Double Dickin': The Metaphysical Reality of Philip K. Dick. Part 1:

Hi, and welcome to Studious! I’m your host, Stuart Byers. Each week on Studious we try and parse out life’s greatest riddles. We tackle topics of particular interest to me, and hopefully to you the listener as well. If not, consider this one of those great podcasts to fall asleep to.

Last week on Studious, we covered Post-Modern Representations of Evil. In it, we discussed many things, but we also introduced this concept of Simulation and Simulacra, the theory introduced by French philosopher Jean Beaudrillard back in 1981.

This week, I want to do a deep dive on a speech given by Philip K. Dick back in 1978, 3 years before Beaudrillard published his work. In it, Dick discusses some fascinating observations about the nature of reality, and if you listened to our three-part series on evil, he touches on many facets we covered.

I myself stumbled upon his speech, How to Build a Universe Without Having it Fall Apart 2 Days Later way back in maybe 2005 or 2006. I honestly don’t even know how I found it… it was probably just a random search on the author. Not only is the speech thought provoking, but some of it actually makes one question the veracity of the statements made, and the sanity of the author. And why? Because he professes to have experienced something quite outside our physical existence. A man who spent a lifetime crafting yarns about science fiction gives us a tale of the metaphysical, or at least it rings with the same resonance of his fictional works, where some of the protagonists deal with their relationship to time and precognition.

Dick himself wonders aloud if he may possess some sort of precognition, but he doesn’t put that forth as his only theory on the matter. It doesn’t seem that much of a stretch to me, but as you will see, precognition can’t explain all of the story he offers. I think precognition might just be an extension of our powers as pattern seeking mammals, for patterns often repeat. Also, if you subscribe to the Grand Simulation theory, they could just be recycled storylines that we pick up on. My own experience with Déjà vu and precognition isn’t as cut and dried.

The other day at work, we were listening to a radio station or playlist that seemingly had no discernable algorithm that it was following based on genre. It was meandering about playing pop music from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. As the song was ending, I randomly began singing the intro to Hall and Oates, “You Make My Dreams Come True.” The next song that played was Rich Girl by Hall and Oates. I made a joke to my coworker that it was just a sign that we were living in my simulation, since it was obviously crafted for me. They laughed and scoffed, because it was only a precognition of the artist, not the actual song. I admitted defeat. “Fair Enough,” I said. After Rich Girlwas over, it was followed by, You Make My Dreams Come True. So not only was it the right song, just one song late, it was a twofer from the artist. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, but the events seem so arbitrary, that they seemingly hold little significance.

Have you ever read, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” by Edgar Allen Poe? Don’t feel left out if you haven’t. It’s one of his more obscure works. In it, Poe weaves a tale about The Custom of the Sea. It’s long been understood by mariners that the sea can be an unforgiving environment, and that one must do what they can to survive. In Poe’s story, the crew of the Grampus find themselves on a busted boat without food or hopes of rescue. They draw straws to see which crew member will sacrifice themselves for the others to eat. Yes, cannibalism, that is the Custom of the Sea. The unlucky member was one Richard Parker, who is immediately stabbed and made into tasty sailor kebobs. If the name sounds familiar, it's not because he ever offered Peter any fatherly advice about responsibility. It’s the name of the Tiger in Life of Pi, the story about a boy lost at sea, sharing a lifeboat with either real zoo animals, or constructs of his fractured psyche. This isn’t precognition, obviously, because the author could have only been making a nod to Poe’s earlier work. However, it wasn’t a nod to Poe at all, but a real life tale when the Custom of the Sea was to be put on trial.

In 1884, a yacht named The Mignonette left England for a journey to Australia. The boat was not intended for world travel, so it was no wonder that it capsized. Luckily, some crew members made it into a lifeboat, but their luck would not last so long. Unfortunately, they would run out of food, and the custom of the sea would need to be evoked. The passengers all drew straws, and the short one went to young seaman, Richard Parker. The two living crewmen were later saved, only to face the gallows for their acts of survival. The case went to the highest court in the land, and eventually, the men were only pardoned by Queen Victoria herself, for they had been convicted of murder in court. The public outcry was too great, and the sentence begged to be reduced. They spent 6 months in prison for their part in the custom.

Often times, predictions come at us in very general terms. “I see someone enjoying a bacon croissant…,” “My cousin loves bacon croissants!” It’s more interesting when predictions have unmistakable details that are too specific, like Futility: The Wreck of the Titan, the short novel about an unsinkable ship, The Titan striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The novel was released just 14 years prior to the sinking of the Titanic.

