Tag: Philip K. Dick

Gregg Margarite of LibriVox, Iambik Audio, The Drama Pod, and SFFaudio has died

SFFaudio News

SFFaudio MetaI’ve just heard that Gregg Margarite, my good friend, and a friend to humanity, has died.

Here are the facts as I’ve been told them.

Gregg died of a sudden heart attack on Friday morning (March 23, 2012).

__

I’ve never used an emoticon in a post on SFFaudio. Emoticons, I thought, were for when words couldn’t be easily employed. And I figured that was never.

I was wrong.

If there ever was a day for a frowny face that day is this day.

:(

I became a friend of Gregg’s after listening to his recordings on LibriVox. I said to him that I wanted to be his friend because he was narrating so many of the audiobooks that I wanted to listen to. I told him that meant we had to be friends. And he believed me. And so we were.

We did several podcasts with Gregg. All of them were really fun. And, we were planning more. My last communication with him was about Philip K. Dick’s The Short Happy Life Of The Brown Oxford – which he wanted to narrate. Gregg wrote:

“I have 3 holy grails when it comes to PKD short stories, Brown Oxford, Electric Ant (not gonna happen in my lifetime) and Not By Its Cover.”

I was also waiting to hear his thoughts on the first episode of Black Mirror. I know he got it, but I don’t know if he saw it. I guess I’ll never know.

I told Gregg I had started listening to his narration of the novel Couch by Benjamin Parzybok. He asked that I tell him about it after listening. I won’t get that chance now.

Gregg was also planning on narrating The Ganymede Takeover, a novel by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson. I don’t think he’d actually started it yet though as I hadn’t yet sent him my copy.

The last update on Gregg’s site says that he’d recorded 205 hours, 58 minutes, and 30 seconds of audiobooks. Most of that was for LibriVox. I figure that’s one hell of a legacy.

In the many times we spoke I learned many surprising things about Gregg. He said he used to build “surrogate penises for Ronald Regan”, he was a musician, he was an artist and he was a fiction writer too (but under pseudonyms). I never learned his pseudonyms.

Gregg’s website, Acoustic Pulp, offers no comments section. So I invite anybody wishing to communicate any kind thoughts with Janine, Gregg’s wife, to comment below.

Update:
Mark Nelson has started a LibriVox forum thread.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Copyfraud by the Philip K. Dick estate for Philip K. Dick stories published in 1954 and 1955

SFFaudio News

I made this infographic for myself for while researching the Philip K. Dick stories published in the years 1954 and 1955.

I find it rather stunning to look at.

The data in BLACK all comes from the form filed on November 22, 1983 and submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office under Registration Number RE0000190631 (SEE THE ACTUAL SCANS HERE).

The RED and YELLOW highlights are my own notations.

Copyright Renewal RE0000190631 for Philip K. Dick stories published in 1954 and 1955 (the bullshit and the accurate)

As you can see the copyright claimants “Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick & Isa Dick” claimed 37 stories were published in 1955. This is false. Only the 12 stories were published in 1955. The remainder, all 25 of them (highlighted in RED), were actually published in 1954 in other magazines, books, or issues. The 12 stories that were genuinely eligible for renewal are correctly noted, the 25 submitted that were not eligible are false.

What do you make of that?

To me it looks like 25 cases of deliberate fraud. To me it looks like the public has been denied its rights to these stories for nearly three decades.

Maybe there’s a math whiz out there could tell us what the chances of making 25 honest clerical errors only in the 25 cases where the clerk’s client benefits, without, at the same time, making any similar mistakes in the 12 cases where a typo doesn’t accrue a benefit to the clerk’s client (namely in those cases where a story was actually eligible for a legal renewal).

What are the odds exactly?

Posted by Jesse Willis

X-Minus One: Philip K. Dick’s Colony

SFFaudio Online Audio

I guess I’m starting on another Dick kick. I’ve been thinking, and reading a lot of his short stories lately. Thanks in part to the two Blackstone Audio audiobook collections entitled The Selected Stories Of Philip K. Dick.

The first story in Blackstone Audio’s The Selected Stories Of Philip K. Dick, Volume 2 is Colony.

I’ve read Colony maybe a half dozen times over the years, I still find it utterly readable.

First published in the June 1953 issue of Galaxy magazine, Colony is a cleverly plotted one-note tale of paranoia and identity.

Robert Silverberg’s wonderful 1987 essay on it, entitled Colony: I Trusted The Rug Completely, points out how very far ahead of the reader Dick is. Dick indulges our expectations, teases us with a foreshadowing doom and still pulls off the unexpected twist ending. The story is also notable for inventing a couple of minor tropes; namely the Robot Door and the Robot Psyche Tester (both with emotive personalities rivaling that of their fellow human protagonists).

This is one of the few PKD tales given the old radio drama treatment.

Unfortunately, there were a few detrimental changes made to the 1956 X-Minus One adaptation. Maybe it’s the audio drama format that neutralizes much of the humor in Colony. It certainly pacifies some of the absurdities. And the 1950s script adds in an unnecessary bit of sexual harassment that’s absent from the original 1950s text (perhaps so as to have it better fit into the decade). On the whole, however, X-Minus One’s adaptation is still well worth listening to. It retains much of the dialogue and the anti-consumerism message, and it also retains the excellent and story-making ending.

Dick wrote, in regards to this story:

The ultimate paranoia is not when everyone is against you, it’s when everything is against you. Instead of “My boss is plotting against me”, it would be “My boss’ phone is plotting against me”.

