philip k dick C/D, S+D

My faves: 'A Scanner Darkly' (captures the paranoid mindset of the heavy drug user better than any 'straight' nov), 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' (terrifying in places), 'Ubik' (his wildest and most exciting bk), 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said', 'A Maze of Death', 'Martian Timeslip', 'Time out of Joint', 'Valis', 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', and prob. the last volume of his collected short stories. Lawrence Sutin's biog is useful and open- minded, too.

There are quite a few dud Dicks, and some bks that only half-work, but it's gd to discover them for yrself (as kind of like a 'control' measure for the 'real' PKD). 'The Man in the High Castle' is his most 'respectable' bk - well-written, a clever idea - but for me it lacks the wild, visionary flavour of his best writing.

Best American author of the Twentieth Century? No; I'd go for Faulkner but would accept arguments for Fitzgerald or Dos Passos as valid.

PKD update! I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon - first collection of PKD short stories I've read & fairly much living up to all the accolades attributed to them etc etc etc. The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer - latter Dick & very, very affecting to me - completely¹ unSF meditations on death, with random touches of the pre-Socratics, the sort of heretical-Christian fragments Beckett was so fond of, & the least irritating wranglings of Dante & Goethe I've seen in a long time. & his San Francisco rings true, to boot.
& just stayed up last night to read through Clans of the Alphane Moon (& something I'm glad I approached after becoming acquanting with PKD etc) - alternately hilarious &, er, provocative (=> heh my current mental state=the book). Grebt ideas & the like (when I clicked to the Clan names), + Lord Running Clam is possibly the bestest PKD character ever!

& what did people think about PKD's "Valis" experience being probably the "climax" (etc) of Linklater's "Waking Life"? If anything else much better than the Crumb interpretation (thanx to duane).

¹this is untrue, obv.

(haha re : my earlier comments (obv?))

GenPets! Mass-produced, bioengineered pets, available today!

i wonder if the film version will make the ending less ambiguous.

i could imagine that one working out much more easily than ASD.

Nice enough story about PKD and his influence, based around interviews with his daughter Ilsa. Talks about the Blade Runner rerelease, the Giamatti biopic etc.

Nice piece - Giammatti thing sounds interesting. No mention of the Bill Pullman pseudo-biopic...?

There was also a piece in the New Yorker recently although I didn't trust it (anything that claims that VALIS is his masterpiece is suspect in my view.)

it is!

See!

Sci-fi crank 'em out one after another Dick >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> kooky am I crazy or not religious-o Dick.

hey, I read Vulcan's Hammer and Cosmic Puppet and Doctor Futurity this year: I'll take the kooky nutbag over the typewriter-monkey responsible for those three

i love UBIK b/c its best-of-both-dicks

I think the final trilogy of VALIS, Divine Invasion, and Transmigration of Timothy Archer are tops, and the ones I keep rereading all these years. They're the things that got me into philosophy in the first place, and that's not too bad a place to start.

Haha the mind fucking boggles at the idea of people whose start in "philosophy" is the Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Naming three of the weakest books he wrote in that period, doesn't change the fact that almost everything else he wrote then is leagues more interesting than The Divine Invasion or VALIS.

To be honest, I exempt the Pike "bio" because it is pretty unquestionably the best non-sci fi book he wrote. But compared to Dr. Bloodmoney, UBIK, The Martian Time-Slip, Now Wait For Last Year, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Three Stigmata of Palmet Eldritch it's no contest at all.

perhaps I'm stupid or liquored up or both, but VALIS presented me w. some provocative ideas that had never occurred to me before -- or at least a new and interesting formulation/articulation of paranoid gnosticism that i'd never previously considered.

Naming three of the weakest books he wrote in that period, doesn't change the fact that almost everything else he wrote then is leagues more interesting than The Divine Invasion or VALIS.

it isn't just those three that drove me nuts. i mean, i adore time-slip, stigmata, ubik, transmigration, even eye in the sky... which i'd hardly call sci-fi crank 'em out! they're - i imagine you agree with me - pretty thoughtful books.

what i'm getting at is that i don't feel like this is an either/or proposition. one isn't definitionally pro-VALIS and anti crank 'em out. i like both, and enough to have read +/- 80% of pkd's novels. that i prefer strangely-executed drug-addled mystical fantasy to high-concept space-time wackiness doesn't devalue my opinion or stance on the matter.

