Unrecorded Philip K. Dick Archive Surfaces

by Stephen J. Gertz

Once again, Phil, you've come up with some memorable descriptive lines in this book -- two stick in my mind: something that smelled badly "as if the skins of dead dogs were drying somewhere, on a line," and "gray and fragile, like wounded mice." Wonderful.  (Larry Ashmead).

An archive of Philip K. Dick's 1970 novel, A Maze of Death - arguably his darkest and most violent work, an exploration of the death instinct and the human capacity for murder, and, as in much of Philip K. Dick's world, inquires into the conflict between reality, perception, and identity - has come to market. It includes the final, holograph-corrected typescript. The asking price is $28,500.

Manuscript material by Dick of any sort is scarce in the marketplace. Most of the author's papers are housed at California State University where they were donated by him in 1972. A smaller cache rests at the Browne Popular Cultural Library at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (which includes a manuscript draft of Maze of Death). As a result, whenever any archival collections of the author appear for sale it's a major event. This archive seems to have been lost in an alternative reality until now.

First edition.

"His job, as always, bored him. So he had during the previous week gone to the ship's transmitter and attached conduits to the permanent electrodes extending from his pineal gland" (from A Maze of Death).

That's what I do when consumed by ennui.

In A Maze of Death, Ben Tallchief hates his inventory-control job so he prays, the conduits from his pineal gland transmitting his prayers to a relay network which sends his plea throughout the galaxy. He hoped it would reach one of the God-worlds. It, apparently, worked; he was transferred to Delmak-O, a harsh and strange off-world colony largely unexplored. There, he joins thirteen other colonists. Soon, six of the colonists either commit suicide or are murdered under mystifying circumstances.

Per usual with Philip K. Dick things are not what they seem. The survivors realize that they are each criminally insane, had murdered the others, and have been a part of a failed psychiatric experiment in rehabilitation. Oh, and that Delmak-O is actually Earth. Ultimately, their entire experience is discovered to be an exercise in virtual reality and hallucination; they are trapped within a program designed to help them endure their fate; their space ship is stranded in orbit around a dead star and they have no hope of rescue. Within the program a computer-generated religion and deity provides solace.

But Dick, who in this novel began to explore theological themes, doesn't let it go. The god of Delmak-O - the Intercessor - bleeds out of the virtual world and into the real to spirit away one survivor from the doomed ship, leaving the others to continue their hallucinatory existence until they die.

"A but of explanation on p. 13, clarifying the fact that nosers are strictly
one-way machines, would make p. 31 perfectly reasonable."

In addition to the corrected typescript, the archive includes letters from editors at Doubleday. Dick, evidently, ignored legendary editor Larry Ashmead's suggestions in a letter dated November 14, 1968 in which Ashmead declared the novel "one of your best to date." And so over a year later Doubleday editor Judith Glushanok wrote to the author on December 15, 1969 reiterating the suggestions.

To which Dick responded on December 28, 1969:

1. Explanation on p. 13. You seem to be under a misapprehension re the way fuel is used in interplanetary flight. Virtually all the fuel is used on takeoff; it is not like, say, a car which uses fuel continually. Thus, a space ship could, for example, handle a single-way flight of ten million miles but not a flight-and-return of five thousand miles each way. Do you see? But if you want to make changes on p. 13, please do so. But as far as I go, no changes are needed, so I will yield to you.

In the same letter, he declines to accept the suggestion that the sexually explicit material and graphic language on p. 131 be "toned down." Yet in the final, corrected typescript - part of this archive - he made changes to words and imagery.

Leaf from typescript, with holograph corrections.

Dick said that the idea for the novel came from an attempt "to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists."

At this point in his career, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was transitioning from science-fiction themes to reconnaisance of religion and God.  He asserted that the idea for the novel came from an attempt "to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists."

The Introduction to the third volume of the Library of America's collection of Dick's writing describes this phase as one where "religious revelation, always an element of his fiction, became a dominant and irresistible theme," and that A Maze of Death "foreshadows Dick's final novels."

This post was written on Ecstasis-9, a barren pebble located in the third quadrant of meta-cyberspace by someone who looks, acts and talks exactly as I do but may be a figment of my fecund imagination, "Stephen J. Gertz" the product of long-term use of Substance-D by someone who shares my DNA but has been known  since  birth  as Agent  Murray, a  defrocked  rabbi  with personality issues working undercover  to  investigate "Stephen J. Gertz" for  the  Department  of  Homeland  Security, Section 8.

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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering this archive, with our thanks. Click here for full details of archive content.

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Guericke's Got Plenty O' Nothin', and Nothin's Plenty For Him (1672)

by Stephen J. Gertz

One day in 1656, the citizens of Magdeburg, Germany were startled by the appearance of strange unidentified flying objects hovering over their town. Documented by a now-famous contemporary engraving, it should have led to panic in the streets. The town's mayor, however, Otto von Guericke (1602-1686), calmed the crowd with confidence empty of any reassurance whatsoever: Nothing to worry about, it's nothing at all. Nothing's happening. You are seeing nothing in action.

