Gabriel Mckee's Blog: SF Gospel, page 3

Radio Free Albemuth in NYC

We interrupt our (de facto, impromptu, and strictly temporary, I assure you) hiatus to pass on the announcement of a film screening this week: Radio Free Albemuth, adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, has its New York premiere this Thursday, October 7th, as part of the Gotham Screen International Film Festival. The novel on which the film is based, originally entitled Valisystem A, was Philip K. Dick's first attempt to communicate his religious experiences into fictional form. Legend has it that the publisher requested fairly minor revisions when he turned in the draft, but he instead completely rewrote the thing, producing Valis. When the Valisystem A draft was found in his papers after his death, it was considered different enough from its descendant to deserve publication under its own cover (and new, disambiguating title). I'm certainly a fan of Valis, but I've always considered Radio Free Albemuth to be at least as good, and in some ways even better. Writer/producer/director John Alan Simon has maintained a healthy level of contact with the PKD community throughout the development of the film, which bodes well for the finished product. I am certainly looking forward to the screening (and, no doubt, pestering Simon with questions about his take on the Exegesis afterward).

Tickets to the screening can be purchased here. 

Philip K. Dick News: Androids and the Exegesis

Cornell University's incoming freshmen are lucky: their summer reading assignment for this year is Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Cornell's Carl A. Kroch Library invited me to curate an exhibit on the novel's bibliographic history and broad influence (including its slightly more famous stepchild, Blade Runner). The exhibit is now open and runs through October 8th, but don't worry if you're not planning a trip to Ithaca in the next few weeks-- an online version of the...

Doctor Who: Alpha and Omega

The fifth season of Doctor Who has ended, and so too has my series on the show for Religion Dispatches. Check out the final installment for James McGrath's thoughts on the Doctor's role in the (re)creation of the universe, and my discussion of Rory Williams, the robot who thought he was a man. See below for separate links to every post in the series (including a few that I seem to have neglected to mention here before. It's been a busy summer, folks).

Part one, discussing "The Eleventh Hour,...

"Amy's Choice": Will the real universe please stand up...?

The latest in my series of posts on the current season of Doctor Who is up at Religion Dispatches. This week, James McGrath, Henry Jenkins and I ponder the difference between reality and dreams, and possibly an unnameable third choice, in "Amy's Choice." Read it here.

Through a wormhole, darkly: The Light of Other Days

 The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. 

This novel, one of Clarke's last (though I think it's safe to assume that Baxter did most of the actual writing), explores the cultural and psychological impact of visual wormhole technology that allows viewers to see what's going on anywhere on Earth... and, eventually, anywhere in the universe, at any time. This is an idea that comes up, briefly, in Clarke's masterpiece, Childhood's End, where the alien Overlords introduce...

Doctor Who, vampires, and reenchantment

The third post in Religion Dispatches' series on Doctor Who is up now. This time, guest smartie Joe Laycock kicks off the discussion with some thoughts on the disenchantment of vampires. Check it out here.

Planetary Profiling: Doctor Who pt. 2

The second entry in my series on Doctor Who for Religion Dispatches is up now. This week James McGrath and I discuss the Weeping Angels two-parter, "Time of the Angels" and "Flesh and Stone."

The first post in the series is available here, and the current one is here.

The Doctor Who Media Club kicks off

Exciting news: I am spearheading a weekly series for Religion Dispatches exploring the intersection of religion, ethics, and maybe a bit of politics in the current season of Doctor Who! For the first week it's just me and James McGrath (of Exploring Our Matrix) posting, but we expect other contributors to join us shortly. In this week's installment, I discuss why the Doctor is an anarchist messiah, and James considers the Doctor's attitude to romance, interstellar exploitation, and whether...

Philip K. Dick's Exegesis

The New York Times reports that new selections from Philip K. Dick's 8,000-page theological journal known as the Exegesis are to be published next year. At least two volumes are projected (it's unclear as of yet whether or not they're planning to print the journals in their entirety), to be edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson (who published an article on Ubik a few years ago that I have not yet read). Previous selections were published in a volume edited by Dick's chief biographer...

More on Kick-Ass: some links and things.

First: No, I still haven't seen Kick-Ass, though I probably will by the end of the week. A pale glimmer of hope still burns deep within my heart that somehow something good could be harvested from the fairly execrable source material.* But I have been reading much about it in the last few days. To wit:

Roger Ebert did not like it, not at all. In fact, it made him sad. That's perhaps the biggest strike against it yet. I like Roger Ebert. I don't like things that make Roger Ebert sad. He's a...