Placing a large(r) emphasis on late and kooky x-tian Dick basically = being more interested in placing Dick in a certain continuum of metaphysical fiction writers rather than as just another, more talented and profilic than most admittedly, sci-fi writer. It's telling to me that a most people I've talk to, met, or read who loved loved loved those last three tend to be largely uninterested in other sci-fi writers or the history of science-fiction, but instead are interested in viewing Dick as being some sort of unique genius who somehow trancends the limitations of his chosen genre. That's ignorant at best and downright insulting at worst. And yes it is a viewpoint which is NOT at all trustworthy to me.

alex thats TOTALLY unfair

and not really confronting remy's point which is that its totally possible to love both the gnostic trilogy and the rest of dicks oeuvre

I wasn't confronting Remy's point. I was simply explaining my point above "anything that claims that VALIS is his masterpiece is suspect in my view".

Oh, finally, glad to get someone's opinion on Divine Invasion. Just read it last week. It was better than meh, but I didn't enjoy it as much as all his books that were made into crappy movies. During the same week, I also read Vonnegut's Jailbird and enjoyed that novel much more than PKD's Divine Invasion.

I also was disappointed to learn that the Kilgore Trout who wrote Venus on the Half-Shell wasn't Vonnegut's alter-ego/psuedonym. I spent > 20 years thinking that Vonnegut had penned it!

I've read pretty everything PKD wrote, and while I wouldn't call VALIS his "masterpiece", because I don't think he wrote a "masterpiece", I love it more than anything else he wrote.

To respond to Alex in SF from earlier: it is true that I haven't read much other science fiction: I pretty much went from PKD in high school to Plato and Aquinas, who I first encountered in PKD, and now I'm a "professional" philosopher. Alex in SF is probably right that I'm an oddball philosopher as a result, but actually I know a lot of philosophers in the US at least who are, or at least were, huge PKD fans. One of these days I'll get around to teaching a seminar in which I work something from PKD in---for now the best I can usually do is refer to The Matrix.

Hang on to the dream! A couple of years ago Max and I took this class together:

378. LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY: DELEUZE, DERRIDA, AND DICK.

This class will attempt to determine if the post-structuralist insights of two of the 20th century’s greatest literary philosophers can provide a framework adequate to interpret that century’s greatest science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. Students should be willing to encounter abstract theory, film, and dizzy fiction. May be used as a Group IV course.

Fineman

Holy shit, I'd love that class, mostly because I'm totally that guy

you know what would've been cooler?

http://www.domdeluise.com/gallery/domcasual.jpg

"deleuze derrida and dick" is still probably the best class ive ever taken at any level of education anywhere

at least in terms of pure life-chaning wtfness

^^^that class sounds like exactly ("that century’s greatest science fiction writer". . . yeah riiiiiight) what I am lamenting above^^^

fwiw the prof is a sci fi fan but honestly alex id like to hear who you think is better??

sorry that came out a little aggro, i just mean that i dont think its a weird or ignorant claim to make at all!

lem, delany, moorcock, butler, le guin, herbert, bradbury, heinlein, asimov, sturgeon, vogt, bester, cordwainer smith, etc etc

^^ many of whom are subject to the same "transcending the genre" bs that alex in sf is complaining about upthread ... same reason i left, say, borges and atwood and john collier off the list

Tiptree, Silverberg, Brunner, Malzberg, Ballard, Kuttner/Moore, Knight, Clifton, Blish, Budrys, Kornbluth, etc

To be fair Dick did have more very good novels than most of these folks did, but I don't think he was the best writer of this group by ANY stretch of the imagination and I don't think any of stories would place in the top twenty of this group and maybe one of his novels might make a top ten.

When I say this group I am including a number of names from Vahid's list as well.

esp. Sturgeon and Bester who were NOT lucky enough to be able "transcend the genre" and consequently haved slipped in and out of print for the last 50 years despite writing novels and stories which wipe the floor with just about everything.