It was a great day for nihilism.

What the good folks of Magdeburg actually saw were two teams of eight horses try to pull apart two 20-inch diameter copper hemispheres that were greased at their mating rims and sealed when all the air was pumped out. It couldn't be done. Guericke had dramatically demonstrated the existence of a vacuum, of nothingness within the sealed hemispheres. In short, he proved that nothing could exist within something.

This was major. It was also controversial. The results are found in Guericks's Experimenta nova (1672), one of the great classics of science.

The subject of a vacuum or void, that is, nothingness, vexed natural philosophers and theologians. Ecclesiastic Jacques du Bois and Jesuit scholars Athanasius Kircher and his assistant and protégé, Gaspar Schott were in the middle of it along with Guericke, a scientist and inventor as well as politician.

"Schott first published what had originally been intended as a brief guide to the hydraulic and pneumatic  instruments in Kircher's Roman museum, expanding it into the first version of his Mechanica  hydraulico-pneumatica [1658]. But he added as an appendix [pp. 441-488] a detailed account of Guericke's experiments on vacuums, the earliest published report of this work. This supplement contributed greatly to the  success of Schott's compendium; and as a result he  became the center of a network of correspondence  as other Jesuits, as well as lay experimenters and  mechanicians, wrote to inform him of their inventions  and discoveries. Schott exchanged several letters  with Guericke, seeking to draw him out by  suggesting new problems, and published his later investigations" (DSB).


Schott, who Guericke cites in the subtitle to Experimenta nova, was a supporter of Guericke. His mentor, Kircher was not; a vacuum is impossible: God fills everything. 
This is one of the few examples of Kircher and Schott in disagreement.



Engraved titlepage.

 "Is it God's immensity or is it independent of God…Guericke's position on this matter emerges in the course of a summary account [in Experimenta nova] of the opinions of the ecclesiastics Jacques de Bois of Leyden and Athanasius Kircher, the eminent Jesuit scholar. In his Dialogus Theologicus-Astronomicus, published in 1653 and directed against Galileo and all his defenders of the heliocentric cosmology, Jacques du Bois had proclaimed the infinite omnipresence of God in an infinite void beyond the world. Du Bois should not have placed the divine essence in an infinite void, complained Guericke, but ought rather to to have declared that ' there is a place or space not in which the divine essence is, but which is itself the divine essence..."

"…[Guericke's] criticism of Kircher differed somewhat…Kircher believed that even if a void culled exist without a body, which he denied, it could not exist without God. In the passage cited by Guericke, Kircher explained that 'when you imagine this imaginary space beyond the world, do not imagine it as nothing, but conceive it as a fullness of the Divine Substance extended into infinity.'  In Guericke's judgment, Kircher was wrong to say that 'God fills all imaginary space, vacuum or emptiness by His substance and presence' and simultaneously deny the existence of empty space. 'For how can God fill what is not' [Experimenta nova, p. 64]. Rather, Kircher ought to have concluded with Lessius that 'imaginary space, vacuum, or the Nothing beyond the world, is God himself,' as he finally does when he announces that the space beyond the world is not Nothing, but is the fullness of Divine Substance.'

"But if space is God's immensity, or even God Himself, Guericke insisted that we must nevertheless understand that 'the infinite essence of God is not contained in space, or vacuum, but is in Himself for Himself" (Grant, Much Ado Abut Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution, p. 218-19).

Presuming that your brain, as mine, dissolved into mush during the preceding theologico-philisophico disquisition about nothing, allow me to sum things up: Guericke made something out of nothing, Kircher thought nothing of it, but nothing is divine so let's move on. Don't tell the Know-Nothings, they don't know anything much less nothing.

Someone who, like Guericke, knew something about nothing and possessed it, too, sang about it in 1963, courtesy Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

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[KIRCHER, Athanasius. SCHOTT, Gaspar]. GUERICKE, Otto von. Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de Vacuo Spatio Primùm à R.P. Gaspare Schotto . . . nunc verò ab ipso Auctore Perfectiùs edita, variisque aliis Experimentis aucta. Quibus accesserunt simul certa quaedam De Aeris Pon Amstelodami [Amsterdam]: Johannes Jansson zu Waesberge, 1672. 

First edition. Folio. 8 ff. (including the engraved title), 244, (4) pp., errata leaf. Engraved title, engraved portrait of the author, two double-page engraved plates ((including that of the famous Magdeburg experiment and twenty engravings, many full-page. 

Dibner, Heralds of Science, 55 (pp. 30 & 67). Dibner, Founding Fathers of Electrical Science, pp. 13-14. D.S.B., V, pp. 574-76. Evans, Exhibition of First Editions of Epochal Achievements in the History of Science (1934), 30. Horblit 44. Sparrow, Milestones of Science, p. 16.

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Images courtesy of Martayan Lan, with our thanks.
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Another existential brain-twister:

The Story of Nobody, By Somebody, Illustrated By Someone.
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