Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  Katherine is an independent, self-sufficient woman with a complex inner life. (She works as a programmer of romance novels, which means adjusting and overseeing the algorithms the computer uses to generate a never-ending supply of fresh stories.) She accepts her fate with a mixture of bafflement, disappointment, and resigned dignity. What she can’t accept is the public’s feeling of entitlement to her story, or the media moguls’ confidence they should be allowed to create a melodramatic spectacle out of her death. From the moment of her diagnosis they hound her mercilessly to sign the release forms that will allow them to begin broadcasting her decline.

  But the producers also have an ace up their sleeve. Their inside man, Rod, has undergone a new and experimental operation that has transformed his optic nerves into cameras. He’s recording 24/7, broadcasting everything to his handlers—a decidedly cyberpunk body modification, appearing well before its time. As Katherine goes on the run from her rapacious public, Rod is with her all the way, posing as a friend—while unbeknownst to her, the show goes on.

  Structurally, the novel alternates between their two points of view. Despite his unforgivable purpose, Rod becomes an increasingly sympathetic character, pressed into this ugly task by both his bosses and the baser parts of his own nature. He is weak in a way that Katherine isn’t. Simply by pursuing a career in these broken times, he’s become a tool of the everyday dystopia, while she steadfastly holds herself against it, even as this sense of “outrage” (as the doctor describes it) becomes the feedback mechanism that tears her down.

  As Katherine attempts to savor the last days of her existence, a bond forms between them. There is something so naked and honest about this natural bond of friendship, two lost people grasping at the threads of their humanity. For a novel about a woman with only four weeks to live, this story is surprisingly joyful, finding in the end a note of bittersweet grace.

  The novel is undoubtedly a critique of a media machine that destroys human dignity for fleeting entertainment, but it’s also more than that. As speculative fiction author Lisa Tuttle writes in her introduction to the SF Masterworks edition (2012), “Compton’s real interest here is not issues of privacy, or the future of the media, or whether watching TV is bad for you . . . but rather with the eternal question of how we are to live, how to be true to ourselves, whatever happens.” Along similar lines, Jeff VanderMeer writes, “At its heart . . . Compton’s book is about two essential predicaments of the human condition: mortality and love.” And GQ’s Kevin Nguyen comments, “It also reads like something written today, which is impressive for something written yesterday about tomorrow.”

  The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a subtle and lovely novel, occasionally funny, often tense, written in spare but potent prose that provides a quietly factual account of the world as it almost is. It’s a masterful work of science fiction whose time for acclaim has come.

  Harlan Ellison’s Legendary Lost Anthology

  Much as Jodorowsky’s Dune holds the uncontested and incontestable title of the greatest movie never made, a similar artifact reigns supreme in the literary world. The saga of The Last Dangerous Visions—an anthology so magnificent it could never be made—reached its final chapter on June 27, 2018, with the passing of its erstwhile editor, Harlan Ellison. The cautionary tale lives on.

  Ellison was a supremely talented writer whose massive contribution to the genre is indisputable. Primarily a short fiction writer, his best-known works include the classic shorts “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” and “Jeffty is Five”; the novella “A Boy and His Dog” (the basis for the 1975 film); and the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” His accolades include eight Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards.

  Equally influential was his work as an editor and anthologist. His groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions (1967) delivered a knockout punch to the genre’s stuffy preconceptions, with a New Wave–defining assortment of brilliant stories by all-time greats such as Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Carol Emshwiller, Theodore Sturgeon, J. G. Ballard, and Samuel R. Delany. In 2002, fantasy writer and New Worlds editor Michael Moorcock observed in a foreword to the anthology’s newest edition, “Single-handedly [Ellison] produced a new benchmark, demanding that in future nothing anyone of any ambition did should fall below that mark. He did what we had, as visionaries, wanted to do. He changed our world forever.”

