THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER

1st.EDITION: In the GSM Collection Timescape, hb, 44066-7, b, 240pp, $15.50 (Powers)
UK 1st.: Gollancz, hb, 03220-0, Oct 1982, 254pp, L6.95 (?)


OTHER ENGLISH EDITIONS:


FOREIGN EDITIONS:

  • ttotaFrSmall.jpg (11170 bytes)
Denoel, pb, 356, 1997, ?,?(?){tr. into French as LA TRANSMIGRATION DE TIMOTHY ARCHER}

{For the best bibliographic info in French goto: www.multimania.com/ggoullet/pkdick/frames.html Thanks for the cover pix, Gilles}


Vote for your Fave PKD Story!  THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER. A beautifully, elegiac, and philosophically sophisticated piece of work. It encapsulates the sarcastic cynicism blended with utter yearning for belief and meaning that makes PKD's work so fascinating and moving. -- Steve Walsh, WA

Vote for your Fave PKD Story!   THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER (Bet you didn't get too many of those) -- Karen Stern, CA

Vote for your Worst PKD Story!   My least favorite is easy, THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER, though just my opinion of course. I know some people really like it. --Charles Broerman, VA


{The following is taken from Ken Lopez, Bookseller, online catalog, May 1997. As far as I know this ms is still for sale}:

7. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. (Published by Simon & Schuster, 1982). Carbon copy typescript, 286 pages, with corrections and changes by the author on 39 pages, plus author notes on two other pages. Together with the one-page (21 line) ribbon copy typescript for the "Author's Note," with several minor changes in Dick's hand. Together with ten discarded manuscript pages: pages 1-4 ribbon copy with the title handritten by Dick: "Bishop Timothy Archer" and more than 50 words added or changed by Dick; pages 5-10 carbon copy with one handwritten correction. And also together with four pieces of correspondence: a carbon copy of a letter from Dick to his editor, with a copy of the text used to epigraph the novel; a carbon copy of a letter from Dick to his agent, 2 pages, reflecting on and analyzing his own novel after rereading the first third of it; a 5 page letter from Dick's agent to Dick, along with one leaf with a six-line poem in Dick's handwriting; and a carbon copy, two pages, of Dick's response to the above. All fine.

In 1981, after enjoying for the first time in his career several years of relative commercial success, and having just published Valis and The Divine Invasion (Valis Regained), Dick signed a three- book contract with his hardcover publisher, Simon & Schuster, which included a small advance for his first mainstream novel to be accepted for publication by a major publisher, Bishop Timothy Archer. Dick had long struggled for and dreamed of mainstream success, or even mainstream acceptance, and Timothy Archer was a breakthrough for him. It came at the same time that Blade Runner was being filmed from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and seemed to represent the accomplishment of a degree of literary and commercial success that his supporters, and he himself, had long felt he deserved and which had been deprived him strictly on the basis of the marginalization of the genre within which he wrote.
As such, this manuscript represents some of the last writing Dick ever did for one of his own novels (as opposed to his journals and Exegesis). For the set of manuscripts: $9500

Science Fiction Review, May 1992    11:

THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER, Dick's last novel, is a fictionalization of the last few years of his friend, Episcopal bishop of San Francisco James Pike. Prior to his death in 1971, Pike had some odd experiences of his own, including messages from his deceased son via seance. Archer dies  in the novel, yet somehow lives on.{...}

{Charles A. Coulombe: "The Ghost In The Android" -- GSM xerox collection}


BGSU?

Dear Phil,

    {... ...}

    {... ...}

    ... A little earlier today I watched Bishop Pike on TV; he is a friend of ours, and in the interview he talked about Nancy and a little about me. This gave me an odd feeling. And last night, as I was going to sleep, I heard a voice which seemed to me at the time to be the voice of God speaking to me, telling me that things weren't so bad. A very optimistic person, God, and very practical {...} it said <<There she shall be taken upward and there she shall be repaid. And I have made her see the sea.>> I got up, wrote it down, found it this morning. It's not my style; I wouldn't use phononyms such as <<see>> and <<sea>> so close together. Strange. Anyhow, I guess it wasn't really the voice of God. Whatever it was, though, it made me feel a lot better. Help comes in unusual ways, as Avram Davidson would say.

{...}

(Later.) I just got a note from my agent telling me that Don Wollheim at Ace has bought the three chapters and an outline from me for $2500. This makes my third book sale in the last month, and I am very glad; now, perhaps, we can pay our way out of debt. {...}

{...}

Cordially,

Philip K. Dick

{PKD > Philip Jose Farmer, 11-14-1968}

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