Dick writes a short letter to Tony Hiss and includes the piece he is submitting for Hiss’s magazine The Real World. Hiss has apparently accepted a poem by Dick’s wife Tessa for the next issue and so Dick assures Hiss about his own hard work on this essay about Tony Boucher.

Tony Boucher was the editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction before he died of cancer in 1968. Dick wonders what kind of a world would let a man like Tony die of cancer. Dick paints a picture of Tony as a generous man ultimately scared of the universe. Dick’s first sale (his story “Roog”) was to Tony. No one understood that story at the time, but it went on to be taught in a college-level science fiction course. 

In a digression Dick goes on to say that his cat Pinky, who also died of cancer, and Tony were one and the same.

Phyllis Boucher was the wife of the late Anthony Boucher, editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Dick writes her a short note and includes the piece about her husband he submitted to Tony Hiss’s Sufi magazine The Real World. 

Dick met Henry Korman when Tony Hiss interviewed Dick for the New Yorker and brought Henry along. Henry and Dick discussed Sufism and Dr. Robert Ornstein’s work involving the parity between the two hemispheres of the brain. 

In a letter to Henry Dick tells him that he fell asleep after reading a Sufi magazine and had dreams of parallel universes, one in which he was a famous jet setter and another where he lived as a migratory worker in Mexico.

I don’t entirely understand the concept of the noosphere, but it dates back to the 1920s and the writings of Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Dick tries to connect the idea of the noosphere (some kind of next phase of the biosphere created by human cognition) to Ubik but he seems to be spitballing about what that connection really is.