 Five days a week, Ed Morris made the long commute back and forth between his home and his job, between Earth and due to his moon, planet Earth. Sci-Fi Radio presents an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Sales Pitch. Philip K. Dick is a great American novelist of the 20th century. He wrote over 40 novels and a bunch of other stuff. He is usually associated with science fiction, not wrongly. He spent most of his career published in that field and a lot of his work includes aliens and other planets and rocket ships. But he also is one of the most typical examples of how a great writer transcends category because his work seems to connect to critique of contemporary society. It's metaphorical, absurdist, surreal. He was the source for the movie Blade Runner which came out shortly after he died and in retrospect was the very, very first salvo in what became a kind of slow recognition and legitimation of his efforts and all his books are now in print and he's very famous. So it's that very rare happy ending in literary history where the forgotten writer or the marginalized writer becomes really important to a lot of people and very widely studied and read and enjoyed and unfortunately he wasn't around to be part of that. I first discovered Philip K. Dick when I was living with a friend at 18 years old. She gave me a copy of Scandered<|pl|><|translate|><|pl|><|translate|><|pl|><|translate|> and oh my god, there's sex and drugs and it's for adults and it's science fiction and I was just in love. It was just the best thing ever. I felt like I was being spoken to and I did that thing that Dickheads do. They go and they buy a giant stack of books and they read it like in a month. But it wasn't actually until I went to college. I had a teacher who taught Duandra's Dream of Electric Sheep in an American Literature class. I was basically coming to grips with our newly secular and cold world and how to stay human in the face of encroaching technology. I was reading literature and my escape from it was reading literature that was considered just sharingATHER head autonomously. but I think that construction tells us a lot about what we want. What we want is somebody who is on the edge, who has been up so high in the thin air that they've seen over the mountain, but they're also dizzy, you know, they also have some altitude sickness. He became my model for what sort of novels I wanted to write. And I wanted to be funny and scary and strange in exactly the same measures. My first aspiration was really, kind of, almost, it's, you know, embarrassingly silly that I just thought, if my books were just taken to be like the next best thing since he's not around, you know, kind of, you know, okay, like B+, Philip K. Dick novels, that was going to be good enough for me. I just wanted to write more of what he did. I was a pretty selfish person at 18 and 19 and 20, I'm not sure how unusual that is, I don't think particularly unusual, but it really was a slap in the face, this work, to say, you know, what are you doing? How are you living your life? I credit my marriage to Philip K. Dick in the sense that it gave me the ability to be empathetic enough to have a quality relationship. I credit my ability as a father to Philip K. Dick. Again, my dad wasn't particularly present, and Philip K. Dick's not a particularly good surrogate dad, but his books are, his art is a very good moral teacher. During the 60s, there used to be this thing that if you took LSD, your brain would change forever, and you could never go back. It crosses so many barriers of your involvement, it really sucks you into a reality that there's no distance, there's no aesthetic distance between it as you're reading it. That's the kind of literature that really interests me, literature that changes the way we live. music plays