I'm kind of in both camps - as a fan of much of what moonship and alex have listed and also as a big booster of Dick's final "trilogy". Altho I can totally see Alex's point that Dick's best, more trad-sci-fi novels (Ubik, Stigmata, Maze of Death, etc.) are actually better written... I re-read Divine Invasion recently and it definitely rose in my estimation. But this is largely because Dick's own pet interests in theology/philosophy mirror my own, so it tends to resonate a little more. There's also something more nakedly emotional about that trilogy, they seem to come from a much deeper, personal place in Dick's psyche (whether that makes them better books is totally debatable, but they do have a heavier emotional impact on ME, as a result of their thematic content).

oh I think Bester totally transcended the genre (as has Moorcock on many many levels, among others).

I have yet to read a full-length Sturgeon novel that really blew me away though (feel free to recommend one!) What I've read has been really mired in 50s psychoanalysis - fairly common for the period, and not bad, but kind of Twilight Zone-ish.

(bear in mind I consider the Twilight Zone to be one of, if not THE best TV show ever so that's not entirely a knock)

Shakey read the (unfortunately titled) The Cosmic Rape.

I'll hunt that down... I read um, something with Medusa in the title and a bunch of his short story omnibus collections.

everyone knows sturgeon wrote for twilight zone, but did you know he wrote for star trek too?

I was aware of both of those tidbits yes

how about frederik pohl, he's pretty badass too

More Than Human is a classic, too, but I can see that some would find (the last section anyway) slightly dated.

Strangely I've never read a Pohl novel not written in conjunction with someone else.

sorry i didnt mean to imply that i thought dick was unequivocally the best sf writer of the century, nor that there arent plenty who had better novels (tho seriously fuck asimov, heinlein & vogt)--just that to call dick the "greatest sf writer of the 20th century" isnt exactly a spurious claim. i mean it sounds to me like this is all backlash--and alex i totally understand what youre saying, the whole "transcends his genre" stuff is crap and far too prevalant (esp. because dick was in a lot of ways one of the worst stylists in his genre). i mean i guess i can see why youre suspicious but it seems silly to automatically disqualify anyone as a sci-fi fan because they liked VALIS or think dick is the best in the century

btw seeing this at the top of new answers warms my heart:

philip k dick C/D, S+D [Started by toby, last updated 15 seconds ago] 44 new answers
who in this bitch reads robert jordan? [Started by di smith (lucylurex), last updated 1 minute ago] 33 new answers
Young Kirk n Spock + Lost = new Star Trek movie [Started by Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), last updated 2 minutes ago] 37 new answers

I am a big Pohl fan and have long considered Jem the best novel written about space colonization ever (besides maybe Red Mars, which takes a couple pages from it anyway). Space Merchants is also fantastic (sequel slightly less so).

"i mean i guess i can see why youre suspicious but it seems silly to automatically disqualify anyone as a sci-fi fan because they liked VALIS or think dick is the best in the century"

I don't think liking VALIS is a disqualification! I just think liking VALIS best makes me distrust your opinions! And stating unequivocally that Dick is the best sci-fi writer ever (cuz really what other century would you pick if not the 20th) is pretty suspicious too.

I think the reason why I give Kornbluth slightly more credit for The Space Merchants than Pohl is that the Syndic is so fantastic too.

haha well there are those whod argue that wells or verne are >>>>>>>>>> than dick

also alex stop drinking haterade valis is good

I was gonna say there ARE a couple 19th century sci-fi writers (field is pretty narrow tho)

It's just okay (xpost)

b-b-b-but the headfuck mind control antics of "second foundation" were ripped so many times by philip k dick

fuck i robot then

you're right about half of my list is probably not better than dick but certainly more interesting than deleuze or derrida

2 u maybe

if Bester had managed to turn out more novels I think he'd definitely be at Dick's level of critical acclaim/popular recognition by now. Too bad Golem 1000 was so bad.

"if Bester had managed to turn out more novels I think he'd definitely be at Dick's level of critical acclaim/popular recognition by now."

Oh right ONLY writing two of the five or ten best sci-fi novels EVER and a half-dozen of the best stories ISN'T enough for you haha he had to toil non-stop for the next twenty-five years into an early grave!

demolished man >>>>>>>>>>> minority report

haha what can I say I am a demanding mistress

Bester's two masterpieces are easily better than a lot of Dick's books and stories, no question

As good as his novels are, I think Bester's stories are even better. I think only Tiptree can really make a claim to writing as many masterpieces.

haha I checked this morning and the Sturgeon novel I ref'd upthread IS actually the Cosmic Rape, its just that the edition I have re-titled it "To Marry Medusa".

