Book Review: What If Our World is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K Dick. Interview by Gwen Lee & Doris Elaine Sauter

What If Our World is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K Dick.
Interview by Gwen Lee, Doris Elaine Sauter (Editor), Foreword by Tim Powers 

204 pages, Paperback

The Overlook Press, 2004

When Philip K. Dick died In March 1982 it was a shock to his friends and the world. Those of us who study his work are still left with questions decades later. Two months before he died journalist Gwen Lee lived in Carlsbad here in San Diego County. She had a friend Doris Sauter,  who had for half a decade lived in the apartment next to the infamous Science Fiction writer. Doris had met Phil when she was dating fellow genius writer Norman Spinrad. After they broke up she struck up a friendship with Phil around the time of her cancer diagnosis. Her battle with cancer and her relationship with Phil became the meta inspiration for his two novels VALIS and The Divine Invasion. During the primary years when Phil was writing his exegesis, Doris was having dinner with Phil nightly and talking about Religion.

Doris had moved away but returned to introduce her friend Gwen who planned to interview Phil. This was two months before he would die. This is after he went to LA to watch the first 20  minutes of Blade Runner, the only movie he got to see based on his work in his lifetime. The interview done on January 10th, 1982 is mostly about Blade Runner. This is in the period after he turned in his last (written) novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer but it was not released yet. He was in the phase of planning his next book and that is why it is important to me.

The production of this book is rather cheap. The 2001 edition has a generic starscape and a random picture of a field of cows. The back cover description is inaccurate having the date of the interviews and Phil's death date off by a year. The Foreword by sci-fi colleague Tim Powers is good, but simple. The conversation on Blade Runner might be of great interest to super nerds for the movie but the thing that interested me is The Owl in the Daylight stuff.

That is the infamous Science Fiction novel that Phil was planning to write next.  The two interviews in this book done five days apart are extremely important because in the January 15th interviews (Lee brought more tape and was better prepared)Phil explains the novel he was planning to write. It is clear he had just a kernel during the first interview and had been thinking it through for the five days in between.
 
It should be noted this is the second concept he threw around under the title “The Owl in the Daylight.” That is not unusual for Phil, who tried to use the title “Earth’s Diurnal Course" for some unexplainable reason three times. Because this is the majority of what we know about Phil’s last Unfinished idea I am not going to say anymore as I am building the final chapter of my book Unfinished PKD around The Owl in the Daylight.

That said if you want a preview.  This book has Phil outlining what I believe could’ve been a masterpiece of Science Fiction. Anyhoo I am writing my Owl  chapter soon. You’ll have to wait for my thoughts on that. But you can buy this now for Phil’s thoughts on it.

It is a bit of a sad experience reading this. I read this entire book waiting for a bus to LA and on the bus.  I finished reading just before we passed the exit in Santa Ana where this interview was recorded. I am not sure it will be as interesting for others as it was for me with this specific interest in the unfinished works but it was a quick powerful read.  You get a little bit of Phil’s humor and his nervous energy. It is just sad knowing he was so close to the end.