Why is there science-fiction? That is, why is it written, why is it read? Would literature be better or worse off if it had never come into existence? Just what function does science-fiction fulfill in literature and for those who choose to read it, or write it?

There is science-fiction because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before anything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view and the invented world. It is written because the human mind naturally creates, and in creating the world of an science-fiction story the ultimate in human imagination is brought into use; thus science-fiction is an ultimate product of and for the human mind. The function of science-fiction psychologically is to cut the reader loose from the actual world that he inhabits; it deconstructs time, space, reality. Those who read it probably have difficulty adjusting to their world, for whatever reason; they may be ahead of it in terms of their perceptions and concepts or they may simply be neurotic, or they may have an abundance of imagination. Basically, they enjoy abstract thought. Also, they have a sense of the magic of science: science viewed not as utilitarian but as explorative. The writer of science-fiction has in his possession ideas not yet committed to print; his mind is an extension of the corpus of already-written science-fiction. He is science-fiction's probe into the future, its vanguard. There is not a vast difference between reading science-fiction and writing it. In both cases there is a joy in the novel -- i.e. new -- idea.

Philip K. Dick, 1980.

Source: http://www.philipkdick.com/media_bertrand.html

Interview with Philip K. Dick, 1974.

You are known as one of the first authors to experiment with LSD. What effect has it had on your writing?

I don't know of any. It's always possible that it's had an effect I don't know about. Take my novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which deals with a tremendous bad acid trip, so to speak. I wrote that before I had ever seen LSD. I wrote that from just reading a description of the discovery of it and the kind of effect it had. So if that, which is my major novel of a hallucinogenic kind, came without my ever having taken LSD, then I would say even my work following LSD which had hallucinations in it could easily have been written without taking acid.

Isn't "Faith of Our Father's," from Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, supposed to have been inspired by or written under the influence of acid?

That really is not true. First of all, you can't write anything when you're on acid. I did one page once while on an acid trip, but it was in Latin. Whole damn thing was in Latin and a little tiny bit in Sanskrit, and there's not much market for that. The page does not fall in with my published work. The other book which suggests it might have been written with acid is Martian Time-slip. That too was written before I had taken any acid.

How much acid did you take anyway?

Not that much. I wan't getting up in the morning and dropping acid. I'm amazed when I read the things I used to say about it on the blurbs of my books. I wrote this myself: "He has been experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs to find the unchanging reality beneath our delusions." And now I say, "Good Christ!" All I ever found out about acid was that I was where I wanted to get out of fast. It didn't seem more real than anything else; it just seemed more awful.

In the light of your own experiences with acid, how accurate do you think The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is as far as drugs are concerned?

You remember what happened when they got on that drug? It was bad, wasn't it? It was so bad it taxed my ability to imagine bad. And it didn't do them any good to stop taking the drug because they had flashbacks. And nobody at the time knew LSD was going to produce flashbacks. I had it in mind that the ultimate horror would be to get an addictive, hallucinogenic drug out of your system and you would say, "Well, I'm back in the real world now." And suddenly a monstrous object from the hallucinogenic world would cross the floor and you would realize that you were not back. And this is what has happened to many people who have dropped acid. It was just an accidental prophecy on my part.

Doesn't your latest novel, A Scanner Darkly, also deal with drugs?

It's about an undercover agent who must take dope to conceal his cover and the dope damages his brain progressively, as well as making him an addict. The book follows him along to the end until his brain is damaged to such an extent that he can no longer wash pots and pans in the kitchen of a rehabilitation center. I hope the reader won't say, "Boy! I bet he did that!" This is the verisimilitude the author is trying to create, the sense that the novel actually is real. Now I was at a heroin rehab center in Canada, and I did draw from it, and I've had friends who dropped acid and became permanently psychotic. And a number who killed themselves too. But I wouldn't say that it affected my writing directly, that the acid wrote the book.

Source: http://www.philipkdick.com/media_vertex.html

interesting to read his words. I think sometimes the emphasis on the link substances - creativity blurs the options reffered to by the following quotes:

INTERVIEWER

You speak in one of your books of “the dictation,” of being almost possessed, of having this stuff spilling out of you. How does this process work?

MILLER

Well, it happens only at rare intervals, this dictation. Someone takes over and you just copy out what is being said. It occurred most strongly with the work on D. H. Lawrence, a work I never finished—and that was because I had to do too much thinking. You see, I think it’s bad to think. A writer shouldn’t think much. But this was a work which required thought. I’m not very good at thinking. I work from some deep down place; and when I write, well, I don’t know just exactly what’s going to happen. I know what I want to write about, but I’m not concerned too much with how to say it. But in that book I was grappling with ideas; it had to have some form and meaning, and whatnot. I’d been on it, I suppose, a good two years. I was saturated with it, and I got obsessed and couldn’t drop it. I couldn’t even sleep. Well, as I say, the dictation took over most strongly with that book. It occurred with Capricorn too, and with parts of other books. I think the passages stand out. I don’t know whether others notice or not.


