Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick saw God.

The only reason Philip K. Dick never started a cult was that he wasn't pedestrian enough; he was no L. Ron Hubbard.

Dick's ideas never stood still for a second. His fictional universes were constantly falling apart.

God manifested as a Pink Light that shot through Phil's bedroom window, a light that somehow scrambled Phil's brain, and he could never figure it out. Was it really God? Or were aliens or Soviet agents the ones beaming information into his head?

Philip K. Dick had fun deconstructing the world; he enjoyed running time backwards, inducing drug like hallucinations, finding God in an aerosol can.

More than anyone else this "crap artist" saw what was happening in the twentieth century, saw how the ground was shifting away from us.

And he loved it.

I recommend VALIS and UBIK as two of Philip K. Dick's very best novels.

Kurt Vonnegut

When I was fourteen years old and only wanted to read horror novels my Grandfather came to my rescue. He bought me a paperback copy of Galapagos.It turned out that what he'd done was very much the same thing as handing me a bag of cocaine.

This sixties guru—this midwestern, corn-fed, science fiction writer—was my gateway drug to the world of literature.

His books Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions are two of his best.

Pif Magazine

"It's not just another poetry and fiction e-zine. It's a full-blown, out-and-out magazine with Music and Book Reviews, Art and Photography exhibitions...

-Jaimes Alsop, The Alsop Review

"Pif was founded in October of 1995 as a small fiction and poetry magazine with a circulation of around 500 readers. Pif currently has 100,000 original readers and 1 million impressions per month... [and] features work by writers like Rick Moody, Amy Hempel, and so on..."

-Richard Luck, Editor of Pif

Check out The Best of Pif Offline for a good cross section of what Pif publishes is all about. Or read my story On a Scale of One to Three.

Guy Debord

Guy Debord's updating of Marx, his analysis of the spectacle, is perhaps the most significant political philosophy to pop up since World War II.

Mostly a theorist Debord was also a filmmaker and an artist, but the book to read is The Society of the Spectacle.

Debord claimed that, given the vacuity of life under the thumb of the commodity, there were but two choices left: Suicide or Revolution.

Debord took his own life in 1994.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I first encountered Gilman's work many years ago when I took a women studies course at Portland State University. I got a C in the class because I couldn't figure out how to color between the lines like the professor wanted, but discovering Gilman made the class and its negative impact on my GPA worthwhile.

The Yellow Wallpaper, is one of the finest fantasy stories I've ever read. It is also a very effective example of feminist agitprop.

Noam Chomsky

The New York Timeswrote that he is "…arguably the most important intellectual alive today." He's also a frequent contributor to Z Magazine,and has written books on American foreign policy and the media.

The easiest way to check out his anarchist ideas is to rent the movie Manufacturing Consent,or you could read some of the interviews he's done with David Barsiaman. But his political books like Deterring Democracy, Manufacturing Consent , and Necessary Illusions are all necessary reading.

You might also want to check out the interview with Noam Chomsky that I published in Diet Soap.

George Berkeley

Bishop George Berkeley is the philosopher who shook me up the most back when I was in college.

Let me try to sum him up:
The material universe doesn't exist. To believe in the physical world is to make a category mistake. This mistake involves taking an abstract general idea, in this case the idea of what it is to exist as an object, and thinking of it as an empirical entity.

More simply:
There is no such thing as an apple that doesn't have a particular stem or a unique color—a certain tangy sweetness, a certain smell.

And even more simply still:
The world exists only in perception.

If you feel up to it you might check out Berkeley's Principles and Dialogues.

The Beatles

The Beatles were the biggest rock and roll band in history. The Beatles were sent by God to show us the way.

The Beatles were lucky. The Beatles are overhyped. The Beatles were replaced by automatons in 1966. In the song "I am the Walrus," you can hear George Martin whisper, "I manufactured Paul. Chucky Cheese is next."

Mark David Chapman was programmed by the CIA.