So, precognition seems to plague some writers, and perhaps we will never know why. This is the case here with PK Dick, who wrote about precognition quite often in his tales of Sci-Fi. Though it’s rather bizarre the tale he shares, it is equally bizarre how much it resonates with our talks on philosophy here on the podcast. I have only read the speech a few times back in the 2000’s, and I listened to a portion of the album recording a few years back. After revisiting the album a few days ago, it was eerie how much it seems to have influenced my work here on Studios. Today, I want to take a deep dive on the material. I understand that most of you are unfamiliar with it, so I want to read passages from it to fully flush out the work. Hopefully since this is somewhat of an academic review of the work, my little podcast will be free of any legal ramifications of domain and usage. If you want to hear it in full, I suggest listening to the album recording. It can be found on Spotify. And now, on to the Dick…

First, before I begin to bore you with the usual sort of things science fiction writers say in speeches, let me bring you official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it — and, as if that were not enough, I once had the honor of being interviewed there by Paris TV.

For several weeks after the interview, I was really ill and confined to bed. I think it was the whirling teacups that did it. Elizabeth Antebi, who was the producer of the film, wanted to have me whirling around in one of the giant teacups while discussing the rise of fascism with Norman Spinrad… an old friend of mine who writes excellent science fiction. We also discussed Watergate, but we did that on the deck of Captain Hook’s pirate ship. Little children wearing Mickey Mouse hats — those black hats with the ears — kept running up and bumping against us as the cameras whirred away, and Elizabeth asked unexpected questions. Norman and I, being preoccupied with tossing little children about, said some extraordinarily stupid things that day. Today, however, I will have to accept full blame for what I tell you, since none of you are wearing Mickey Mouse hats and trying to climb up on me under the impression that I am part of the rigging of a pirate ship.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college or university would ever have considered inviting one of us to speak. We were mercifully confined to lurid pulp magazines, impressing no one. In those days, friends would say to me, “But are you writing anything serious?” meaning “Are you writing anything other than science fiction?” We longed to be accepted. We yearned to be noticed. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were invited to give speeches and appear on panels — and immediately we made idiots of ourselves. The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction writer know about? On what topic is he an authority?

It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose. Just think: Someone in this world is an authority on the topic of whether mice can or cannot put on two-tone shoes, derby hats, pinstriped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass as humans.

Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can’t claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbage men who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly — and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbage men will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbage men do not eat people. But the dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical — given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.

I’m gonna pause the speech here to jump in. Noam Chomsky and other linguists discuss the subjective experience of using language all the time. How we use language not only has denotative meaning, but connotative as well. And our connotations of words can’t always be agreed on, in fact, we may even be mistaken on the agreed connotation, and have the word definition entirely wrong. Words are magic, in a sense. Not only do they lend meaning, but often can alter perception, and in doing so, construct subjective realities. You watch two different news outlets, and one describes the perpetrators as “thugs,” the other, as “assailants,” or suspects. One description may seem more nefarious than the other, but do not be fooled, both are selling you an agenda. Non-partisan media no longer exists, and if it does, it is relegated to independent media outlets. Sorry for the interruption. Back to PK…

I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story… which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups — and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And — cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Baretta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

We discussed this briefly back in our discussion on Good and Evil. I was referencing semen and Superbad, but the message from on high is clear: break the law and you will be caught.

Back in the days of the Hays Code, we couldn’t explore narratives revolving around anit-heroes, because it simply wasn’t allowed to show the “bad guy” getting away with his misdeeds. In the original Oceans 11movie with Sinatra and the Rat Pack, the gang was originally trying to abscond with the loot in the coffin holding their former colleague who unfortunately passes during the heist. What plays out brilliantly as a bit of comical misfortune for the hard on their luck criminals, the coffin is sent away for cremation, and the rewards of the heist are burned up along with the deceased. This was Hays’ Code shit, because it was hard enough for them to sell the idea of old Blue Eyes not going to the clink in the end. The ne’er-do-wells get away with the crime, but they don’t reap the benefits.

When PK is talking about manufactured realities, he’s talking about simulation theory 3 years before Beaudrillard. Maybe Dick was a big fan of the French New Wave. Regardless, the point is of major value.

Disney just fired Marvel CEO and activist Victoria Alonso. The brand maintains that it was over her finding other work in conflict with her time at the studio, but she was greenlit to produce her movie Argentina 1985 by the studio beforehand. Since the excuse isn’t jiving here, what is the real reason?

Many have commented, and maybe some have noticed the politicizing of the MCU with their storylines and filling of perceived quotas. I’m gonna avoid getting political myself, because I don’t want that for this podcast. I just want to examine power structures at large. The theories on the web suspect that she was fired for promoting an agenda. Which should be of no news, since she was openly an activist.

This is what I want you to consider: even though the Supreme Court maintains that corporations are people, they possess no inherent emotion or benevolence. If the media, which is a corporation, a media conglomerate, or any other corporation is selling you on an idea or ideals, it’s not because they believe in them. They are selling you a product. That is their job; that’s what they are in business to do. No matter how ethical they purport to be, they are selling you on an ethos for the sake of the brand. Be ever so wary of corporate morality. Often times, it’s just pandering. Let’s swing back to Dick…

So, I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

Simulation and Simulacrum, all in one paragraph. Go Dick, Go.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change… and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, so, according to his own philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have been right — let’s not forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore, according to Heraclitus’ philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus judged things real.

