Jonathan Lethem

The body of work that established Dick’s reputation—his forty-odd realist and surrealist novels written between 1952 and his death in 1982—concerns itself with questions like “What is it to be human?” and “What is the nature of the universe?” These metaphysical, ethical, and ontological themes enmesh his work, even from its very beginnings in domestic melodrama, science fiction adventure, and humor, in an atmosphere of philosophical inquiry.

So, what happened to Philip K. Dick in 1974? Among the mysterious events he chews over in these pages, the first, dark precursor to his visions was a break-in at his home in San Rafael, California, in November 1971 when someone blew up the file cabinet in his office. Candidates range from drug dealers to Black Panthers to various clandestine authorities, a few of which undoubtedly had Dick on their watch lists. Dick never settled on a single explanation for the break-in, but his fascinated, terrified rehearsals of this event set the stage for the deductive explosion to follow. It was then that Philip K. Dick’s life began to resemble, as many have observed, a Philip K. Dick novel.

The writing in these pages represents, perhaps above all, a laboratory of interpretation in the most absolute and open-ended sense of the word. When Dick began to write and publish novels based on the visionary material unearthed in the Exegesis, he commenced interpreting those as well. So, as these writings accumulated, they also became self-referential: the Exegesis is a study of, among other things, itself.