Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) Excerpts from various sources, including KPFA, of Philip K. Dick discussing his career, his books, and his life, originally created as a memorial program by Richard Wollnsky, Richard A. Lupoff and Lawrence Davidson in the spring of 1982. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky.
When science fiction writer Philip K. Dick died of a stroke on March 2, 1982 at the age of 53, most of the literary world shrugged and the entertainment world barely took notice. The film Blade Runner, based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, was still a few months from its release.
Today, IMDb lists nearly fifty adaptations for film, TV and other media, which includes twelve feature films and a handful of television series, from Total Recall to A Scanner Darkly to Minority Report to The Man in the High Castle and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams.
The science fiction world, though, knew it had lost one of the all time greats. Between the time the KPFA show Probabilities started in the February of 1977 until Phil Dick’s death five years later, Dick Lupoff, Lawrence Davidson, and Richard Wolinsky never did get a chance to fully interview him for the program, though over the years they’d collected several excerpts to use in a two-part memorial program which was aired some time in the spring of 1982.
The show consisted of commentary and explanations from all three of us interspersed with these excerpts. As is pointed out a couple of times in the program, the sound quality of the excerpts is very uneven, and even with digital tweaking, some of it may be unintelligible. This is the two-part show that originally aired, minus a few musical segments along with an outro from part one, and intro and outro from part two. The program was never rebroadcast, and the cassette sat in a closet for the next forty years, until it was digitized, remastered and edited in 2023.