OC Letters and Documents

Drawn from various sites around the web, various artifacts…speeches, letters, notes and documents…reveal PKD as he was and thought in the last decade of his life while living in the OC....

PKD's speech, "The Android and the Human," linked below is the speech PKD gave in Vancouver in 1972 before he had a break down and went into rehab and emerged to move to the OC. In his by turns brilliant and rambling speech, PKD claimed to try "to sum up an entire lifetime of developing thought."

In the following letters sent from PKD's apartment in Fullerton to the FBI, he outlines an alarming plot to plant codewords in science fiction novels. Here he is intricately paranoid.

In the letter below from 1973, offered for auction by Tessa Dick, PKD scrawls out that his fiancee, Leslie Busby, helped write A Scanner Darkly and is owed half the profits

Below is PKD's marriage certificate to Leslie Ann Busby in 1973

Below is a link to to a letter to Claudia Bush describing a dream he had from 1974. As expected, interesting dream.

Letter on a dream

Below is a link to a famous letter to the FBI in 1974 denouncing the Polish writer Stainslaw Lem as a communist plotting against the US.

Letter to FBI on Lem

Below is a link to a brief story PKD sent in a 1978 letter in which he meets himself (and a smug Harlan) on a bus.

Letter with brief story, 1978

Below is a link to a letter from 1979 to Charles Brown, editor of Locus, the news outlet for the sf field, describing his writing of VALIS, including a claim that he is assisted by a long-dead Kabbalah figure....

Letter to Charles Brown, 1979

Below is a link to a letter from 1981 in which PKD embraces and correctly predicts the success of Bladerunner.

Letter from 1981

Below is a link to letters written to a young fan at the end of PKD's life in 1982 from his Santa Ana condo. The letters show him to be engaging and kind-hearted.

Letters from Santa Ana, 1982