Here’s Roger Zelazny telling a few funny anecdotes about Philip K. Dick, from Zelazny’s essay “A Burnt-Out Case?,” which appears in The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain:
On collaborating with Philip K. Dick on their novel Deus Irae:
Before I had undertaken this entire collaboration with Phil, I decided I … would learn to write like Phil Dick … I felt that I achieved this; I believe that I can write exactly like Phil Dick if I want to.
But I chose, for my sections of the book, not to use that style. I chose a kind of meta-style, halfway between that and my own style, so my sections would be different enough from Phil’s sections so the book would have a different tone to it.
As I was writing like this over the years, I said to myself, “It’s a shame to be able to write just like Phil Dick … and not do it, at least just once.” So in one scene I plotted it just exactly the way I thought Phil would plot it. I wrote it in Phil’s style exactly, and then the other themes in that section I wrote in the other style. I sent the entire batch of manuscripts off to him, waited a while, and received a letter back, “Roger, that was very good material you sent along, but this one scene you’ve written is sheer genius.”
On missing a Philip K. Dick lecture at a convention in France:
A little later another fellow came in and … said, “Well, in the lecture he said that there are many parallel time tracks and we are on the wrong one, because of the fact that God and the Devil are playing a game of chess, and every time one makes a move it reprograms us to a different time track, and that whenever Phil Dick writes a book it switches us back to the proper track. Could you care to comment on this?”
I begged off. A little later, Phil came into the store to sign some books and sat down beside me at the table. When I had a free moment, I leaned over and said, “Phil, what the hell did you talk about this afternoon?”
Phil said, “I don’t know. It was the strangest thing. You know, I don’t speak French, so I was asked to write out my talk. I provided a copy of my talk and then the fellow translated it into French. I was to read a paragraph and then he was to read a paragraph, and so on. Right before I was to go on, they told me that the talk had to be cut by twenty minutes. So I went through crossing out paragraphs, and so did the translator, but we got mixed up along the way, and he crossed out all the wrong paragraphs. So I don’t know what I said.”
On hanging out with Philip K. Dick at a party:
Phil said, “I have this book, A Scanner Darkly. I have these characters who have been on hard drugs for a long time, and they’re burnt out cases. I wanted to choose a scene which exemplified the extent of their mental deterioration. I had them attempting to figure out the functioning of the gear shift on a ten-speed bicycle.” (Phil always chooses good examples for things.)
So he had written this up and indicated that they were wrong, because this is how the gear shift on a ten-speed bicycle really works. His editor called him: “Phil … A funny thing in this manuscript of yours. I happen to own a ten-speed bicycle. I went out and looked at the gear shift, and — um … you’ve got it wrong yourself.”
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