The PKDS Newsletter is a zine founded by Paul Williams shortly after Philip K. Dick passed in 1982. Williams wanted to shine a light on a neglected author. Williams had experience using zines to change culture as the founder of Crawdaddy, the first rock and roll zine, the forerunner of every punk, hip hop, and riot grrrl music zine to follow.
Fans who subscribed to the PKD Society Newsletter were often simply on the hunt for out-of-print editions, but Williams was the executor of Dick’s estate, and so had access to unique, unpublished material he used to make compelling zines. Notice, for example, in issue three, the first look at Dick’s then unpublished Exegesis, unfinished at his death, the demanding work he himself considered his most important writing.
(left) PKDS Newsletter, No. 9/10 (1986), "90 Minutes with Philip K. Dick" Audio cassette tape.
Here is an unusual special issue of the newsletter that came with a cassette tape. The tape includes previously unavailable excerpts from an October/November 1974 interview with Dick, and the author's own privately-recorded spoken notes for a novel in progress, circa August 1974.
Below are both covers for another special double issue, a two-sided pamphlet, with rare essays by Philip K. Dick, "Nazism and the High Castle" and "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes". These essays are relevant to one of Dick’s most important (and enigmatic) novels, The Man in the High Castle, recently made into a tv series.
Here is a zine in our collection that influenced PKD. “Kipple” is a sf fan term for unwanted or useless junk which seems to reproduce itself—a low-key, domestic manifestation of entropy. Dick was an early reader of Ted Pauls’s Kipple, which began in May 1960 and is based in Berkeley (where Dick lived at the time); PKD subsequently used the word in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and other novels. The term “kipple” is frequently but erroneously attributed to him. However, he only popularized it. Pauls first used the term for his zine, and other sf fans took a hand in refining its sf meaning.
Here is a working script for the first movie adaptation of Dick’s work, part of the rich PKD archive in the Pollak Library that contains rare first editions and manuscripts. The movie was considered something of a failure at first, though it has come to be considered a classic. When Paul Williams first published the PKDS Newsletter, the only PKD book still in print in the U.S. was a Harrison Ford fronted edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, re-titled Blade Runner, with the author's original title in tiny print underneath.
By the end of the PKD Newsletter’s run, many of PKD's titles were rapidly coming back into print. Williams's initial reason for the zine itself had been achieved.
Zines, by connecting and organizing the cognoscenti, help accomplish remarkable cultural transformations.
Ikarie is a fanzine from the Czech Republic. The issue features translations and analyses of works by Philip K. Dick. This serves as another fine example, like the zine Chernobylization from the end of the Star Trek section, of PKD’s rising global fame.
We hope you enjoyed our closer look at Star Trek and Philip K. Dick zines. These fandoms used zines not just to talk amongst themselves, but as a platform to convince others to join them…and it worked, keeping the show on the air with Star Trek…and proving that those out of print books should be reprinted with Philip K. Dick.
Now Spock is an alien everyone knows and new “Star Trek Universe” shows are still being made…and Philip K. Dick is considered simply one of the most important writers (of any kind) of the twentieth century, constantly republished and with numerous film adaptations of his work.
Zines contribute to remarkable cultural change.