UBIK chapter illustration by elevenade on devantart

PKD: The Simulacra - Hungarian cover

Agave Könyvek, 2013.

premiumbeverage:

This first thing I thought of when I woke up, after a stressful dream that I can’t remember, was this anecdote from A Scanner Darkly by Philip Dick. As I sleepily steeped my tea waiting to leave for the day I kept running over the theme of the anecdote as if I had the passage memorized. Then before I actually left I pulled the book out of my closet and after some scanning (no pun intended) I found the passage and skimmed it before leaving. Can’t seem to get it out of my head so I figured I’d write it down.

“— this guy,” Luckman was saying, manicuring a box full of grass, hunched over it as Arctor sat across from him, more or less watching, “appeared on TV claiming to be a world-famous impostor. He had posed at one time or another, he told the interviewer, as a great surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical College, a theoretical submolecular high-velocity particle-research physicist on a federal grant at Harvard, as a Finnish novelist who’d won the Nobel Prize in literature, as a deposed president of Argentina married to —”

“And he got away with all that?” Arctor asked. “He never got caught?”

“The guy never posed as any of those. He never posed as anything but a world-famous impostor. That came out later in the L.A. Times — they checked up. The guy pushed a broom at Disneyland, or had until he read this autobiography about this world-famous impostor — there really was one — and he said, ‘Hell, I can pose as all those exotic dudes and get away with it like he did,’ and then he decided, ‘Hell, why do that; I’ll just pose as another impostor.’ He made a lot of bread that way, the Times said. Almost as much as the real world-famous impostor. And he said it was a lot easier.”

thehansoloist:

Do Portraits Dream of Painted Sheep?

gnoth:

oh my god! i want to be this graphic! :|

wow

seanhowe:

Blade Runner by Jim Steranko

therealityinstitute:

Moby K. Dick, a chapbook by Noel Black, published by Ugly Duckling Presse with lots of references to Philip K. Dick.

herobot:

novel deformation 

alien4elsinore:

VALIS Trilogy, Philip K. Dick

A SCANNER DARKLY

CHAPTER ONE

Once, a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in fact, he had bugs all over him. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.

gotardi:

“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… 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.” 

Philip K. Dick

Antonello Silverini illustrating Philip K. Dick