Well if that wasn't your bag def. try More Than Human. It's a quick read and well worth it.

Is there a Phillip K Dick book which you would recommend to me, who has never read him? Especially if you have read a bunch, and wish you had read a specific Phillip K Dick book FIRST?
I was tempted to read VALIS first, as Robert Anton Wilson has written on it's similarity to RAW's COSMIC TRIGGER - or would that be like listening to Bitches Brew before you listened to Kind of Blue?

Valis is a good starting point in the sense that it's not pure SF, but be warned that it's completely batshit insane. Ubik might be an easier way in.

or a collection of short stories, or something like Clans of the Alphane Moon

"A Scanner Darkly" is the best beginning point if you are thinking you might only read one book (you won't if you read it and like it, but at least if you don't like it at all you can probably stop there cuz it's probably the one book that's in everyone's top ten.) If you feel like you are going to probably read everything eventually start with something like "Clan" or "Time Out of Joint" or "Martian Time-Slip" or "Now Wait For Last Year", something early to middle sixties and then work your way around to the later sixties and fifties and then the seventies stuff like "Flow My Tears" and "Scanner" and then finally to the "Valis" trilogy and then read the fantastic biography "I Am Alive And You Are Dead".

You may find this thread helpful:

POX Phillip K Dick

Three Stigmata of Palmer Erdrich first.

I'd prop it up as the PKD with the best mix of WTFness/headtrippiness/gnosticism/actual comprehensible plot

Oh I'd just pick up whichever one seems most interesting to you, but I like things to not be that preplanned.

For example, I picked up The Simulacra first. It's the only novel I've read of his (but I've read all his short stories, A++), and it was way crazy and entertaining and WHOA. And I don't see it mentioned anywhere on this thredd.

I dig PKD, but I couldn't get into Counter Clock World. Folks reguritating their morning coffee into cups and saying "Mmm" was more than I could wrap the ol' skullprisoner around.

Scanner Darkly is a decent first pick. I'd also think maybe Radio Free Albemuth (as a stepping stone to Valis) is a good idea.

Of his "realistic" (that is, non-sf) novels, my favorite is BY FAR "Confessions of a Crap Artist."

also, DOCTOR BLOODMONEY is all sorts of awesome.

Richard Pinhas liked it to much he named a Heldon track after it!

hmmmm, hadn't heard about this:

<i>Film adaptation
Main article: Radio Free Albemuth (film)
John Alan Simon is producing, writing, and directing the upcoming film adaptation for Radio Free Albemuth. Alanis Morissette stars in the lead role. A release date has yet to be determined. Filming took place during October 2007 in Los Angeles at Lacy Street Studios and multiple locations for the film version which will be released in the summer of 2008. Phillip Kim was the executive producer.</I>

martian time slip is also a very good "first Dick" read because it explores some of his main themes within a fairly "straightforward" sf context.

Counter Clock World is definitely bottom tier. Simulacra is great as Abbott noted, I also really like We Can Build You for classic PKD. My favorite more esoteric one is Radio Free Albemuth.

ubik too

you should all read the PKD bio "Divine Invasions." A+ even if it does read like fiction half the time.

Divine Invasions is one of the best books I ever found at one of my favorite stores in NYC that i never go to, Mercer Street Books.

Where is the love for The Man In The High Castle? I thought this was by far his best. Though love Ubik and Palmer Eldritch too, think those are the three to go for. I found Valis beyond dullsville.

Piece on Dick's last days in Orange County (doesn't add much for folks who've read his bios, but still):

http://www.orangecoastmagazine.com/article2.aspx?id=15622

For all his psychological maladies and quirks, though, Dick remained a focused, professional writer. “He would get up at 10, have some coffee, write until 3 in the morning, sleep for five hours, and then get up and do the same thing the next day,” Sauter recalls. “He’d switched to using an IBM Selectric typewriter, and he was a lightning-fast typist. I don’t recall him doing a lot of rewriting. The first draft was always very readable.

“After he passed away, people would always ask me, ‘How sane was Philip K. Dick?’ Anybody who could wake up at 5 a.m. like he did and play hardball on the phone with his agent in New York—I mean, how crazy could he be? There’s been a tendency to picture him as a psychological mess, because of the suicide attempts and so on. But Phil had the ability to put aside whatever he was feeling or thinking to do business.”

the detail that scanner was the first novel he had written without speed is kind of ... well, i suppose i knew that, i just hadn't ever seen it put down as that kind of straight fact before.