  In 1972, Ellison followed up the first anthology with an equally well-received installment, titled Again, Dangerous Visions, released in two volumes. Part of the conceit for this follow-up anthology was that no authors included in the first would be invited to contribute to the second, thus exploring the cutting edge of the genre in greater breadth. The result is another breathtaking collection of stories: The assembled authors include Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch, M. John Harrison, and James Tiptree Jr. The collection also included Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ, with their award-winning classics “The Word for World is Forest” and “When It Changed.”

  Having laid such a lofty foundation, Ellison was determined to follow up with the anthology to end all anthologies. When Again, Dangerous Visions was released in 1972, Ellison was already promising a third installment to be called The Last Dangerous Visions, to be published in 1974. In fact, it would never be published, but Ellison continued to promise this incredible anthology for at least another decade.

  The history of the project was charted in extensive detail via the dedicated journalistic efforts of writer Christopher Priest, who published his report first as a fanzine titled “The Last Deadloss Visions” (1987) and later as a chapbook titled The Book on the Edge of Forever (1994), a play on the title of Ellison’s own famous Star Trek episode. For a lengthy report on bombastic correspondences, failed deadlines, and broken promises, Priest’s pamphlet offers surprisingly entertaining reading. Even more entertainingly, it was nominated for a Hugo in the nonfiction category (an interesting parallel with Jodorowsky’s Dune, both the subject and title of an award-winning documentary).

  In 1973, Ellison announced a table of contents for TLDV that included sixty-eight stories. He promised the book would be out soon—as soon as he wrote the 60,000 words of accompanying introductions. Perhaps penning those 60,000 words proved more onerous than expected, and the timeline dragged on, and in the meantime he acquired several more stories, announcing an expanded table of contents in 1974. Priest writes, “Assuming that the non-fiction matter still amounted to 110,000 words, the book has now reached over 600,000 words in prospect: equivalent to seven and a half normal-length novels.”

  In mid-1974, Priest became personally involved in the project, as Ellison solicited a contribution from him with the persuasive words, “It would be a terrible omission were there not to be a story by you in this landmark trilogy, now being taught in over 200 colleges and universities.” Priest later learned that an almost identical letter had been sent to a colleague, whose work Ellison also termed “sui generis,” or “one of a kind.”

  Obviously, Ellison was still buying stories for the anthology. In 1976, he announced a change in publishers and a table of contents that now included more than one hundred stories . . . about sixteen novels’ worth.

  TLDV had become a kind of black hole, voraciously sucking in the best stories of the decade, never to release them, while growing ever more lumbering and unwieldy. In 1979, the anthology again changed publishers, and now numbered three volumes and 110 stories. In June of that year, Locus published what has become TLDV’s most complete and definitive table of contents; it can easily be found today in various online sources, offering a story-by-story breakdown of the project’s proposed 700,000 words.

  To this day, many of the stories Ellison purchased have never been published, and likely never will—a true loss to the genre, considering they once represented the best work of the era’s best writers. One author wrote in 1983, “Another way not to write is to sell a story to Harlan Ellison and wait for it to be published in [TLDV]. . . .
I heard the book will be out real soon now. It’s only thirteen years later, so I really shouldn’t complain. You don’t hear me complaining, do you?”

  This state of affairs was allowed to continue for so long because many authors were in fact afraid of Ellison. He was known as a mercurial, volatile, and occasionally violent person, who usually managed to get his way via a combination of flattery, bribery, pleading, and threats, along with a penchant for lawsuits. “Fear of reprisal from Harlan Ellison is a very real phenomenon,” wrote Priest, and later editions of his report included letters he received from TLDV contributors attesting to this claim. One remarked pithily: “I hope you’re still alive when you receive this. I don’t think it’s likely that Ellison has hired a gunman, but if you’re dead when you get this, or soon after, that will establish how little I’ve learned about Ellison over the years.”

  To his dubious credit, Ellison never gave up on TLDV. In a 1995 magazine column, David Langford wrote, “I talked to Harlan Ellison myself last year, and he managed to sound genuinely hurt and surprised that, despite minor delays since 1972, anyone could doubt that TLDV would soon appear. We must have faith.” In 2007, Ellison remarked in an interview with Newsarama, “For . . . my piece of mind, and to have people stop sniping at me, of course, I’d like to get The Last Dangerous Visions out of here. It’s this giant Sisyphean rock that I have to keep rolling up a hill, and people will not stop bugging me about it.”