Richard Starkey was also programmed by the CIA. This explains Mr. Starkey's role on "Shining Time Station."

Paul wasn't really the Walrus. John was just saying that to be nice.

It isn't fair, by the way, that the two best Beatles were the first to die. The death of George Harrison is definitely proof positive that God is an underachiever.

James Morrow

James Morrow is obsessed with God.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Did Jesus ever suffer from constipation? What would happen if God died? How would we Bury him?

James Morrow's characters are nice enough types, but the fiction is mean. Morrow is trying to show how even the best amongst us are complicit in the absurdity; how even Jesus ended up assisting the devil.

James Morrow is a literary writer working in the science fiction genre.

Towing Jehovah is the Morrow book to start with.

Barry Malzberg

Malzberg's short stories and novels are dark and depressing: astronauts go mad as they try to explain what went wrong with the mission; time travelers reenact the assassination of John F. Kennedy; and robot versions of Sigmund Freud are enlisted to cure the neuroses of the alien invaders.

It's all part of the big disappointment that is Malzberg's writing career.

He hates it. Barry Malzberg got trapped pumping out fiction for pennies a word; he was a youthful idealist but he's been brought down by the terrible realities of pulp fiction. Where is it getting him, the writing of all these millions of words, what difference does it make? He'll never get reviewed in The New York Times,he'll never be remembered for anything.

For fun you might try Malzberg's nonfiction rant against the genre: The Engines of the Night.

Barry Malzberg has quit the field of science fiction more times than I can count.

He keeps coming back, but bitterly, bitterly, bitterly.

Lynda E. Rucker

Lynda E. Rucker is one of Portland's Alternatives; she's one of the gang of speculative writers living in Portland whose work is more popular with British than American editors. The fact that her stories are more likely to be set in Ireland, Czechoslovakia, or Eugene rather than anyplace American might explain her intercontinental success.

I love to travel...I once worked in a pub in Dublin, Ireland, and I taught English in rural Nepal and the Czech Republic as well as here in the US. I speak some French, some Nepali, and enough Czech and Romanian to say things like:

I am lost, please help me.

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman photographs her own alienation. She plays dress-up, takes on the various roles assigned to women--the housewife, the girl next door, the starlet, the jilted girlfriend--in order to expose these categories as constructs. She takes pictures of herself, over and over again, but it's hard to find her in her work.

These pictures are about how pictures work. Sherman is responding to a world made up of surfaces, of images. She knows how the media environment we occupy effects and directs our inner lives. And, with every untitled photo, Cindy Sherman resists.

Sherman's Retrospective includes hundreds of her photographs and is still in print!

Ratbastards

The Ratbastards are slipstream/genre jumping writers who have to apologize for everything they do, every word they write. They (i.e. Alan Deniro, Christopher Barzak, Barth Anderson, and Kristin Livdahl) feel the pain of their percarious position quite keenly. Their writing is neither genre nor literary. Neither escapist nor realist.

After reading the Ratbastard chapbook Rabid Transit I was impressed and felt a certain affinity.

Luckily, their website includes the following advice:

Q. What if I, too, am a Ratbastard?

1. Remain calm. The condition, although incurable, is not life threatening.
2. Strive to purchase a chapbook of the aforementioned specimens, Rabid Transit immediately.

AM Dellamonica

Alyx and I both went to Clarion West in 1995. At the time she was the hot-shot who'd already been published in Crank! and I was the dumb kid who was wet behind the ears. She's still a hotshot. Her fiction has since appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Tesseracts, The Best of Crank, and at SciFi.com.

Whether she's writing about a modern day Dionysius, magical prairie dogs, or a teenage boy who gets a sex change operation and thus makes the team, she's always enviable.

Jessica Reisman

Jessica Reisman is another alumnus of the Clarion West class of 1995. She has been a number of things, including an art house film projectionist, house painter, blueberry raker, art director, high school dropout, teaching assistant, graduate student, and researcher. At Clarion she was the one with the beautiful prose.

