Index > Robert A. Heinlein > Funny you mentioned him > You weren't asking me but > And of course > Re: And of course > Dick's Naturalist phase

I knew about those books but I've never read them.

Posted by Joe (@joe) on Jan. 8, 2026, 7:25 a.m.

Confessions of a Crap Artist was published during his lifetime, that’s the only one. “The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike” is an intriguing title that I’m surprised isn’t one of his SF books.

Michael Bishop wrote a novel called Philip K Dick Is Dead, Alas (originally released as The Secret Ascension, but the other title was his preferred title) that I remembered seeing described as an alternate history where PKD was known in his lifetime for his realistic novels and not his SF. I like Michael Bishop so I plan to read it after I get around to some of those posthumous PKD books. Looking at the Amazon blurb, I guess there’s alot more to the plot:

It is 1982. The United States has a permanent Moonbase. Richard M. Nixon is in the fourth term of the “imperial presidency.” And an eccentric novelist named Philip K. Dick has just died in California.

Or has he? Psychiatrist Lia Pickford, M.D., is nonplussed when Dick walks into her office in small-town Georgia, with a cab idling outside, to ask for help. And Cal Pickford, a longtime Dick fan stunned by the news of his hero’s death, is electrified when his wife tells him of the visit.

So begins a sequence of events involving Cal in the repressive Nixon regime, the affairs of an aging movie queen, a hip but frightened Vietnamese immigrant and an old black man who works as a groom–all leading up to a fateful confrontation between Dick, Cal, and Nixon himself on the moon.