Lee, Gwen

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LEE, Gwen

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Oceanside, CA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Overlook Press, One Overlook Dr., Woodstock, NY 12498.

CAREER:

Journalist.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Elaine Sauter) What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick, Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

In the fall of 1981, journalist Gwen Lee sat down for a series of conversations with her good friend and the visionary science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The talks continued up to within two weeks of Dick's death in the spring of 1982 and covered philosophy, music, writing, and anything else on Dick's expansive mind. At the time of his death, Dick was at work on plotting what he hoped would be his masterpiece, The Owl in Daylight, and had seen twenty minutes of the film Blade Runner, which was based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and would later give him a much broader posthumous reputation. Eighteen years later Lee's interviews were transcribed and published as What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer delighted in the "exuberant thought processes ricocheting around this book" and in the New York Times Book Review Gerald Jonas agreed that the interviews sing with Dick's "typical manic energy," allowing a look into "one of science fiction's most unconventional minds." Bryan Baldus of Booklist noted, "Dick's fans will enjoy seeing how he formulated his ideas and reading about his never-finished novel."