Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 15, 1990 TAG: 9004150317
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MARY AND THE GIANT. By Philip K. Dick. St. Martin's Press. $8.95.
Philip K. Dick, best know outside science fiction readership as author of a book adapted to film as "Blade Runner," wrote stories about alternate realities, androids posing as humans, encounters with God and other far-out stuff.
Most of it seems to have been based on his own life.
Lawrence Sutin has given us a biography of the late author (1928-1982) which is every bit as mind-boggling as a typical Phil Dick novel.
In fact, there is more stuff in print about him since he died than while he lived. A PKD Society publishes periodic material. Several recent books by other authors use Dick as a character (something he did himself in some of his last novels). The January issue of Starlog Magazine boasts a resurrected Dick interview. Previously unpublished non-sci-fi books by Dick are coming out for the first time.
One of these is "Mary and the Giant," written and set in the early 1950s, first published in 1987 in hardback and now as a trade paperback. Placed in the same California milieu as movie-maker George Lucas' "American Graffiti" but about a decade earlier than that '60s-generation film, it centers on the tribulations of young Mary Anne Reynolds, thrust among such characters as a rich older man who lusts after her, a black jazz musician after whom she lusts (no big deal today but something that would have raised eyebrows in the segregated '50s), an abusive drunk of a father, and more of an upbeat ending than Dick wanted to give it, according to biographer Sutin. Its sense of time and place indicates that Dick could have made outside the low-paying (at the time) sci-fi ghetto, given a chance.
Even with the ending changed to editorial demand, Dick could not get the book published during his lifetime. Among the major frustrations of his life was his not being able to publish his mainstream writing, just his sci-fi. On the other hand, it was those sci-fi readers who brought him his first critical recognition, voting his novel "The Man in the High Castle" - a what-if? novel about Japan and Germany having won World War II - as best of the year at the 1963 world sci-fi convention.
Sutin got extensive interviews with four of the five women to whom Dick was married at various times, as well as with roughly 100 other friends, fellow writers and others who each shed a bit more light on the man's troubled life. In 1974, he experienced a religious visitation in which he "saw God" or something much like it, a vision which some blamed on his earlier drug experimentation but others believed really occurred.
Dick himself, who seemed to enjoy seeing how far he could carry outrageous statements before people stopped believing them, had his own doubts about what happened but none that something happened. Much of it is reflected in his last novels.
"Divine Invasions" is a superb and entertaining portrait of one of the most complex writers of our times. It is a must-read for Phil Dick fans, and is likely to add to their legions from people unfamiliar with the man's works.
by CNB