so clever.
Take another look at yourselves as a mankind
and what's the answer?
Who do you think you are and how cute you are
and how lovable and how brilliant?
What's the most ugly part of your body?
It's the brain.
In our heads, that's where we are, human.
Heart, yes, okay, heart, okay.
Our stomach?
Yes.
Okay, Dick, yes, Mr. Dick, okay,
but in the mind, that's where we are,
extremely stupid, we're extremely interesting.
The three-dimensional protected backdrop
was utterly convincing, or was it the projected backdrop?
How could he be sure?
Good God, Grunberg, you realize this may be nothing
but an exhibit, you and everybody else.
Maybe you're not real?
Just pieces of this exhibit.
(thunder rumbling)
The production company brought him up to Los Angeles
and he actually visited the set,
and he was blown away by the set and they showed him
some footage of the film and he said,
"No, this is fantastic
"because they took a slideshow of my brain,"
or words to that effect.
(soft music)
I wonder how success would've been.
It was so close to his stroke
and the opening of Blade Runner.
He was supposed to go in limousine
with Harrison Ford that night.
Talk about poetic justice in a way,
and if he had been the normal writer
seeking fame and fortune, but I don't think that was Phil.
He wrote for, like I said, different reasons,
to balance his life out.
(sighing)
I can only imagine just, had he survived,
how he would have handled fame.
Philip Dick's dystopian worldview of a society
where technology is not positive and not cheerful
can be seen to inspire many films
that have been made since his death.
Blade Runner, which is an official adaptation
of a Philip Dick novel, inspired many other tech noir,
as they're sometimes called, such as The Terminator
or The Matrix in which technology is seen as a dark force,
sometimes hat people have to struggle against,
and many, many Hollywood films have come out
since the 1980s that portray that darker view of technology,
quite different than the cheerful,
upbeat presentation of technology
that we find at the time
that Philip Dick was actually writing.
He was a dissident in the world of techno-utopias.
[Television Announcer] America's first attempt
to launch a satellite, a six-and-a-half inch sphere
weighing just over three pounds was checked out
by scientists and declared ready.
A great wave of advance publicity focused attention
at Cape Canaveral, Florida for the launching
of Test Vehicle Three, a Project Vanguard.
If you look at the popular literature
and the popular television,
you see the triumph of technology celebrated.
Well, Phil had nothing to do with that.
That was not his world.
(rocket rumbling)
(rocket exploding)
Something had gone wrong
with an automatic defense system out in space,
and it was acting to its cycle this way
and no one could halt it, either.
The exact cause is classified,
either the satellite program--
It was war and death, yes, but it was error.
It lacked intent.
He did not feel any hostility from the forces overhead.
They were not vengeful or motivated.
They were empty, hollow, completely cold.
It was not policy, it was breakdown and failure, chance.
(singing in foreign language) That's one small
step for man. (rocket exploding)
(singing in foreign language)
Science fiction was badly named.
It should have been speculative history
because we're constantly obsessed
with how history might've been different
or extending it into the future,
and so it should've been speculations about us,
our great story, how it extends
as a people and as a species or as individuals.
Philip K. Dick was one of the best at this.
He would always explore the alternatives.
What if something was different?
What if the Nazis and Japanese
had won World War II, for example,
in his famous book The Man in the High Castle.
One of Philip Dick's most famous novels,
and certainly in his lifetime, his most successful novel,
was The Man in the High Castle.
(footsteps thudding)
By the year 2014, we're all used to alternate worlds,
alternate stories, alternate histories
in which something happens and then everything changes
and we're living in a different universe.
Well, at the time that he wrote that book
in the early 1960s, this was much rarer.
The period he wrote in from the early '50s to the early '80s
was a great period of American ascendancy in the world.
America seemed unchallenged in terms of world dominance.
If we're going to be true to our destiny
of being the great defender of freedom
in these dangerous time, then the United States
must build its strength.
We are a great country, but I believe
that we can be a greater country.
Philip Dick presented a United States that was defeated,
genuinely defeated and genuinely occupied.
It was not like the usual sort
of occupation fantasies in which there's a resistance,
we're fighting against the evil occupiers,
which is something that we like to think of.
