The OC helped shape Philip K Dick. A festival in Fullerton celebrates the sci-fi writer

Did you know Orange County was once home to one of the trippiest and perhaps the most prescient science fiction writers of the 20th century?

That man was Philip K. Dick, who once called Santa Ana home.

This week, the Philip K. Dick Festival will celebrate the work and honor the O.C. legacy of the sci-fi master at Cal State Fullerton.

‘A big idea guy’ 

Most stories about Philip K. Dick — or PKD as many fans refer to him — start out with a list of Hollywood adaptations of his work: Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, The Man in the High Castle... and the list goes on.

Dick’s more than 40 novels and some 120 short stories are filled with explorations of what it means to be human, untrustworthy realities and generally mind-bending narratives.

“Philip K. Dick’s novels are basically impossible to film. But he’s a big idea guy and the ideas seem to excite a lot of Hollywood producers,” said David Sandner, an English professor at Cal State Fullerton.

The Pollak Library at Cal State Fullerton houses a Philip K. Dick archive, which includes original manuscripts, correspondence and recordings of the author talking as a guest speaker in the 1970s.

Philip K. Dick with his literary papers.

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Courtesy of the Pollak Library

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“Science fiction is a world where you could be,” Dick can be heard saying on the recording. “You always feel this thin tenuous line between your world and a good science fiction novel.”

Some fans who read Dick now might feel that tenuous line disappearing more than ever. Take for instance the fictional news device known as a "homeopape" from his novel Ubik, first published in 1969. It prints out articles based on a user’s interests and allows them to dial in the specific, niche news they want to read. Sound familiar?

“He understood that the technology was going to get inside of our heads... Which is what the algorithms are doing now. Right? They’re being set and then they’re being shifted more and more to bring us under control,” Sandner said from the third floor of the Pollak Library, where the Philip K. Dick papers are stored.

Dick grew up and spent the majority of his days writing in the San Francisco Bay area. Still somewhat obscure and recovering from a self-harm incident in Vancouver, a professor at Cal State Fullerton named Willis E. McNelly invited Dick out to Orange County in the early '70s, where he continued to write, give guest lectures and eventually donate many of his papers to the library.

Patrice Prestinary, archivist and special collections librarian at the Pollak Library, said Dick’s papers have been moved to their own, more accessible spot because they are so frequently requested.

The collection of PKD-related material includes colorful 1950s and 60s-era paperbacks emblazoned with rocket ships and psychedelic visions.

Patrice Prestinary in the Pollak Library's PKD archives.

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Robert Garrova

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LAist

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But Prestinary said many researchers who come here are seeking out the more personal ephemera.

“You know, writing to his mother and talking about really ordinary things like paying bills and his cat,” she said. “Sometimes they just want to know the man behind these stories that they love.”

The man behind those stories spent the last 10 years of his life in Orange County, including at a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Ana.

Pink beams and O.C. friends 

During that period, Dick had some of his most trippy, spiritual experiences, including a run-in with a pink beam of light that he believed imparted transcendent wisdom.

“He himself is a character. And once you start learning about his life and the experiences that he had... It’s interesting because then his own life became like his novels,” author and Dick researcher Keith Giles told LAist. Giles will release a set of PKD-inspired novellas from seven authors at this week’s festival.

But it wasn’t just transcendental experiences — Dick was making plenty of more terrestrial friends in Orange County, too. Those include author Tim Powers, who will be part of a panel called “Phil’s Orange County Friends” on Aug. 22.

“In a lot of ways, I think he really felt like Orange County saved his life,” said David Agranoff, author and co-host of the Dickheads podcast.

“I don’t think he felt like he could change his life if he didn’t go somewhere else,” Agranoff said, citing Dick’s struggles with substance use in the San Francisco Bay area.

Dick died in 1982, just a few months before the release of Blade Runner, which was loosely based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film skyrocketed his name into the mainstream.

“He’s this 20th century writer who’s almost more relevant today than he was then,” Agranoff, an organizer of the festival, said.

The festival features a wide range of talks and panels exploring everything from quantum physics and artificial intelligence to death and the afterlife in the author’s works.

“He wrote about all those things and it gives us a chance to talk about not just science fiction, but philosophy and politics,” Agranoff said. “And the festival becomes this way to expand out into the universe... from the view that Phil gave us.”