The Dice Man

About the Author

Luke Rhinehart is the highly acclaimed author of six novels: The Dice Man, Matari, Long Voyage Back, Adventures of Wim, The Search for the Dice Man, and The Book of the Die. He is also the author of seven screenplays, several based on his own novels. London’s Time Out called The Dice Man “The most fashionable novel of the early 1970s”, and in 1995 a BBC production named it “One of the fifty most influential books of the last half of the twentieth century.” Loaded magazine recently honored it with the prestigious title “The Novel of the Century”. It has become an international cult classic, being continually in print for thirty years in half a dozen countries, and now enjoying a dramatic rebirth. A major television documentary, Diceworld, was made about Luke and the “Dice Man phenomenon” and aired on Channel Four in England in June 1999. It was presented at the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival in November of that year and at the New York City Documentary Festival in New York in June 2000. Canadian and English production companies produced a six-part dicing TV series for Canadian and UK television which was aired last year. For three years The Diceman Travel Show has appeared on the European Discovery Channel. The program is about two Englishmen travelling in England, Europe and the U.S. who cast a green die to determine where they go and what they do. In the last several years, three different stage plays either based on The Dice Man or using dicing as the centre of the story have been written and staged. The latest, Dice House, by Paul Lucas, opens in the late spring of 2001. Search for the Diceman, first published by HarperCollins in October 1994, has also been published in an additional four European countries. This sequel to The Dice Man tells the story of the Diceman’s son who is forced to search for his father, who disappeared twenty years ago. The conservative son sets out rejecting all that his father stood for, but his picaresque search, especially in one of his father’s still-existing Dice Communes, means that by the time he finally confronts his father he has been profoundly and hilariously changed. The Book of the Die, published by Harper Collins in 2000, is the “bible” of dice-living. It is a collection of essays, proverbs, parables, cartoons, poems, and options for dicing. All are intended to help free us from patterns which dam our lives – damning being considered undesirable. This is a Book of Wisdom and, as is true of any book of wisdom, contains a lot of bullshit. Not to worry. Luke is merely trying to introduce the human race to an entirely new way of looking at life and society and so shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Politicians are serious. You’re not one of them, are you? (from The Preface)