How much do you know about Philip K. Dick? I scored an 8/10.
Guardian: Do you have total Philip K Dick recall?
(via Boing Boing)
Tagliterature
Philip K. Dick is finally being recognized as a “serious” author by Time Magazine as part of a cover story on Minority Report.
If you’ve never been to cyberpunk maestro Rudy Rucker’s website, you’re missing out on his free fractal and alife software, artwork, and writing. It’s quite the nifty site.
Here’s a great sub-site from a Jorge Luis Borges site with analysis of Borges’ influence on numerous writers, including: Grant Morrison, William Gibson, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Umberto Eco and others.
Morrison: I had a dream where I was on a train going through a horrible bone-like station. The name on the platform said “Orqwith,” so I’d thought I’d use it. Also, part of this dream was that this fictitious world was infiltrating parts of itself into our world. But like you say, it’s got a lot to do with stealing work of a blind Argentinian writer.
AH: I’m afraid I stopped reading after “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
Morrison: So you haven’t finished Labyrinths?
AH: I did read ‘”Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the one about Don Quixote.
Morrison: I think he’s wonderful. I just have baths in this sort of thing. That was one of the things I wanted to Introduce in Doom Patrol. All those strange paradoxes and philosophical curios.
(via the Barbelith Underground).
The Garden of Jorge Luis Borges is a collection of online texts that contains, in addition to criticism, some of Borges’ fiction and poetry; including “Library of Babel,” one of his most acclaimed and frequently referred to stories.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad … The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.
The latest edition of the weird literary magazine Exquisite Corpse has an Jorge Borges story called “Ragnarök” in it. Short and thought provoking.
In dreams, writes Coleridge, images form the impressions that we believe them to trigger; we are not afraid because we’re clutched by a sphinx, but rather a sphinx embodies the fear that we feel. If this is so, can a mere account of one’s dream–shapes transmit the stupor, the elation, the false alarms, the menace, and the jubilation that is woven into last night’s sleep? I will experiment with this account, without restraint; perhaps the fact that the dream was a single stream of consciousness expunges or mitigates this essential difficulty.
Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy died of a heart attack at age 49:
As soon as the news began to spread that author Douglas Adams had died Friday from a sudden heart attack at age 49, tributes to the science fiction humorist began to blossom all across the Internet. There has always been a strong correlation between computer geekdom and science fiction, so it’s not that big of a surprise that the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” would be remembered fondly online. But Adams was more than just a science fiction satirist — he was also passionate about technology in the here and now, a geek’s geek who was paying close attention to current developments even as he focused his fiction as far ahead as the end of the universe.
(Thanks to Bren for the story).
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