  By that interview in 2007, a sizable portion of the anthology’s authors had already passed away, making publication an even less likely proposition. In 2018, Ellison joined their ranks.

  The Last Dangerous Visions persists in myth, perhaps grander in our imagination than it could ever have proven in real life. Tamed by the decades, no longer dangerous, a vision it remains.

  The Otherworldly Visions of Philip K. Dick

  This brings me to my frightening premise. I seem to be living in my own novels more and more. I can’t figure out why. Am I losing touch with reality? Or is reality actually sliding toward a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god’s sake why? Am I responsible? How could I be responsible? Isn’t that solipsism?

  If you’re at all familiar with the works of Philip K. Dick, then you know that a “Phil Dickian type of atmosphere” is one saturated with paranoia, mystery, symbolism, shifting realities, and hallucinatory vision. You may not know that the words above were written by Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) himself, one tiny fragment of an 8,000-page document he created over the last decade of his life in an attempt to grapple with a hallucinatory experience of his own.

  This very strange document is called the Exegesis. It has never been published in full; considering its length, it probably never will be. But about 1,000 pages were recently collected in a volume edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. The book offers a fascinating glimpse into a fascinating mind, though it never comes close to solving the mystery at its heart, the mystery that drove Dick to write obsessively through the night: What exactly happened to him in February of 1974?

  As a writer, Dick is an interesting case. He was massively prolific, publishing forty novels and around 120 short stories. His writing encompasses decidedly literary themes, grappling philosophically with the fundamentals of human existence and offering unflinching explorations of drug abuse, mental illness, and the dark side of human nature. Nevertheless, his high reputation in literary circles is a fairly recent development. Throughout his lifetime, he was considered decidedly pulpy, and embraced by science–fiction fans alone. His cult following eventually morphed into a much broader recognition of his irreplaceable contributions to both literature and the culture at large. This change in status has no doubt been helped along by the fact that his work seems to be ideal for adapting to screen. We can thank Phil K. Dick for Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990; 2012), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), as well as The Man in the High Castle (2015–unfinished) and of course, Amazon Video’s ten-part anthology series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. Dick also wrote the remarkable novels Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Ubik; and VALIS (a trilogy). Like the Exegesis, the VALIS trilogy was also an extended attempt to understand the events of February–March 1974, or as Dick typically referred to it, 2-3-74.

  Futuristic street scene inspired by Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. Illustration by Aleksandr Dochkin. Mentally, Dick connected Ubik and 2-3-74, believing the novel—published four years earlier—in some ways predicted or presaged his hallucinatory revelations.

  The years immediately preceding 2-3-74 were difficult ones for Dick. He spent some time in a psychiatric hospital in 1973. In The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, perhaps the most authoritative book on the subject, biographer Kyle Arnold writes of this time, “The IRS, who seized his car in 1971, continued to hound him for back taxes. Dick was afraid they would seize his assets again. Also, his relationship with Tessa, his fifth wife, was turbulent. Dick was afraid that Tessa might suddenly abandon him, and on bad days he became enraged if she left him alone for more than a half hour. Dick’s phobias and paranoid fears had become so paralyzing that he was rarely able to leave the house.”

  On February 20, 1974, Dick visited the dentist to receive treatment for an impacted wisdom tooth; while there, he received a dose of sodium pentothal, a barbiturate that’s used as an anesthetic and also has a reputation as a “truth serum.” Soon afterward, he was convalescing at home when a delivery arrived from the pharmacy bearing more pain-relieving narcotics. The delivery girl had “black, black hair and large eyes very lovely intense.” The description of her appearance is relevant; Dick was always preoccupied and perhaps even obsessed with dark-haired, dark-eyed girls, who represented for him an image of his twin sister as she might have been if she’d lived. Instead, she died when the twins were infants, a loss at the center of Dick’s life that never stopped haunting him.

