During the last years of his life, Philip K. Dick lived in, of all places, Orange County, a Southern California setting that made the life-battered sci-fi writer something of a stranger in a strange land (to borrow from Robert Heinlein). This is the third of a six-part series looking at those final years. The series is written by Scott Timberg, the L.A. freelance journalist who runs the West Coast culture blog the Misread City. He's also a longtime (albeit sometimes closeted) fan of science fiction.
While in Orange County, Dick often fell back on the reflexes of Bay Area types who move to Southern California. He joked often about the artificiality of it all, the local slang. “He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland,” remembered wife Tessa Dick, “and said it was plastic, wasn’t real. He was used to real cities like Berkeley and San Francisco and Vancouver.”
To a writer whose primary subject was the slippage between the real and constructed, the place surely also fascinated him as well. “He loves fakes and simulacra as much as he fears them,” novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote in the introduction to Dick’s selected stories. He calls Dick very much a man of the 1950s, holding “a perfectly typical 1950s obsession with the images, the consumer, the bureaucrat, and with the plight of small men struggling under the imperatives of capitalism.”
Dick, an unceasingly self-conscious and skeptical writer, was also aware of the Bay Area cliché he was falling into. In the novel “Radio Free Albemuth,” written mostly in 1976, a narrator named Phil Dick spoke of the insularity of the Bay Area’s coffeehouse-and-Trotsky community, describing “the isolation of the Berkeley radicals” as well as their caricature of the rest of the country.
more:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/01/philip-k-dick-an-uneasy-spy-inside-1970s-suburbia.html
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