If the Nazis take over, if the Communists take over,
if the robots take over, there's always gonna be somebody
fighting against the power.
In Philip Dick's world, there is no resistance.
Maybe the Goebbels Government
will fall after all
he thought, as he was ushered into the waiting
SS Daimler staff sedan, but what does it matter?
Even if Dr. Goebbels is deposed
and Operation Dandelion is canceled, they will still exist,
the blackshirts, the Partei, the schemes
if not in the Orient, then somewhere else,
on Mars and Venus.
We can only hope and try.
We do not have the ideal world
such as we would like,
where morality is easy because cognition is easy,
where one can do right with no effort
because he can detect the obvious.
(horn music)
He wanted to show that what the Nazis did
in World War II was not unique
and it could happen anywhere at any time,
and more specifically, in the United States
after President Kennedy was assassinated.
At 1:25, the motorcade moves into the downtown area.
Death is six minutes away.
Phil was a very empathic human being,
and unlike most of us, when something bad happened,
he reacted to it very strongly
and he understood the impact with Kennedy's assassination,
with Sadat's assassination,
he recognized that blood would flow.
Antiwar demonstrators protest U.S. involvement
in the Vietnam War
in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations.
Central Park is the starting point
for the parade to the UN building.
The estimated 125,000 men have the marchers,
include students, housewives, beatnik poets,
doctors, businessmen, preachers, priests, and nuns.
(rock music) (artillery shells exploding)
Phil was very much against the actions
in both Korea and Vietnam.
They were called police actions
because they were not declared wars,
but they were wars and they were hell,
and he signed a petition in Ramparts Magazine
promising not to pay any income taxes
till our troops came home from Vietnam,
and that might be why he came to the attention
of certain authorities who did not like him very much.
Anybody like me who grew up
and was part of the Berkeley counterculture
became a marked man during the Nixon administration.
It is impossible to tell how much
of our fears were justified.
What do we need? -: Revolution.
When? -: Now!
Not seeing anything in slogans
an organized parties and beliefs and dying
can be a belief worth dying for in itself.
I thought I was without a creed.
Now I realize I have a very strong creed.
Demonstrators, but however,
they can be expected-- Philip Dick
was not an activist in the sense of someone
who was going out in the street
and demonstrating and protesting.
Philip Dick was very aware of the injustices of America,
but Philip Dick did what he could as writer
writing away in his little room all by himself,
pecking away, writing his novels, writing his stories.
Police once told me that I was a crusader
and they had no use for crusaders,
but unfortunately, they didn't tell me
what I was crusading for.
I was afraid to ask what it was I was a crusader for,
and they told me that if I did not get out of the county,
I would be shot in the back or worse some night,
and I merely took their advice.
I left the United States and went to Canada for a while,
but I never found out what I was crusading for.
It may have had something to do with my writing.
I don't think he was overtly paranoid,
but highly suspicious.
He didn't trust the government.
He had gone through a police raid,
I guess, of the Black Panthers in Oakland
and was walking the far left wing side
during or leading up to the war,
so he had some real concrete reasons
to not be, especially in terms of the government.
Phil and I had a poster at one time
that said just because I'm paranoid
doesn't mean you are not out to get me,
and in a sense, that's quite true.
You just have to read his novels.
It's always somebody trapped
and there's all these machinations going on
that this person is being influenced by,
that it's out of his control.
175-- -: (mumbles) Special force
in there for you. (siren wailing)
My house was broken into, my files were blown open,
my papers were stolen.
I've seen my CIA file, I've seen my FBI file.
Except that in the house,
when I checked the storage drums of the holo-scanners,
I'll pretty well know pretty soon
what everyone in my house is doing
and when they do it and probably even why, myself included.
I will watch all the rooms on a 24-hour basis.
(electric guitar music)
Make sure they don't have a closed-circuit
TV surveillance system.
You'll find cameras are usually located over each entrance.
You'll find them in other areas too,
like where expensive articles are on display.
Phil did seemed to be warning us
through his writing about the control of the state
and how the state is controlling us more and more,
how we are being watched all the time.
Phil was giving warnings.
Now the question is, did Phil know
that he was given warnings though
or was he a form of cipher?
(woman speaks foreign language)
(tense music)
My recent novel was A Scanner Darkly.