Her first novel The Z Radiant, published in 2004 by Five Star Press, posits a society where people tailor reality to suit their whims.

Her story Threads is available at SciFI.com.

The Ampersand

Mission Statement

Your English is quite clear... She said, "Your synthetic aesthetic is a pathetic prosthetic." I thanked her. We kissed. She apologized, explained that she had changed her mind about everything. But, anyway, if you really loved me, you'd criticize me.

Founded in February 2001, Ampersand is a monthly literary journal with a critical/surrealist edge. Jesse Cohn's American Nihilism in American Beauty seems a fairly typical example of the journal's basic stance.

Jonathan Lethem

In his novel Amnesia MoonLethem turned his protagonist into a grandfather clock and made the transformation believable.

His work is no longer marketed as science fiction. He's the former editor of Fence,and his fiction has appeared in The Paris Reviewand been reviewed by The New York Times,but his work is just as speculative as ever.

A detective with Tourette's Syndrome, a college professor that falls in love with his lab experiment, and a nomadic psychic named Moon who can change the world with his dreams, all of these are Lethem's creations.

Influenced in unequal parts by Don Delillo and Philip K. Dick, Jonathan Lethem is Barry Malzberg's opposite.

Terence McKenna

Forget Timothy Leary, now it's Terence McKenna who is dead. He's on the outside looking in.

Terence McKenna spoke to the mushroom, to the Logos. The ideas he came back with after his trips, if they are even close to being correct, will reinvent the way we look at the world.

Time is running out. The end of history is imminent. The eschcaton! The eschcaton!

McKenna's True Hallucinations tells Terence's basic story in all of its weird glory.

Kathleen Juergens

Kathleen Juergens is out there on the front lines, using her art to challenge the worst of our world. She's got a strong voice, fast fingers that can find the chord even at the coldest protest, and a keen mind. Her lyrics are sometimes funny, but always biting. She is the real deal.

From Kathleen's website:

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." --Bertolt Brecht

I am a revolutionary folksinger who does not make a distinction between art and politics. My proudest performances have not been in concert halls, but out on the streets, at protests, on picket lines. I sing my testimony at public meetings, and some of my most popular compositions have been written in jail.

Howard Waldrop

Howard writes the most amazing stories. Mickey and Donald are the only survivors of the nuclear holocaust, an antique mechanical television from 1930 is picking up broadcasts from Mars, and the Dodo is back.

Howard Waldrop is tragically unknown. One of his story collections is entitled Howard Who?

Howard Waldrop is the best story doctor I've ever come across. At Clarion West in 1995 he made us all sit up straight and listen closely. He has a thick southern accent.

Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories was the first publication dedicated solely to the science fiction genre. The magazine was founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, widely acknowledged as the father of science fiction-the genre's prestigious Hugo Award was named for him.

In 1998, after a hiatus of several years, Amazing Stories was reborn and reinvented, and published the very best in science fiction short stories from well-loved authors such as Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Pamela Sargent, and so on...

In the summer of 2000, Amazing Stories died...again.

Let's hope it comes back.

Tim Jones

This slipstream writer from New Zealand has appeared in a variety of Australian magazines and journals, not the least of which would be Winedark Sea.

Tim's first book, a short story collection entitled Extreme Weather Events, came out in May of 2001 from HEADWORX Press:

"These are stories of travel and adventure. They deal with societies and individuals functioning - or failing to function - under extreme conditions. Looking back at the 20th century and forward at the 21st, Extreme Weather Events is a distinctive collection of New Zealand fiction."

Benjamin Rosenbaum

This speculative writer from Long Island now lives in Switzerland. He swears that his major in college (actually Brown University, but you shouldn't hold that against him) was not Urban Planning, but won't specify what, exactly, he did during those years other than quit writing.

Well now he's started again and his "Other Cities" series is currently appearing in Strange Horizons. Rosenbaum's work has also appeared in F&SF and Quarterly West.

