Kindred blood in Kensington Gore : Philip K. Dick in the afterlife, an imaginary conversation Brian W. Aldiss
25 pages, Paperback
Published January, 1992 by Avernus Creative Media
Brian
Aldiss is a towering figure in British Science Fiction, he is the type of
writer I fear will be lost to time if not for the effort of historians in the
field. For me immortality comes from seeing the name on the spine of
cracked and well-used paperbacks, or SF masterworks editions. That is how I
kept being introduced to this guy and that is why I was curious. Immortality in
the field in reality often comes from Hollywood treatment, and that is the
reason Aldiss may be remembered. His novel Frankenstein Unbound was the
final major directing project by the late great Roger Corman starring John Hurt
in 1990. The story that will lock him into the canon is the short story “Supertoys
Last All Summer Long,” which Stanley Kubrick (and eventually
Spielberg) developed into A.I. Aldiss is one of the names most associated with
mid to late 20th century British SF, while I prefer Brunner or Ballad the
Unbound books and Heliconia Season books are epic on a grand scale that is hard
to undersell. His novels Non-Stop and Hothouse are also
all-timers.
As a PKD
researcher, I was familiar with an often-quoted Brian Aldiss introduction to a
1976 British edition of Martian Time-Slip. This was long before Phil’s
genius was as widely acknowledged as it is today, even with his Hugo win Phil
did not think highly of himself, so Aldiss giving this novel love was as
important to Phil as Stanislaw Lem’s love for UBIK or Thomas Disch
writing about Solar Lottery. Aldiss is not your hip-out-there new waver
so his love and attention for MTS was more than admiration of a John Brunner or
Leguin who was peer in age (if not class) coming from the same town.
This
book, or eh chapbook is essentially a one-act, two-actor play that Aldiss wrote
for a gathering of PKD fans who gathered in England ten years after his death.
This is an interesting time for this, with the release of Total Recall,
the slow building of Blade Runner from bomb to cult classic the genius of PKD
was starting to grow. This play had the benefit of being written two years
after Lawrence Sutin’s groundbreaking biography but the status of PKD had not
fully developed yet.
Aldiss
read it, but as closely as I have read into Phil’s life, I had a hard time not
nitpicking some of the details. The idea is that PKD is a ghost hanging
around England and gets into a conversation with a woman who could be his twin
sister or perhaps his father. This presumably played by a woman and written in
the play as WOMAN gives the whole thing a dream-like quality of shifting
reality and perception.
She
says at one point she is Jane and at another time says she is Edgar (Phil’s
father). It was odd that she never spoke as Phil’s mother (or his beloved
meema) but I realized that Aldiss is trying to use two figures who were voids
in Phil’s life. It is interesting to use two void figures in his life to talk
about his religious beliefs.
Aldiss
like many more skeptical PKD fans is trying to process the VALIS period.
His favorite novel Martian Time Slip comes from that middle period that
produced Three Sigmata so Aldiss and I share a love for that era.
There is some time set early in the play, when Phil, talks about being in
England and feeling British. Cute way to explain the British voices reading
this play. This is the least interesting part of the whole thing. Kensington
Gore is a place, and the setting is important to Aldiss, but it doesn’t do much
for me.
“I
replaced my life with fiction, filled the cracks with fiction like it was
rubble into the San Andras fault – high octane fiction, all immovable forces
and irresistible objects. Full of synthetic things designed to be at once True
and Not-True. White man speak with forked psyche. My elan vital went into my
Remington. Which would you rather have, a career or an Ace Paperback? It’s a foregone
conclusion. Being published is like being born; it is a secret way of making strangers
love you – even strangers like your parents. I invented PKD by being published.”
It is an
interesting notion, because of how much we think of PKD as a still active voice
creating literary ripples decades after the stroke that killed Phil. Is Phil
Dick the guy that Bill Sarill or Tim Powers hung out with a different being
than the literary figure, and if they are not the same, are they related.
Aldiss in 1991 was already trying to unpack the relationship that readers have
with PKD. and this was long before the industry of films, TV shows,
documentaries, books, podcasts, and blogs devoted to the man really exploded.
It is
interesting to have Phil talk about Milton as that was an inspiration for the
novel he intended to write next The Owl in the Daylight. I think this play
communicates that while Phil talked about VALIS “reprogramming” him, the way he
talked about these spiritual forces was a manifestation of how he was trying to
fill a certain void lost by these two personal voids. Of course, the more we
study Phil’s life as large a figure that his mother was, it was the lack of
love and affection she showed that was as powerful a void as the lost sister or
mostly absent Father (whom he portrayed so well in the Father-thing)
This
is a lost out of print work. I had to ask a friend to take photos of his copy
for me to read. It will cost you a pretty penny to buy it outright, but it is an
interesting read. I think Aldiss is adding to the conversation for sure.
