Philip Dick was NOT "absolutely a child of Los Angeles" -- he was both absolutely and literally a child of Berkeley. He lived in Southern California for less than a decade of his life, and that at the very end. For the rest of it, he lived in the Bay Area.

Even if this weren't fairly apparent in his writings (his final trilogy very firmly deals with Berkeley intellectual attitudes), this is a surprising mistake for a journalist at all familiar with Philip to make: there are hardly a shortage of biographies. Even the least accurate gets his physical background more or less correct.

Why raise a fuss about it? While those of us who knew him have (unfortunately) had to steel ourselves to his interpreters simply making up "facts" about him, as you apparently have done here, to match their pet theories about his work, it never ceases to surprise and disappoint. And I can tell you from more than 25 years' experience that once this kind of factual error appears in print, interviewers will spend the next five years demanding of his kith and kin whether it is actually true.

So while this kind of careless error may not have repercussions for the journalist, it is most definitely harmful. Please correct it.

thanks for the review - I read a depressingly negative review in The New Republic, and was about to not even bother looking at Chronic City, even though I really liked Fortress of Solitude and Gun, with Occasional Music. I think I'll pick it up now, as soon as I finish Infinite Page Count.