Pretty sure it's mentioned in one of the bios.

the two biographies i read don't really agree on quite how sane he was: but one of those was the awful emanuel carrere one. (jacket quote: "philip dick, like edgar poe, seems to be being placed more and more in the unenviable condition of being appreciated by the French.")

xp i think the relative facts are presented in 'divine invasions' but i don't think at any point sutin says "btw, if you weren't paying attention, the novel dick wrote on pp164 is the first one he wrote without chemical assistance." actually, now i think about it, i think he kind of does.

I thought I Am Alive and You Are Dead was great but it was super-fucking depressing

How near are either of the biopics to being released?

"but one of those was the awful emanuel carrere one"

Oh I love that one! Who cares what the jacket quote sez?

I don't know that I've seen discussion of this anywhere on ILX, but it seems pretty huge and majorly WTF: they are making a Walt Disney animated feature based on a a PKD short story.

!!! will see.

[i]I Am Alive and You Are Dead[/i} is a biographical novel. Scenes or details are sometimes falsified.

dammit

Also this old article first published in the LRB that I've come across recently

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/burt01_.html

I've read the Tiptree bio. It is fascinating as well.

I'm partway through reading the collections of short stories, and King of the Elves was one of the most WTF - I hope Disney don't change a single thing...

The best PKD biography is still Paul Williams' one: Only Apparently Real

Start of a six part series on the LA Times site on PKD's life in Orange County. Good stuff, they're currently up to the third part.

Movie version of Radio Free Albemuth on the way. Starring Alanis Morissette and with music by Robyn Hitchcock.

The Exegesis is forthcoming:

In 1974, after a number of novels that explored the notions of personal identity and what it means to be human, Mr. Dick had a series of experiences in which he believed he had information transmitted to his mind by a pink beam of light. He wrote about these and similar occurrences in autobiographical novels like “Valis,” but also contemplated their meanings in personal writings that were not published.

“It’s something that he talked about and created a kind of amazing aura around,” Mr. Lethem said, “so that people have an image of it as if it’s some kind of consummated effort. ‘I’m working on my exegesis.’ But what he really meant was he was turning his brain inside out on the page, on a nightly basis, over a period of years of his life.”

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which has also acquired the rights to 39 of Mr. Dick’s previously published works and will release them next year, plans to release Volume 1 of “Exegesis,” which is about 350 pages, in the fall of 2011, and Volume 2, at the same length, a year later.

Wow! Awesome news.

can't wait to the wikipedia summaries of these!

I don't think this is a good idea tbh

altho I'm curious about the non-exegesis unpublished works

some of this was collected in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, right? Which I remember as being pretty unreadable and dull (though it has been over ten years)...

yeah pieces have been published here and there.

I guess if you are also excited to read rants posted on telephone poles by homeless schizophrenics then this will be right up yr alley

"Pamela Jackson, a Philip K. Dick scholar"

lol, cute. Really could care less about this, but the nearly complete canonization of Dick has truly been a wonder to behold.

I've enjoyed the exegesis excerpts I've read; I expect I'll enjoy the whole hit and caboodle as well.

It's still excerpts though, 700 pages out of 8,000 or whatever...

Whole thing feels like it'll be the equivalent to that Jung book that recently came out.

Sort of surprised Vintage lost (or gave up on?) the rights to Dick's work after all these years...

Are Jonathan Lethem books worth reading? I know him almost entirely for his "I AM THE BIGGEST DICK FANBOY"-dom, but he actually writes books, right?

unfortunately no he's not worth reading anymore. as soon as the NPR/NYT crowd got ahold of him it was all over. His early stuff is quite good though, would be happy to recommend some if yr curious

xp Probably just got outbid.

I am. I see copies remaindered all over the place.

you don't love me yet (2007?) isn't horrible. there's even a kangaroo reprise

My commute is putting a serious dent in the stack of unread books by my bed so any suggestions are welcome actually.

