I Am Alive and You Are Dead: The Strange Life and Times of Philip K. Dick

published	2003 by Metropolitan Books
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0805054642 (isbn13: 9780805054644)
pages	336
description	For his many devoted readers, Philip K. Dick is not only one of the 'most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century' (The New York Times) bu...more [close] For his many devoted readers, Philip K. Dick is not only one of the 'most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century' (The New York Times) but a source of divine revelation. Dick, whose work inspired such films as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, dedicated his life to solving one ultimately unanswerable question: What is real? In the riveting style that won accolades for The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrre follows Dick's strange odyssey from his traumatic beginnings in 1928, when his twin sister died in infancy, to his lonely end in 1982, beset by mystical visions of swirling pink lights, three-eyed invaders, and messages from the Roman Empire. Drawing on interviews as well as unpublished sources, Carrre traces Dick's multiple marriages, paranoid fantasies, and vertiginous encounters with the drug culture of sixties California. He vividly conjures the spirit of this restless observer of American postwar malaise whose more than fifty novels subverted the materials of science fiction-parallel universes, intricate time loops, collective delusions-to create classic works of contemporary anxiety. As disturbing and engrossing as a book by its subject, Carrre's unconventional work interweaves life and art to reveal the maddening genius whose writing foresaw-from cloning to reality TV-a world that looks ever more like one of his inventions. [close]
date added	12-28-06 edit book

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | Abebooks | more...

Sign in to Goodreads to see your friends' reviews of I Am Alive and You Are Dead: The Strange Life and Times of Philip K. Dick.

discuss this book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

groups with this book

friend reviews (0)

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

This book is not in any lists. Go add it to a list.

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 123)

Eric rated it:

(review of isbn 0312424515)

07/05/07

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in October, 2005

One wouldn't call Philip K. Dick a literary stylist. He writes in a style that is pretty much straightforward science fiction genre. But what made Philip K. Dick great was the driving force of the mind behind the prose, the ever-curious, questioning, mad mind of a man almost pathologically obsessed with metaphysical truth. What is real? What is the nature of ultimate reality? What does it mean to be human? What makes us human?

In popular culture, Dick's exploration into such questions can be...more One wouldn't call Philip K. Dick a literary stylist. He writes in a style that is pretty much straightforward science fiction genre. But what made Philip K. Dick great was the driving force of the mind behind the prose, the ever-curious, questioning, mad mind of a man almost pathologically obsessed with metaphysical truth. What is real? What is the nature of ultimate reality? What does it mean to be human? What makes us human?

In popular culture, Dick's exploration into such questions can be found in movies based upon his fiction, sometimes loosely based, but usually carrying the central theme, and other writers have picked up on this to pretty much establish a whole new genre of Dickian filmology. More than twenty years after his death, his popularity grows.

I Am Alive and You Are Dead is an engaging biography of the mind of Philip K. Dick. Carrere carries us from his first trauma, the loss of an infant twin sister due to starvation, through his any marriages, his paranoia, his clever manipulations of FBI agents and therapists, his gnosticism, his addiction to amphetamines and his enduring philosophical investigations.

One morning as Phil stumbles into a darkened bathroom, he reaches for a light switch that has never existed, and

"...then it hit him. There wasn't any cord to pull. The switch was on the wall -- it had always been there--just to the right of the door. He found it easily and flicked it up. The bulb hanging from the ceiling went on. He looked around the bathroom, somewhere expecting it would look different, but it didn't....

...he thought again about the light cord, wondered where the memory of it had come from -- it was a specific light cord, of a specific length and in a specific location. He knew he hadn't been fumbling around for it randomly, as he might have done if he had been in someone else's bathroom. He had been looking for a cord that he had used before, on any number of occasions -- often enough, he thought, to create a reflex in his nervous system...

...something is not right."

Dick wonders if something fundamental has changed, and the changers somehow missed his own nervous system. He uses this device to explore the possibility of the unreality of apparent reality, and to ask questions about the nature of the mechanics that lie behind visceral existence.

Carrere follows the Dickian path through Alice's wonderland by charting his development as he writes novel after novel, including his less successful mainstream fictions, which are generally based upon his own life. Nothing is as it appears to be in Dick's world; nor is anything arbitrary. There is emotion, but there is also an ever-present, Kierkegaardian fear-and-loathing that co-exists in all of his fiction, as well as his life. The author displays this with both compassion and humor, as well as in the mode of admiration.

The biographer's tactic is unique in that he attempts to write not a biography of Dick's life, per se, as in he said this, and did that there and when, and so on..., but rather, to write a biography of Dick's mind, its changing thoughts and passions, its self-deceptions and delusions, its hungers and ambitions. The mind is hence illuminated by his exoteric biography, which includes his published fictions; the stories give insight into what he is thinking, and his thinking lay in the domain of personal circumstance. The result is very compelling, readable, and though possibly prone to psychological guesswork and error now and then -- since who can really decipher and accurately detail the mode of another person's mind? -- is is the best bio of Dick that I have read, and helps me to love the man even more than I already do.
...less

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

title link
avg rating
small image
med image
large image

I Am Alive and You Are Dead: The Strange Life and Times of Philip K. Dick

discuss this book

groups with this book

friend reviews (0)

lists with this book

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 123)

book data (includes all editions)

blog this book

popular shelves

other editions