Archives for July 2009

Terrific trailer for an upcoming film called Creation about Charles Darwin’s internal struggle over whether to publish On the Origin of Species.

I love Paul Bettany, who did a fantastic job in Master and Commander in a very Darwin-esque role. I’m looking forward to seeing Creation some time, though it looks like right now it only has UK distribution.

Are you at Confluence right now? If so, come watch me stage a guerrilla reading of my short story “The Skull-Faced City,” a sequel to my zombie horror story “The Skull-Faced Boy.” 10:30 p.m. tonight (Friday) in Willow-LL.

I’ll be away from New York from the 15th through the 26th for Alpha and Confluence, so please postpone anything fun until after I get back. Thanks.

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.”