Alembic co-founder Erik Davis has been thinking and writing about the visionary Californian science fiction writer Philip K. Dick since he wrote about PKD for his Yale thesis in 1988. This month, Davis returns with another series of lectures focused on a prophetic PKD novel. For this round, we will read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), perhaps best known as the novel that formed the basis for the Ridley Scott cult film Blade Runner (1982). The first lecture will present Dick’s work and life in the late 1960s, and lay out some of the major themes of the novel, as well as a more general discussion on “prophetic reading". Subsequent weeks will combine close readings of the novel with focused discussions sessions (only on-site participants will have access to the discussion). Weekly readings will consist of roughly 60-page chunks, plus optional secondary texts.
We will explore a number of themes found in Do Androids Dream, one of Dick’s most explicitly ethical novels. We will look at how Dick presents the vexed human relationship to both animals and humanoid machines; the pharmacological control of personality and emotion; the mechanization of empathy; the ontology of entropy; and the transformations of the Christ figure in an age of immersive “social" media. We will be reading the novel not so much as fiction or science fiction but as a prophetic lens on today’s polycrisis, aspects of which resonate uncannily with Dick’s philosophical and visionary concerns.
Tickets are available for the full series ($150) or the first, intro class only ($35). Purchasers, for both in person and online tickets, will receive access to the recordings of the lectures covered by their tickets. The recordings will be available for two weeks.
Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on alternative religion, media culture, the popular imagination, and the psychedelic underground. He is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com), and his next book is Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).www.techgnosis.com
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