TLS, one page, 8.5 x 11, October 11, 1977. Letter to Mr. Hughes, in full: “Your letter to Dr. McNelly has been turned over to me to answer, regarding Part Two of THE UNTELEPORTED MAN. What Linda Herman says is true; material in Special Collections which lacks a copyright cannot be Xeroxed and sent out. However, it is now no longer true that a major publisher is interested in putting the whole book out (although Linda doesn’t know this; I haven’t gotten around to telling her). Bantam was interested, but my editor there, Mark Hurst, left them and so their interest died.
Part two of THE UNTELEPORTED MAN was written in 1964, a number of years after Part One was written—for Amazing/Fantastic, by the way, in response to a cover they had gotten and wanted to use. They needed a story to go with the cover, so they sent me a photo of the cover and I came up with 40,000 words, which was the maximum number they’d accept. Don Wollheim at Ace said he’d like an expansion to use as a novel, rather than 40,000 word novelette; however, Part Two did not please him, so he published the 40,000 word Part One (as you know) as one-half of an Ace Double.
As to the contents of Part Two, I’m afraid I really don’t remember what’s in it, except that the writing wasn’t very good, and I don’t blame Don for rejecting it. I really doubt if it would be worth your time to read it; I don’t think it’s worth my time, and I wrote the darn thing. It was what Don sourly called ‘an acid trip sort of space-out thing,’ and I guess it was. I was in a dry period when I wrote it and just couldn’t come up with anything worthwhile. Hope this letter will be of some help to you.” In fine condition.
The Unteleported Man had an unusual publishing history compared to other novels by Dick. After originally appearing in Fantastic Magazine in 1964, the story’s rights were then bought by Ace Books but Dick's subsequent revisions to bring the manuscript up to novel-length, as he explains here, were rejected and the original story was published in 1966. Its first novel publication was as one half of Ace Double G-602, bound dos-a-dos with The Mind Monsters by Howard L. Cory.
In 1983, the expanded 80,000-word story was published by Berkley Books. Dick had been revising the material to include his original 1965 expansions—some pages of the 1965 manuscript were missing, leading to continuity problems—before he died in March 1982, leaving the revision incomplete. The original story was published, with Dick's revisions, in 1984 as Lies, Inc. The missing pages were found and published in 1985 in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter #8.
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