I offer this merely to show that as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin talk nonsense. Zeno proved that motion was impossible (actually he only imagined that he had proved this; what he lacked was what technically is called the “theory of limits”). David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume’s point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren’t taking what they said seriously.

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real — that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — you can have all of them, but none is true.

Broooooooo. Bro bro, bro bro. Did you listen to what my man Dick just said here? This is the world in which we inhabit, fake ass motherfuckers selling us their bullshit, manufactured realities. The closest thing Dick had to reality TV in 1978 was Network Battle of the Stars.

Recently, renown confidence man, The Dalai Lama was in the news. He was being filmed, speaking to a young boy. He first asks the boy, to kiss his cheek. He then asks the boy to kiss his mouth. After succeeding twice, he goes in for the third attempt, and asks the boy to suck his tongue.

In sales, they teach you to get the people to say “yes” to arbitrary things first. After two successive yesses, the odds are higher that a third one is waiting, because the subject is now successfully primed. We spoke about priming briefly in our talks about neuro-linguistic programming in an earlier podcast.

The Dalai Lama has a boy suck his tongue and the only celebrity with the balls to comment on this is Cardi B. This is the bizarre reality in which we now participate. Even if the Lama was being “playful” with the child. We don’t inhabit a blissful world free of pedophilia anymore as if we ever did, perhaps we were just more blind to it. This man who was “The Chosen One” from birth has all the markings of someone primed to exhibit pedophile behavior. The Dalai Lama means, “Great Master,” so its more of a title than a name, but titles can garner perceived gravitas. Tenzin Gyatso was ordained from birth. As he reached puberty, he was forbidden to seek normal sexual relations. His emotional grown is in a state of permanent adolescence. These kind of people are prime for exhibiting pedophilic behavior and desires as adults, because they can only identify with children who are similarly in such a regressive state. The Lama kinda reminds me of another former child star who no one dared to question. And yet in the world of cancel culture, his music was never canceled posthumously. This is the world we live in, where a perversion of truth is the masquerade set before us. The media immediately tells us that the Dalai Lama is all sympathetic, and we buy it as fact, but the news hasn’t been in the business of reporting facts for some time now. Even when they get it wrong, which is quite often, the apology is buried later in a section of the publication relegated as unseen and obscure. Anyway, I digress. Back to PK…

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God’s power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.

In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

I’ve often asked myself, “why did I pick Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to talk about in my 3rd podcast? I seem to keep going back to the Allegory of the Cave and his world of Perfect Forms. Do you think I would have remembered this small portion of Phil’s speech, where he never even directly mentions the cave or perfect forms by name? It’s quizzical at best, and may speak profoundly to the powers of our subconscious. PK continues…

We would not be aware of this transformation, since we were not aware that our world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to helpless laughter. What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn’t exist, and how can something that doesn’t exist have aspects? But then I realized that I’d been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.

Of course, in science fiction no pretense is made that the worlds described are real. This is why we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance not to believe what he is about to read. Equally true, the visitors to Disneyland understand that Mr. Toad does not really exist and that the pirates are animated by motors and servo-assist mechanisms, relays and electronic circuits. So no deception is taking place.

And yet the strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title “science fiction” is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?

And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but — Is it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth… and only later on realize it.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blanks are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.

YES, YES, AND YESSSSSSS QUEEN!!!! So much to unpack here. Science Fiction writers have often been at the forefront of figuring shit out long before we discover it is possible. The multiverse or many worlds theory was just hogwash 40 years ago, now we increasingly accept this as a possible option in the field of quantum physics. Poe predicted the Big Bang Theory and frontal lobe syndrome in his works. Science Fiction writers concern themselves with the what-ifs of our universe. They are the forces of creation that inspire actual scientists to pursue the possibility of such theories. For the most part, our science is not created, through much perseverance, it is discovered. Listen to Dick here: We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom. I would argue that now we are doing it knowingly. Now go watch your Housewives… Dick continues, and this is where the facts proffered start resembling fiction…

And — and I say this as a professional fiction writer — the producers, scriptwriters, and directors who create these video/audio worlds do not know how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability, it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labeling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label… you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn’t if he himself does not know.

It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel, believing it is pure fiction, and to learn later on — perhaps years later — that it is true. I would like to give you an example. It is something that I do not understand. Perhaps you can come up with a theory. I can’t.

In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband’s name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy — this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restaurant together, Kathy stopped short and said, “I can’t go in.” Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. “I have to tell you the truth,” Kathy said. “I have a relationship with him.”

That’s all the time we have here on Studious today. We will continue with Dick’s How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart 2 Days Later in part 2. I’ll see you all real soon. Thanks again for listening to Studious.

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