The Auto/Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions by D. Harlan Wilson
296 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: September 8, 2026 by Routledge
This is a book I have tracked from kernel to publication, so you can take this review with a ton of salt, if you must but I am going to go deep with the things that make it important. Yes, DHW is my podcast co-host. As brothers in this work, I really encouraged him to write this and feel he has managed the impossible. Bring something fresh to the studies of a writer who probably has fifty or more books about him already. That is the angle, a book about the books about the man who wrote books sometimes about himself.
Infinite Regressions. Yes, Professor Wilson is the person to write this. His fiction is Schi-flow experimental, so it should not surprise anyone that he found an uncornered angle to Dick- scholarship. His academic writing is serious, ,from monographs on J.G. Ballard, Alfred Bester, and most recently with Kubrick in Strangelove Country.
Sure, it is a book about PKD, but it is also about Gregg Rickman, Anne Dick and Kyle Arnold, who have written books about PKD. The best example might be how DHW writes about one-time editor of the PKD Society newsletter Paul Williams (who was also in charge of his literary estate). “These qualities have been documented many times over since Only Apparently Real, which I had not read in full until the research phase of Infinite Regressions. None of the information it contains about Dick was new to me. I had gotten the information from other sources, many of them deriving from this biography. So I found myself less interested in Dick than Williams. How did it feel to be in Dick’s presence as a friend? As a biographer? What about a biografriend?But let’s say I knew nothing about Dick.¨
Wilson didn’t invent a term like Biografriend, but he uses it in a Dickian fashion that blurs subject and writer. Wilsonś narrative becomes a study of the many men and women who study PKD. In some cases close friends or even the two wives who wrote books about him. The obsession with PKD as a storyteller is one thing, him as a thinker another. Some of the books are just memoirs of wives and girlfriends trying to understand their relationship.
´´My argument is that Williams (or any PKD life‐writer) becomes more interesting just by being in Dick’s uncanny sphere, which can evoke feelings of empathy, ardor, and belonging alongside a Kierkegaardian fear and trembling that beckons us to jump down a rabbit hole of absurdism.”
DHW shows great interest in showing how the Megatext of books about PKD says as much about the people in his orbit, those relationships can be direct through friendship or indirect through the PKD canon or the fandom. One thing this book does that very few biographical looks at great authors do is study the relationship between the author and those who read him.
One thing of great interest to Dickheads in general is the updates on the planned trilogy of biographies that Gregg Rickman only finished one volume of. First teased as Firebright in the late 80s in the PKD and more recently teased as The Variable Man. Rickman released a short book on PKD on Film, and we knew he was working on it, but as years turned into decades the mystery grew for Dickheads.
DHW however, was able to read an in -progress draft of The Variable Man; it is pretty much a scoop that we got insight into how sections of the book are named: I am Machine, Schism in Me, and Imposter.
While Wilson is a co-host of the Dickheads podcast, we put him in the hot seat in a recent episode of the PKD hangout. We talked about Paul Williamns and Rickman of course.
I like some of the flowery big-word super academic sounding paragraphs of DHW and when I quoted this next part as sounding like a mission statement…
“In Infinite Regressions, after all, I am feeding on the bio‐texts that feed on Philip K. Dick, although my scholarly PKD meta‐biotext operates at a distant remove from the primary source, whereas the closer proximity of creative PKD biotexts enables them to easily sink fangs into Dick’s jugular. Dick’s autobiografiction, in turn, eats itself.”
DHW laughed and said maybe that should be edited down but it does feel like the meaning of the whole thing.
DHW hints at other books for other academics. A study of the PKDS Newsletters, or science-fictionalized biographies and PKD inspired works. That is where my novel Great America in Dead World is mentioned. I love the idea of PKD’s style as a virus.
“A virus or infection is a suitable metaphor. As an artpiece in an artwork, however, the interpolated Dick does not carry negative or harmful connotations—such fictions celebrate his lifework and sometimes treat it like a literary experiment, as in David Agranoff’s novel Great America in Dead World (2025), a “post‐truth” satire set in a Phildickian dystopia, composed by Agranoff according to the formula Dick diagrammed in his letter to Goulart. Then again, there is a distinctly viral and infectious quality to Dick’s fiction and life experience that is clinically negative, toxic, and ruinous (i.e., “not so benign”). The metaphor works as an agent of chaos, too.”
That is kinda the idea of Keith Giles doing Pink Beam Press, and longtime Bizarro writer Garret Cook is also experimenting with using the formula. This part of the book covers mostly the fictionalized takes on PKd like The Ben H. Winters Benjamin comic or Michael Bishop’s Alas, Philip K. Dick is Dead. These novels are total fiction, but they build on the mythology.
We are not done with academic big word salad. Are you ready for one of my favorites?
“Dick’s novelistic lifework during the final stage of his career is a psychonautic case study for autobiografiction’s evolutionary aptitude. As a SF author in the postmodern era who dabbled in pomo aesthetics (n.b.,metafiction), he constructed a dialectic that intertwined his own psychological voyages extraordinaires with broader philosophical curiosity.”
He was an SF writer who got in his own head and thought about deep stuff. Ok DHW said it better. This is an important Text, that sadly is only available in a $200 Physical edition; hopefully it will be available in a more inexpensive version. This is a long book, but well researched, and most importantly for an academic text, it will expand the borders of knowledge on the topic. A towering achievement.
