I continue to be fascinated by Philip K. Dick. And there are still so many of his books that I can read. This is a warmup for Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, so I can start to shape some theories about what the book is about. As usual, much of this is about drugs and a totalitarian state that resides in the future. Jason Taverner, a television star with 30 million viewers, is suddenly whited-out. That is, he finds himself unknown, without any data on him in the state data banks. When he calls an old girlfriend, Heather Hart, she has no idea who he is. Jason gets some fake identity cards made by a crafty forger, Kathy Nelson, but he is picked up at stop point for questioning. It seems that the students from the universities are in rebellion and this future US is just coming out of a Civil War, so things are still very tense.
It`s my understanding that Mister Dick wrote this SF novel in 1970, then edited it for a 1974 publication. This got the John W. Campbell award for best novel in 1974. I won`t reveal the resolution to the lost identity of Jason Taverner, but I will say it has a lesbian S & M queen at its core, and the consciousness that she embraces. I have two essential articles that are a great aid in getting familiar with Philip K. One is in The New Yorker, The Return of Philip K. Dick by Adam Gopnik. The other one is The True Stories of Philip K. Dick by Paul Williams, that was in Rolling Stone, November 6, 1975. These are required pieces to have around when probing the mysterious world of Philip K. Dick. Much of this is about the break in of Dick`s crash pad where file cabinets with pristine documents were blown up. Many theories were postulated as to who the culprits were, and apparently this fueled the imagination of Dick (not a very hard thing to achieve) and he put this spice into his writing. I`m sending you the biblical web page for Philip K. Dick for you to start to study, if you find yourself moving in the direction of Dickian worship! I will continue tomarrow with some observations on the novel and the mystique Dick himself....
The main bullet to this story is how did Jason Taverner lose his identity? My best theory is that it was through the mind control of Alys Buckman. She controlled him with the drug KR-3 and put him in a parrallel world-a sort of space/time warp where everyone had x him out of existence. I too have experienced subliminally of course...in my earlier frontier days. Mind control is a strange thing...but such things really do happen. By way of analogy, think of when Stalin would eliminate supposed ememies...then their identities would completely erased from the face of the earth! They would even be whited-out of photos...yea, completely gone. Soviet Union memories are coming quickly lately with the invasion of Georgia, me thinks. Well, got to get ready for the factory...more tomarrow for sure!
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