Sauter, Doris Elaine

views updated

SAUTER, Doris Elaine

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Home—Dallas, TX. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Overlook Press, One Overlook Dr., Woodstock, NY 12498.

CAREER: Journalist and freelance writer.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Gwen Lee, and author of introduction) What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick, foreword by Tim Powers, Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS: Dallas journalist Doris Elaine Sauter holds a strong interest in and familiarity with the horror and science-fiction literature genres, and she lectures on them frequently. She became friends with science-fiction author Philip K. Dick in 1972, and remained a close friend until Dick's death in 1983.

In 2000, together with fellow journalist Gwen Lee, Sauter edited a volume containing transcripts of in-depth interviews with Dick that were recorded six months before his death. Dick is well known in science-fiction circles as the author of such works as The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and his stories have been adapted into major motion pictures such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report. In her introduction to What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick, Sauter tells the story of her and Dick's friendship; Lee conducted the interviews. The book covers topics such as the details of Dick's writing process, information about a novel he was in the process of writing, and his enthusiastic reaction to scenes from Blade Runner, which was being filmed at the time.

Many critics felt that What If Our World Is Their Heaven? provides an inside look into the novelist's life and work. Bryan Baldus, a reviewer for Booklist, commented that "Lee's conversations with Dick provide a unique glimpse of one of science fiction's pantheon writers." The book was of special relevance to science fiction enthusiasts. New York Times Book Review contributor Gerald Jonas wrote that "anyone who has been drawn into the paranoid, hallucinatory premises of Dick's best fiction . . . will enjoy spending time with one of science fiction's most unconventional minds."