Here’s the play:

X-Minus OneX-Minus One – Colony
Based on the story by Philip K. Dick; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 29 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: NBC
Broadcast: October 10, 1956
Colony tells the story of an advance research team scouting the planet Blue in the Aldebaran star system to assess what may be required to render this newly discovered planet habitable. Strange occurrences soon plague members of the scout team, as they are attacked by inanimate objects with the unmistakable intent to kill. It is soon discovered that some force, or entities unknown, have the power to mimic any conceivable object, rendering even seemingly benign items such as a belt, a bath towel, or even a weapon such as a blaster, instruments of murder.

Here are the original illustrations from Galaxy:
Colony by Philip K. Dick - illustrated by Ed Emshwiller
Colony by Philip K. Dick - illustrated by Ed Emshwiller
Colony by Philip K. Dick - illustrated by Ed Emshwiller

And here are the images and the audio combined into a YouTube video:

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #150 – NEW RELEASES/RECENT ARRIVALS

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #150 – Scott, Jesse, Tamahome, and Kristin (A.K.A Terpkristin) talk about recently arrived audiobooks, new releases and more.

Talked about on today’s show:

Scott’s recent arrivals, Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth and The Crack In Space, Futurama, Allan Kaster’s Timeless Time Travel Tales, “say that five times fast”, Jesse and Luke’s time travel podcasts Sfbrp 151 & 152, “mindblown”, Resurrection by Arwen Elys Dayton, “pen name?”, Theodore Sturgeon’s To Marry Medusa (A.K.A The Cosmic Rape), Tam thinks it’s random, Stephen on Goodreads liked it, Robert Silverberg’s short story Passengers is mentioned again, Gregory Bear’s Primordium (Halo: The Forerunner Saga, #2), Kristin is a recovering Halo player, Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein (1949), in the year of Pearl Harbor, a fifth column, “I got nothin”, Dieter Zimmerman’s Brad Lansky And The 4D-Verse audiodrama |READ OUR REVIEW|, good audio like Ruby, Against The Light by Dave Duncan, “here’s one for the haters”, Them Or Us (Hater, #3) by David Moody, Hater (Hater, #1), |READ OUR REVIEW|, “that review still gets comments”, Kristin thinks Gerard Doyle is a good narrator, Farewell To The Master by Harry Bates — it inspired The Day The Earth Stood Still, “is there a theremin?”, Ben Bova and Bill Pogue’s The Trikon Deception, Scott likes Bova’s Grand Tour series, Pogue was an astronaut, “how do you go to the bathroom in space?”, Jesse’s new releases, The Comedy Is Finished by Donald Westlake will be the next readalong, Audiogo sells BBC audiodrama and audiobook mp3s, a new A Princess Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs audiobook, narrated by Scott Brick, hope the movie is good, no nudity, is David Stifel (“That Burroughs Guy“) upset?, he appeared on Sffaudio 137, Tam likes Scott Brick narrating the John Corey books like Plum Island by Nelson DeMille, “wise ass detective”, Philip K. Dick’s Upon The Dull Earth And Other Stories, Jesse helped spur that into creation, now we pick random interests, The Stand by Stephen King is 47 hours, it used to be half as long, Jenny couldn’t stay awake for Insomnia, Larry Niven’s A World Out Of Time, a corpsicle, The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson, revenge version of Robin Hood, Fritz Leiber, George Zebrowski space opera?, Mars Needs Books!, A Llull In The Compass, James Blaylock was a steampunk pioneer, Avram Davidson’s Rork!, Larry Correia does magic noir, Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary books seem like an older The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo (Generation Loss and Available Dark), Lev Grossman’s review of book 2, “she’s boiling hard”, The Odyssey narrated by Gandalf, Tam wasn’t super excited by Peter F. Hamilton’s A Quantum Murder (Greg Mandel, #2), Kristen gets converted to superheroes with Wildcards #1 edited by George R.R. Martin, Heroes, Elmore Leonard’s Raylan, Justified tv show, cross breeding from book to tv, psychotic nurse, short descriptions, Elmore’s 10 rules of writing, he likes Margaret Atwood’s descriptive powers, never write ‘Suddenly’, Tam likes Jennifer Pelland’s ebook Machine, James Patrick Kelly told Jennifer “don’t take out the vomit“, you may find it ‘squicky‘, Jennifer Blood comic in one minute, Scarlet comic in one minute, chicks that kick ass, copying or transferring a consciousness, what good does a copy do me?, transporters?, Think Like A Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly (dramatized version linked here — nope it’s gone), Kristin and Jenny need to watch Star Trek, Norman Spinrad, The Doomsday Machine, a sock dipped in cement, Old Man’s War, Tam’s favorite 1st 2 chapters are in Altered Carbon, hard boiled future

pelland-machine

Posted by Tamahome

To The Best Of Our Knowledge: Philip K. Dick

SFFaudio Online Audio

To The Best Of Our KnowledgePublic Radio International’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge has a new Philip K. Dick special up. Here’s how they describe it:

Nobody blurred the line between his life and his literature more than the legendary science-fiction author, Philip K. Dick. And that’s only fitting since one of the major themes of his fiction is, “What is reality?” This week we take a look at the life and work of the man who’s been described as “one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the twentieth century,” as we commemorate the 30th anniversary of his death.

And here’s the list of speakers:
Jim Fleming, Steve Paulson, Anne Strainchamps, Jonathan Lethem, Anne Dick, Umberto Rossi, and David Gill.

Here’s the audio |MP3| but I’m afraid the file isn’t directly HuffDuffable (though it does readily download).

[via TotalDickHead and BoingBoing]

Posted by Jesse Willis