The Secret Ascension - Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas

The Secret Ascension (1987) is an alternate history novel by Michael Bishop in which Richard Nixon is serving a fourth term as president and Philip K. Dick, reduced in this timeline to a minor cult figure whose work was suppressed, has just died. Or has he. The novel follows Lia Bonner, a Georgia psychologist, whose husband becomes entangled in events surrounding Dick's apparent posthumous reappearances, a growing political resistance, and the question of what Dick's fiction might have meant in a world designed to prevent it from circulating. Bishop writes in a mode that borrows freely from Dick's own methods: paranoia, institutional surveillance, slippery identity, and a reality that may be less stable than it appears. Later editions were retitled Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas, which is the novel's subtitle here. A knowing and affectionate tribute that holds up as fiction in its own right.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in maroon cloth boards with silver lettering on spine. New York: Tor, 1987. ISBN: 0312930313. #11059.
Fine in fine dust jacket.