A narcotics agent winds up reporting on himself,
turning over information on himself to these higher-ups.
Phil Dick presented a world
in which all authority figures lie to us all the time,
so you see that in novel after novel
and story after story,
and I think he was trying to warn us.
He was sitting away in his little room typing away,
and he was giving us a warning,
he's giving us a sending, he's giving us,
I guess, the equivalent of an I Ching reading
of our future world and saying folks, don't do this.
(bomb exploding)
If Phil Dick were alive and writing today,
I think he'd be appalled at how much
of his dark vision of the future had come true,
what with the surveillance society,
what with the collapse of the ecology.
In The Penultimate Truth, he presents a world
in which humanity is hiding underground.
Humanity has been told that an atomic war has broken out.
People are kept underground to make robots
not as soldiers to fight the war,
which ended after a brief battle,
but actually to have robot servants for the elite
who live above ground in vast, landed estates
because the world is not really polluted and it's a lie.
The big lie is that atomic war has broken out
and that the world's surface is an ash heap
and everyone has to hide and live underground.
Well, you have the big lie of the Iraq War,
you have the big lie of all the lies
that are being poured out constantly by our government
and other governments around the world
down to the present time.
The gravity of this moment
is matched by the gravity of the threat
that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction poses the world.
(tense music)
(helicopter blades whirring)
Some day, he said to himself,
it'll be so hot that nothing
will keep this place from melting.
He recalled the day his LP record collection
had fused together in a lump back around '04
due to a momentary failure
of the building's cooling network.
Now, he owned iron oxide tapes.
They did not melt.
And at the same moment, every parakeet
and Venusian ming bird in the building had dropped dead.
(faint shouting)
You and I can wake up and say wow,
that was a crazy dream or that was a bad dream.
Well, I'm not sure, at times,
Phil separated dreams and dream states from non-dreams,
which would probably scare the hell
out of the average person or you and I.
You're not sure whether you're dreaming or not dreaming.
Look at me, look at me.
(digital beeping)
Positive for Howard Marks.
Mr. Marks, by mandate of the District of Columbia
PreCrime Division, I'm placing you under arrest
for the future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald Dubin
to take place today, April 22nd,
at 0800 hours, four minutes.
No, I didn't do anything!
Sarah! Give the man his hat.
Oh God. -: In Minority Report,
the government finds three precognitive mutants
who get glimpses of violence in the future.
And say this person is going to commit this crime
and off the police go,
and they stop the crime from happening.
Showing seven units in 451, 451,
(mumbles) in progress.
81st and-- Can predictive crime
become as accurate in real life
as Philip K. Dick portrayed it?
14 over 50, just checking on critical location.
There is a program PredPol, predictive policing,
in which cities, police departments,
are analyzing neighborhoods and traffic patterns
for anything that might predict the arrival of crime,
and this has already worked very well in many cities.
They say that social conditions here,
various other factors, mean we should have extra police
in this area this weekend,
and this has been a relative success.
(siren wailing)
When I implemented predictive policing,
for the last 12 weeks now, I've seen a steady decline
in my actual property crime,
so it has demonstrated to me that there is efficacy
in the predictive policing,
and it really is just focusing our enforcement efforts
of all our police offers here assigned at Pacific
to be in those specific areas.
I truly believe this technology
and further technology as it relates to crime reduction
is really the future.
(tense music)
My God, my life,
which is to say my 2-74/3-74 experience is exactly the plot
of any one of my 10 novels or stories,
(horn honking)
even down to fake memories and identity.
I'm a protagonist from one of PKD's books.
Jeez.
Mixture of Imposter, Joint and Maze,
if not Ubik as well.
(tense music)
VALIS was warning us through Phil,
using Phil as a medium by which we could be warned
about the outcomes of what we are now doing,
which is an interesting aside,
which would make him a profit,
specifically, a profit downloading information
from elsewhere to warn humanity of the way
they should not go forward.
Yet the last thing he told me,
this business that the psycho-neutronic gun
was gonna save the world and that the scientists
are all getting together
and they've invited him to Amsterdam.
He was convincing and I thought I bet if I open his bag,
there's a plane ticket in there
and you're going to Amsterdam next week.
