DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF PHILP K. DICK?

A controversy is growing around the publication of the novel The Owl in Daylight by Tessa Dick, last wife of Philip K. Dick, that claims to be a reworking of the book the revered author was working on at the time of his death in 1982. In an interview in Self-Publishing Review, Tessa Dick states her case.

“I started writing The Owl in Daylight when some of Phil’s loyal readers begged me to write it. I had (somewhat foolishly) posted a comment on a blog about the Owl that I knew the story and could write it. This was followed by pleas that I do so at once. I attempted to express the spirit of Phil’s proposed novel, without using his plot or the one character that he had created. Phil had written very little about this novel. In fact, all that has been found is a letter that he wrote to his editor and his agent (same letter, two copies). It was very sketchy and did not even name any characters. It did mention Dante’s Inferno and the Faust legend. I did not use Phil’s ideas as he expressed them in that letter to his editor and his agent. He was going to have a great scientist design and build a computer system and then get trapped in its virtual reality. The computer would be so advanced that it developed human-like intelligence and rebelled against its frivolous purpose of managing a theme park.
In the conversations that we had shortly before Phil’s death, I couldn’t convince him that a computer system would have to be designed and built by a team of experts in different fields, such as one expert in graphics, another in animation, one for hardware, one for software and so forth. I have read that Doris Sauter published an alternate plot involving a musician and aliens, but I did not read her book and did not use her ideas. The Owl in Daylight is my concept of what Phil’s novel should be. I relied heavily on Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The plot is loosely based on Phil’s life, which will become more apparent in the sequel, The Owl in Twilight. Sometimes I do feel that Phil is communicating with me from beyond the grave, but that concept is too spooky for me to accept completely. It’s probably just that I knew him so well that I can think the way he did."

Not everyone is exactly happy about all this. The opposing case is succinctly stated by our pal Dr. Adder (although is makes clear his doctorate is primarily in bullshit.)

“She's not just using the title, but she is publicly representing the book as being based on Phil's story; arguably, if nothing else, the estate might be able to claim that she's intentionally creating confusion in the market and undermining the value of the "real" Owl in Daylight story outline that Phil set down in writing while he was alive. The ungenerous view would be that this may be a work of blatant corpse-fuckery, as when August Derleth wrote "posthumous collaborations" with HP Lovecraft, basing whole novels on some dashed-off sentence in HPL's notebooks. Her intentions may be much more noble, buuuut...It sounds like she's on the outs with the estate and I wonder if she's setting herself up for a big legal kick in the teeth if the estate deigns to take notice. Though it doesn't look like she's put his name on the book and has been cagier in the phrasing in the promo material on the publisher's site, calling it a "tribute" to Phil.”

If more unravels we’ll bring it to you.