Philip K. Dick, Great American Writer
November 27th, 2006 by Alan Chudnow
This from Ron over at GalleyCat:
Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas’ interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist’s plate: “I’m helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my formerly outsider heroes, Philip K. Dick: I’m writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select.” Unless I’m overlooking somebody, that would make Dick the Library’s first science fiction writer—unless you count H.P. Lovecraft, but I’m filing him under fantasy/horror. So which novels are they? Sure, we could always email Lethem and ask, but its much more fun to guess. Three of the four slots are no-brainers: The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ubik. But that fourth…there’s a few good candidates, but I’m going to go with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. And then I’m going to cross my fingers that this all works out, so that the Library will then go back and publish an omnibus edition of the VALIS trilogy, the three mind-blowing novels Dick wrote at the end of his career.
I’d say Stigmata is a good guess but I wouldn’t dismiss Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said which was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and is the only Dick novel nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula Award.
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Update 11/30: The LOA announced the book today with a June ‘07 release date. Stigmata is, indeed, the fourth title that will be included. Ron has a follow-up article with some interesting responses from various SF professionals regarding who else they think should be so honored.
i think i just made my ‘o’ face