(tense music)
People claim to remember past lives.
I claim to remember a different,
very different present life.
I know of no one who has ever made this claim before,
but I rather expect that my experience is not unique.
What perhaps is unique is the fact
that I am willing to talk about it.
(tense music)
Phil was fascinated by the idea of orthogonal time,
in other words, a sort of time
that runs perpendicular.
So, we're on a time and this time
is running perpendicular to ours,
and at some point they intersect.
They overlap just for a moment,
and he's apparently experienced something like that,
a contact with people in a timeline
that was not the same.
They claim to be from our future,
trying to fix something that had happened in their past.
Maybe he was lucid, he was literally lucid
in the sense he was seeing through this reality
into another reality,
and literally, by seeing that other reality,
it may have actually drove him slightly crazy,
but then again, if we were perceiving a world
that he was perceiving, would you not also go,
as we would call it, crazy?
Sometimes I wondered whether he was testing out
a new plot on me or maybe he's really crazy.
I just never quite knew,
so he kept me really on my toes.
At that time, I had no idea what I was seeing.
It resembled nothing that I had ever heard described.
It resembled plasmic energy, it had colors,
it moved fast, it collected, and then dispersed.
Phil became convinced that this voice in his head,
that this manifestation that had been with him
all of his life was eventually to manifest itself
more fully in his life during what he called
his 2-3-74 experiences, where he called it VALIS,
he called it artificial intelligence, he called it Sophia.
He had many terms for it.
In '74, there came upon me,
at the trough of my life, at a point where I saw nothing
but inexplicable suffering, there came to me
the beatific vision which calmed
all my sense of horror at the world,
the divine power that I perceived
as master of this world was either cruel,
wanton, blind, insensible,
destructive, or evil. (phone ringing)
Yeah, I think I got the call in the evening.
I'm thinking around 7:00, eight o'clock at night
and he said he was being interviewed
and his eyes, his vision was failing
and the fellow interviewing him
was saying, "You don't wanna see the truth
"or you don't wanna see this,"
whatever their topic was,
and that's when I said,
"Phil, you wanna see the emergency room
"is what you wanna see."
This is not something to intellectualize.
This is something to deal with in a very real way,
and he swore he'd go.
Tessa witnessed some of the extraordinary experiences
that happened to Phil.
Tessa experienced the radio coming on when it was unplugged.
Now Tessa could have been hallucinating as well,
but then if Tessa and Phil were both hallucinating,
we have a (speaks in foreign language) here.
It was sort of the last bit of evidence
that convinced me that this really was happening.
I am the infinitude of the void
and you know me as I am.
Do you believe what you saw?
Do you accept that where the infinite is I am,
and where I am, there is the infinite?
I said yes.
God said, "And your theories are infinite,
"so I am there."
One of the most peculiar elements of evidence
of Phil's precognition was a letter that Phil wrote in,
and I will confirm the date here,
on May the 9th, 1974, and in a footnote,
he writes the following,
I was up to 5:00 a.m. on the last night.
I did something I never did before.
I commanded the entity to show itself to me.
A sort of dreamlike period passed, them of hypnagogic images
of a stark, single, horrifying scene.
Inert but not still, a man lay dead on his face
in a living room between a coffee table and the couch.
(tense music)
And that's how he was found
the day the paramedics took him to the hospital,
where he died,
and I can't explain any other way
than to say that he remembered the future.
I haven't gone to the hospitals very often,
but when I heard that the next day,
he'd had a stroke, I got in the car
and went to the hospital,
not that I knew what to do when I got there,
but it just seemed like the right thing,
and it was painful.
It just kinda like you watching,
seeing a giant who had fallen and he just,
hospital bed with all the tubes and the wires
and the beeping noises and just,
that's not you, Phil.
Where's the real Phil?
What bothers me the most
is that he was unable to speak
and he wanted to tell me something,
so I brought in a pen and a pad of paper,
but they had his right arm on a splint,
so I have no idea what he wanted to say,
but he really wanted to say it.
After all, you have to consider
we're only made out of dust.
That's admittedly not much to go on,
but even considering, I mean, it's a sort of bad beginning.
We're not doing too bad,
so I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation
we're faced with, we can make it.
(rock music)