INTERVIEWER

How do you account for the fact that certain men are creative? Angus Wilson says that the artist writes because of a kind of trauma, that he uses his art as a kind of therapy to overcome his neurosis. Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, takes quite the opposite view, and says that the writer is preeminently sane, that if he has a neurosis this only adds to his handicap as a writer. Do you have any views on this subject?

MILLER

I think this varies with the individual writer. I don’t think you can make such statements about writers as a whole. A writer after all is a man, a man like other men; he may be neurotic or he may not. I mean his neurosis, or whatever it is that they say makes his personality, doesn’t account for his writing. I think it’s a much more mysterious thing than that and I wouldn’t even try to put my finger on it. I said that a writer was a man who had antennae; if he really knew what he was, he would be very humble. He would recognize himself as a man who was possessed of a certain faculty which he was destined to use for the service of others. He has nothing to be proud of, his name means nothing, his ego is nil, he’s only an instrument in a long procession.

INTERVIEWER

What ever happened to Draco and the Ecliptic, which you announced many years ago?

MILLER (last answer)

Nothing. That’s been forgotten, though it is always possible that I may one day write that book. My thought was to write a very slim work, explaining what I had been trying to do in writing all these books about my life. In other words, to forget what I had written and try once again to explain what I had hoped to do. In that way perhaps to give the significance of the work from the author’s standpoint. You see, the author’s standpoint is only one of many, and his idea of the significance of his own work is lost in the welter of other voices. Does he know his own work as well as he imagines? I rather think not. I rather think he’s like a medium who, when he comes out of his trance, is amazed at what he’s said and done.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interview ... nry-miller

Thanks Chavdar! Miller's right, every writer is unique, and when it comes to inspiration, to each his own. His drugs I think were alcohol and women hehe. I know he had a short correspondence with Albert Hofmann, and that his long-time girlfriend, Anaïs Nin, tried LSD. With or without drugs though, many writers have talked about that state of trance.

"Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it—I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things."

Terry Gilliam

Source: http://www.believermag.com/issues/20030 ... ew_gilliam

Oliver Side, I'm just in the social world with hardly anything to say to anyone. you've a right to bring in so much the questions of new sciences etc .. there are many interesting processes discovered in the field of modern neurology, sociology etc.. I bet you've learned more than me about these disciplines and experiences

i'm interested if i can learn smtng i don't know about Miller, is this a correspondence you read, or a fact you memorized as a curiosity

The reason why I know that Hoffman had a short correspondence with Miller, is because Hoffman says so in his autobiography. A friend of mine who was crazy about Miller, told me that she never read in his novels any mention of psychedelics. References to alcohol and women, though, come by thousands.

"However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new."

Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978.

Source: http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

"You know, art is only the search, it's not the final form."

"It's a mind opened to everything and yet attached to nothing: it's called freedom."

"You must remember to chase and catch your dreams, because if you don't, your imagination will end up in empty spaces."

Gary Busey video interviewed about Hunter S. Thompson.

Source: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xr3k1_ ... life_music

"It's pretty hard to play music when you're really, really tripping on whatever," he says. "We were probably more prone to take LSD to keep us up at night when we were trying to drive from New York to Los Angeles in four days. Have you ever tried DMT? Oh, my fucking God. Jesus Christ. You absolutely experience death. You get to a point where everything just shatters into a gazillion rearranged pieces, and then everything just slowly comes back into this bizarrely pixilated landscape, where you're completely levitating and you don't know what the fuck. It is terrifying. And as soon as you're through, you're like, 'Hmm, let's do that again.' You totally ought to wear diapers when you're doing it. Have a bucket."

Gibby Haynes (The Butthole Surfers)

Source: http://www.dallasobserver.com/2008-10-1 ... ily-wiser/

No more Chavdar to answer to...

well, no more Chavdars that will answer to questions, for the moment...

Ok well I can't answer your previously erased comment, since you erased it... the only part I remember is, "why isn't she a Miller fan anymore" and she still is.

"Maximum Overdrive is Stephen King's first and only directorial effort, though dozens of films have been based on King's novels. The film contained black humor elements and a generally camp tone, which contrasts with King's sombre subject matter in books. The neophyte director was nominated for the title of "Worst Director" by the Golden Raspberry Awards in 1987, but lost against Prince for Under the Cherry Moon. King himself described the film as a "moron movie" and stated his intention to never direct again soon after. In a 2002 interview with Tony Magistrale for the book Hollywood's Stephen King, King stated that he was "coked out of [his] mind all through its production, and [he] really didn't know what [he] was doing." In spite of this, King stated in the same interview that he "learned a lot from the experience," and would "like to try directing again sometime."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Overdrive