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75 www.hplusmagazine.com ways, those are elements that are innate to this very strange technology — this gigantic pile of sentences stuck between two hard covers, that someone makes this incredible commitment to read. It's a bizarre commitment, very unusual the first few times you make it — to just sit and follow, in order, each of these sentences and make the artificial reality come to life yourself by reading. It's a crazy technology, very specific and weird. Now may not be the time to take it for granted. Instead, maybe we should point out that by doing this, you do achieve a kind of weird mind meld. eD: There are a number of Phil Dick-ian moments in Chronic City where we're on the edge of realizing that something we've been taking for reality is a construct or is a convenient fiction. There's a palpable sense that recognizing this construct to its fullest extent would thrust you one into the cold vacuum of space. at the same time we are immersed in more and more media constructs every day. So as we edge closer to the anxious recognition of the reality construct, there are also more technologies of distraction that try to cover that over or displace it. Jl: The reason I tend to write from the complicit point of view is I'm always struck by the deeply personal nature of the alliance we make with these opportunistic distraction mechanisms, the substitute realities that are offered to us, the way that we build ourselves into them. And that's why I always think that Dick was such an insightful writer — because he always took it personally. He was always aware of his own wish- fulfillment impulses, his own yearning to be consumed and seduced. And it's why his role as a fiction maker and as a liar was allied to his fascination and distrust of fictional realities, of marketing realities, of commercial realities and political realities — because he saw that they're rooted innately in storytelling and in emotional necessity. And that there are all sorts of things that turn out to be ideological all the way down to their bones — the family structures that we come up inside are themselves a form of storytelling, a form of myth-making and persuasion. We sell ourselves on versions of existence that are tolerable. We're all marketing. eD: Towards the end of your book, I sense a deep ambivalence about the necessity of consoling fictions. Right next to the rage and the desire to expose the machine is a complicit adoption of conventional realities and more constructive views. Jl: Absolutely. What are the tolerances for the exposure of sustaining fictions in any given life? At some point, you're going to settle. You're going to make a snow globe and live inside it. Erik Davis regularly posts to www.techgnosis.com. His most recent book was The visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual landscape. The Philip K. Dick Collection, edited by Jonathan letham http://www.amazon.com/Philip-K-Dick-Collection/dp/1598530496/ref=sr_1_4?ie=uTF8&s=books&qid=1255392808&sr=1-4 P.K. Dick Official Site http://www.philipkdick.com/ Jonathan lethem Chronic City http://www.jonathanlethem.com/chroniccity.html resources