Philip K. Dick scholars Dave Gill and Jonathan Lethem are teaching a new online course about one of PKD's nuttiest novels, Clans of the Alphane Moon. Offered through the fine folks at Morbid Anatomy, the course is a two-day Zoom experience taking place Monday, 3/31, and Thursday, 43/ from 8 to 10pm ET. Step right up!
From the course description:
In 1963 Philip K Dick's third marriage was crumbling, his idyllic life in the small northern California town of Pt Reyes Station was coming to a sad and dysfunctional end, and the author was relying on increasingly large doses of amphetamines to supercharge his writing output.
During this chaotic period in his life, Dick wrote one of his most "out there" science fiction novels: Clans of the Alphane Moon.
The "Clans" in Dick's novel are tribes of psychiatric patients organized around their diagnoses: "pares," or paranoiacs, comprise the leadership, "manses" or those suffering from mania, live amid "a hodgepodge of incomplete projects, started out but never finished," the "skitzes," or schizophrenics, comprise a village of disheveled poets.
Dick's microcosm of mental illness functions not as a bleak dystopia, but as best-selling author Jonathan Lethem explained in his keynote address to the Philip K Dick Fest in Fort Morgan Colorado last summer, a vision of diversity that lights the way out of the dark times we find ourselves in.
Join leading Philip K. Dick scholar David Gill and Jonathan Lethem for a two-session class on Dick's novel and his life at the time of its composition. Survey the weirdness of one of Dick's strangest books and discover his proffered solution to our troubled times.
David Gill has studied the life and work of Philip K. Dick for more than a quarter century. His writing on PKD has appeared on Salon, Reactor, and Boing Boing. Gill has been interviewed about PKD by The LA Times, The New York Times, NPR, Salon, and others. Gill has managed his Total Dick-Head blog (totaldickhead.blogspot.com), which has received more than 1.3 million views, for more than fifteen years.
"The Sanity of Philip K Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon: A Crazy Novel's Solutions for our Troubled Dystopia" (Morbid Anatomy)
Previously:
• Multimedia opera based on Philip K. Dick's VALIS coming to MIT
• Deluxe edition of Philip K. Dick's Ubik
• Philip K Dick on Disneyland, reality and science fiction (1978)
• Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick
• 600 Philip K. Dick book covers to keep you awake at night