3am magazine

"From 'cutting edge short fiction' to political satire and music reviews, 3am is a dream publication for the young, literary and clued-up, and it counter-balances nicely the London/New York publishing behemoth." - Bill Broun, The Times.

This e-zine takes a while to load but it offers a myriad of short stories, articles, and links. A good example of what 3am has to offer is this essay on the anti-naturals.

3 am also displays great banners for Viagra and various computer dating services!

Paul G. Tremblay

When he's not counting the bricks in the wall, teaching America's youth, or editing the legendary internet publication Chizine, Paul G. Tremblay can be found scribbling out visionary stories and creating worlds in advanced states of decomposition.

His collection Compositions for The Young and Old was published by Prime Books in 2004.

Martha Wells

Martha Wells is the fantasist behind the world of Ile-Rien.

Her first novel, The Element of Fire, was published by Tor in hardcover in July 1993, but The Wizard Hunters (HarperCollins Eos/May 2003) was the first book set entirely in Ile-Rien. The second book in that trilogy is The Ships of Air(HarperCollins Eos/July 2004) and the third is The Gate of Gods, which is to be released in November 2005.

Robin Catesby

Robin Catesby is a writer by nature, a webpage designer by trade, and Shopkeeper by default. Her story The Happy Jumping Woman is in Polyphony 5, her poem Celaeno was nominated for a Pushcart Award, and her adaptations of the Velveteen Rabbit have frightened children from coast to coast.

In her own words: My middle name, when I was little, was BunnyRabbit. Now it's blank, but I often fill in that blank with words that fit the moment.

Terry Hickman

This fantasy and science fiction writer has mastered the art of writing down her dreams; waking up and scribbling before her conscious mind is up and running she jots it all down. Her most recent accomplishment with this method was the scribing of the words:

"Three Outside the Skinny."

What does that mean? She claims not to know herself.

Seth Lindberg

Seth Lindberg's horrific fiction has appeared in publications like Brainbox, Denying Death, Gothic.net and in the infamous publication ChiZine. Lindberg is also famous for seeking a restraining order against his own endlessly revised, baroque, and perhaps even self-aware biography.

Lindberg's story "Seconds" is due to appear in the anthology Jigsaw Nation in 2006.

Ross E. Lockhart

From his website: Although frequently mistaken for a writer, Ross E. Lockhart is, in all actuality, a wronger.

Ross E. Lockhart has been known to write poetry, prose, essays, and naughty words on bathroom walls.

Ross E. Lockhart is the brawn behind http://www.apeshitmedia.com - the brains behind the operation is WildeyJenn.

Ross E. Lockhart awaits the day when gorillas wise up, throw off the yoke of submission, and deal with those damn, dirty humans once and for all. The letters that form the name "Ross E. Lockhart" can easily be rearranged to spell "Hares rock lots."

Joe Murphy

Joe Murphy went to Clarion West in 1995 and got his mind expanded. In fact his mind was expanded so far that he ended up with trouble from the authorities. We won't go into all the details here.

Joe Murphy is a wild writer with fingers that don't stop moving. His stories have appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, Abberations, and in Strange Horizons.

Jon Hansen

From his site:

Jon Hansen lives in the company of his wife Lisa, their small army of cats, and a few books. His writing has appeared in various speculative fiction magazines, anthologies, and online webzines since 1996. He's a member of SFWA, SFPA, the Unholy Army of the Minions of the Woodchucks of Darkness (SouthEastern Division, Third Cabal), and ALA. When not writing, his chief amusement is watching the cats keep an eye on the birdfeeder.

David Schwartz

David Scwartz writes about musical vaginas and Iron Ankles because he's that kind of strange.

In his own words: Will you know me then? I have blue eyes, but sometimes they are green. Does this help? I am older than The Electric Company but younger than Sesame Street. Have you figured it out yet?

Schwartz's stories will be published in a chapbook by Small Beer Press in 2006.

The Fiction of Douglas Lain
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