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Philip K. Dick

((IMAGE FROM FACEBOOK PAGE))

Updated at 2:01 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016 to note that Daniel Abella was director of the 4th annual Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival.

This column about Philip K. Dick phenomena will run occasionally, depending on what the ether yields.

HOLYOKE -- Hide your replicants: The "Blade Runner " sequel is set for release on Jan. 12, 2018.

Also, the video game industry finally has addressed the needs of those who have always wanted to feel like they were tumbling on LSD with science fiction author Philip K. Dick.

Variety.com and numerous other online sources reported Thursday Warner Bros. will release the sequel to Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" in about two years time. The rainy-neon-noir, cult-fave came out in 1982.

The untitled movie will star Ryan Gosling, with Harrison Ford reprising his role as Rick Deckard, a special police officer, or blade runner, charged with hunting down supposedly troublesome androids known as replicants. "Blade Runner" was based on Dick's 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

Warner Bros. has set a Jan. 12, 2018, release in North America for Alcon Entertainment's sequel to Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner." Denis Villeneuve is directing, Variety.com said.

"The story, written by Hampton Fancher (co-writer of the original) and Michael Green and based on a story by Fancher and Scott, continues several decades after the conclusion of the 1982 original -- which was set in a dystopian 2019 Los Angeles with constant rain," said the Variety.com story by Dave McNary.

In 1993, "Blade Runner" was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, the Variety.com story said.

Production on the "Blade Runner" sequel is scheduled to begin in July, according to a Pastemagazine.com story Jan. 26 by Myah Anglin.

"Blade Runner," Anglin wrote, "has also been deemed one of the greatest movies and science fiction films of all time and a major influence on the cyberpunk and dystopian genres."

The movie and its source story explore one of Dick's favorite themes, asking, what part of what we're experiencing is real?

Which leads to "Californium."

A video game released Wednesday and packaged as a tribute to the life and works of Dick, "Californium" puts the player as a writer trapped into shifting realities.

"Will you find what's behind the simulacra?" the game description says. (Simulacra is the plural of simulacrum, which means a superficial likeness to something, such as an effigy. Dick wrote a 1964 novel titled "The Simulacra.")

Or as Wired.com headlined, "Always wanted to do LSD with Philip K. Dick? You'll love playing Californium."

Californium is produced by Darjeeling and Nova Production, edited by Arte France and published by Neko Entertainment.

Known as PKD by fans, Dick (1928-1982) wrote the books and stories made into movies such as "Total Recall," "Minority Report," "A Scanner Darkly," "The Adjustment Bureau" and "Paycheck."

"The Man in the High Castle," a novel by Dick published in 1962, is a hit Amazon.com television show while a Fox TV series based on "Minority Report" lasted barely a season before being cancelled.

And if you happen to be in England on April 23: Birmingham City University is holding "Philip K. Dick Day."

It's billed as a one-day conference dedicated to exploring "evolving conceptions of culture and the countercultural through the lens of the life and works of a countercultural figure who appears to be in danger of recuperation," according to philipkdickday.wordpress.com.

Proposals for 20-minute presentations at the conference (suggested topics include "Life-writing and counterculture" and "Cultural resistance") are being accepted for review until March 3.

Lastly: Spokesman Jonathan Carsten said the 4th annual Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival (Jan. 13 to 17 in New York City) was a smash. It featured 80 movies by creators from more than 20 countries. Daniel Abella was festival director.

"The festival went better than expected," Carsten said in an email. "We ran two programs simultaneously, each theater holding 150 people for the weekend. The festival was well attended with over 1,000 people. People thought the movies were better than ever and the selection by country, ethnicity and gender was also noticed. The filmmakers enjoyed the communal feeling 'we are in this together' attitude.

"At the pre-festival party on January 13th, we Skyped with Golden Globe winning actress Joanna Cassidy (Zhora from Blade Runner) where she discussed her film What Could Have Been: Snake Dance and on opening night David Hartwell, friend and editor of Philip K. Dick opened the festival with some kind words. Unfortunately, we just learned that David passed away a few days ago and the festival sends its condolences to his family. Screenings included The Art of Human Salvage, Chatter, Chronos, The Incident, Counter Clockwise and The Mill at Calder's End.

"The panels were all great and include one about Philip K. Dick and The Man in the High Castle with Adi Tantimedh, Paul Levinson, Richard Doyle and Noam Roubah. There was a panel following the screening of the documentary Sympathy For The Devil: The True Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment with director Neil Edwards and a panel on Travis: The True Story of Travis Walton with featured Travis Walton on Skype, Peter Robbins and Lee Spiegel," Carsten said.

Here is this installment's randomly selected quote from "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick":

"Piercing the veil, seeing into the heart of our (present) world, I saw Urbs-Roma; it underlay/lies; it is the core, the seed within the fruit; what our world actually is once all the layers of delusion are stripped away. Seed, then, equals Being. Rotten fruit or veil equals surface appearance. Only the external trappings (the names) have been changed." (p. 79).