“I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick”, by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Timothy Bent

 

336 pages, Metropolitan Books, ISBN-13: 978-0805054644

You may think you have never heard of Philip Kindred Dick, but check out this list of modern-day adaptations of his (many, many) works:

• The 1982 film (and its 2017 sequel) “Blade Runner” based on the 1968 short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• The 1990 film (and the 2012 remake, if you must) “Total Recall” based on the 1966 short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
• The 1995 film “Screamers” based on the 1953 short story Second Variety
• The 2002 film “Imposter” based on the 1953 short story of the same name
• The 2002 film “Minority Report” based on the 1953 short story The Minority Report
• The 2003 film “Paycheck” based on the 1953 short story of the same name
• The 2006 film “A Scanner Darkly” based on the 1977 novel of the same name
• The 2007 film “Next” based on the 1954 short story The Golden Man
• The 2011 film “The Adjustment Bureau” based on the 1954 short story Adjustment Team
• The 2013 film “The Crystal Crypt” based on the 1954 short story of the same name
• The 2015-2019 mini-series “The Man in the High Castle” based on the 1962 novel of the same name
• To say nothing of the many tales adapted for the 2017 anthology series “Electric Dreams”

That’s a lot of writing to fit into a mere 53 years, but Philip K. Dick was nothing if not prolific – and weird, as is made clear in I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère and translated by Timothy Bent (a French dude writing a biography of an American SciFi writer? Will wonders never cease?). Carrère’s biography is standard in that it follows its subject chronologically – Dick is born, Dick lives, Dicks writes, Dick loses his ever-lovin’ mind, Dick dies – and so the facts of Dick’s life are easy to grasp…NOT so easy to grasp are the many machinations that sprung forth from Dick’s brilliant but disturbed brain.

Carrère’s writing (and Bent’s translating) are excellent and his – their? – biography works on several levels: he brings the eras Dick lived and worked in – the 1950s, 60s and 70s – to light and invokes their differing atmospheres and how his writing and ideas differed one from the other; he also brings forth his subject’s personality as he aged (I won’t say matured), from his adolescent nerdom to his more-or-less-straight 20s onward into his drug-induced 30s and 40s. Throughout it all Carrère never loses focus on his subject’s writings, especially how changes in his life became reflected in his work which become some of the author’s most insightful undertakings.

Carrère’s biography proves its worth in that after one has closed the covers at last they have a better feel of just who this man was and what made him tick; better, it makes one want to read the source material for so many modern Hollywood adaptations. If you are unfamiliar with just who the hell Philip K. Dick was – or if you think you are familiar – then I Am Alive and You Are Dead will open your eyes to this one-man creative force. And even if you don’t think that he is an American Dostoyevsky like Carrère does, you cannot help but marvel at the prophetic visions this mere Science Fiction writer wrought all those decades ago.