  On that February afternoon, Dick stood there a moment, loopy from the drugs, “thinking I’d never seen such a beautiful girl, and why was she standing there?” The girl wore a gold necklace with the Christian fish symbol, recently repopularized. A ray of sun glinted off her necklace, and according to Dick, the fish began to emanate a pink laser beam. Contained within that beam was a sudden flood of knowledge. So much raw, unfiltered knowledge that it was impossible in the moment to understand or even process it all. Later, Dick writes, “Her appearance at the door had that effect only as a mere triggering release and because of manifold almost infinite preparatory steps. This was a life time process, not a single event.”

  Over the next several weeks these visions continued. He saw visual hallucinations; he felt that he was communicating with an otherworldly entity, somehow tapped into his consciousness: “A gold and red illuminated-letter like plasmatic entity from the future, arranging bits and pieces here: arranging what time drove forward.” He saw a local playground transformed suddenly into a scene from ancient Rome, complete with Christian martyrs being fed to lions for the entertainment of the masses. In true poltergeist fashion, his radio played threatening messages whether or not it was plugged into the wall.

  Inexplicably, one vision also alerted Dick to the fact that his infant son was suffering from an undiagnosed hernia. According to Tessa Dick, the baby’s mother, this insight proved invaluable for getting their son medical care. “I had taken our baby to the doctor about a week before Phil told me about the hernia, but the doctor did not take me seriously,” Tessa said in an interview with dickien.fr, a French Philip K. Dick fan site. “When I took him back to the doctor and told him that Christopher had a hernia, he took me seriously and referred me to a specialist.” The doctor confirmed that the baby had an inguinal hernia, a condition that could be life-threatening without prompt surgical intervention.

  But in time the visions departed. Dick was despondent, and attempted suicide. The attempt was serious; the method brutal and, Dick presumed, foolproof. Reportedly, he
swallowed forty-nine tablets of his blood pressure medication, slit his wrist so deeply the spurting blood sprayed the ceiling, and then staggered off to his car that was parked in the garage with the engine running. But as miraculously as he’d survived the infant neglect that killed his twin sister, he lived once again. He vomited up the pills, the cut coagulated and the bleeding stopped, and the car stalled out. Accounts differ on how the paramedics arrived, but they did. Afterward, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for another month.

  In the aftermath of 2-3-74, he devoted himself to trying to figure out what had happened, both in the private journaling that would become the Exegesis and in the VALIS trilogy, as well as many letters to friends and colleagues. This analysis and exploration had no particular object and certainly no end; it was simply a knot he couldn’t stop worrying. As Jackson and Lethem write in their introduction, “Dick’s pursuit of the truth of 2-3-74 was destined, like Zeno’s arrow, for no destination. Years before his death, it became apparent that these activities would not cease until the pen fell from his hands, no matter his periodic attempts at closure.”

  The obsessive writings of the Exegesis are often preoccupied with thoughts of good and evil, religion and philosophy, consciousness and metaphysics. They’re filled with references to Plato, Jesus Christ, and other Greek and Roman historical and mythological figures. One thought connects restlessly to another. These prolific nights of frantic free association were often fueled by methamphetamines, which Dick habitually abused throughout his life, fueling his productivity as well as his paranoia.

  Dick considered all the options, opining variously that he’d had some kind of temporary psychotic break; that he had in fact been touched by the Divine; that the universe and the nature of time itself are not as they seem; that entities from other times or dimensions were reaching out to him; that he’d suffered some kind of neurological event; or that his years of drug use were finally catching up with him. Others have theorized that perhaps he experienced a temporal lobe epilepsy, or seizures of the brain, which can cause both graphomania (obsessive writing) and preoccupations with religious themes. Dick’s friend, or perhaps frenemy, Tom Disch (who wrote, among other things, The Brave Little Toaster) mockingly suggested that perhaps Dick had been possessed by the Old Testament prophet Elijah.