Gun With Occasional Music - some PKD silliness (genetically engineered talking kangaroos! super-intelligent babies!) plus Dashiell Hammet/Raymond Chandler noir narrative
Girl in Landscape - PKD plus Little House on the Prairie, Martian colony coming-of-age story from the POV of a young girl
Amnesia Moon - pretty much just straight PKD homage. Plague of amnesia has hit the planet, nobody can remember anything for more than a few days, civilization has collapsed, etc.
The Shape We're In - THE BEST. very short, Kafka-esque journey by two hapless miniature protagonists as they try to find their way around a body that they live in (literally, they are trying to get from the bowels to the eyes)
Men and Comics, some other collection I can't remember the name of right now - short stories, prose experiments, usually pretty well done. he's an excellent stylist.

Everything afterwards = crap.

well not totally crap but there's definitely a precipitous drop in quality (imho) when he started working in more conventional literary territory. his book about an indie rock band (the above-referenced You Don't Love Me Yet) = ugh, hated it. definitely put me off him for good.

Ick.

yeah it's about a young couple who form a band together but aren't sure they're a couple (or really a band!) and .. ugh. just... why.

oh there's also a split book he did with Carter Scholz called Kafka in America which is really good.

Some of the excerpts from the Exegesis have been interesting. It's hard to believe that Ubik wasn't intentionally about gnosticism but that's what he claims. Dick said he only noticed the themes in his work in retrospect. Anyone ever read the early book that was explicitly Zoroastrian (the Cosmic Puppets)?

Finally returned to reading PKD for the first time since junior high, just finished The Simulacra and am ready to head back to the library for more.

When did the 'canonization' of PKD start? Anyone in particular responsible (Fredric Jameson)?

yeah I've read Cosmic Puppets... but lol don't remember a thing about it! A lot of his early work blurs together for me

When did the 'canonization' of PKD start? Anyone in particular responsible (Fredric Jameson)?

nah I would credit other sci-fi writers actually - LeGuin and Lem in particular were big advocates, and wrote stuff about him prior to his death iirc

and duh Bladerunner

LeGuin and Lem in particular
When Author X was Compared to Author Y by Author Z

The Cosmic Puppets is one of PKD's more underrated books imo. Generally I'm not a huge fan of his early work, but this one was great. The whole thing feels like a really weird twilight zone episode and I mean that in the best way possible.

Bladerunner was more of a factor in putting the word of PKD out there, and I guess that could've been picked up by academics...which is more what I'm wondering about as to what sparked that process of canonization. xxp

Lem and Malzberg both published excellent career overviews of PKDs (Lem's was published while he was still alive iirc)

xp

The Cosmic Puppets is one of PKD's more underrated books imo. Generally I'm not a huge fan of his early work, but this one was great. The whole thing feels like a really weird twilight zone episode and I mean that in the best way possible.

Seconded, it doesn't really fall into the SF bracket at all. Dunno what you'd call it genre-wise, fantasy? Not that it matters.

"When did the 'canonization' of PKD start?"

Late 70s was when it started to expand beyond sci-fi circles. It def. snowballed though post-Bladerunner and the Vintage tpbs.

shakey this shape we're in's my favorite lethem too. it's almost as good as a donald barthelme novel. don't get the hate for ydlmy. indie rock shtick notwithstanding it's a long love letter to n. west and miss lonelyhearts imho

When Jonathan Letham was Compared to Nathaniel West by Poster Kamerad.

you spelled his name wrong though

I did it on purpose just to demonstrate how little I care.

goes without saying

I did it on purpose just to demonstrate how little I care.

― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Friday, April 30, 2010 3:49 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

d-d-d-dang... thats cold bro...

lol I'm sure Jonothan Lethem is crying all the way to bank.

he is :(

I'm getting onto a PKD roll, finally starting to splurge on all the books of his that I have been meaning to get to for years. Up to now I had only read the easy famous ones - Do Androids and Man In The High Castle, but now I have just finished Flow My Tears (after rereading Do Androids for SF book club) and am planning to read Dr Bloodmoney and VALIS soon (mainly because they are the ones lying around at home). I am open to recommendations for future reads.

Has anyone tried his non-SF books? I found myself imagining that I was getting an inkling of what they are like from some of the dialogue and situations in Flow My Tears - people moaning about their lives and being dissatisfied and stuff.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is the best of the non-sci-fi in my opinion. The rest are just okay.

I'm assuming even though you haven't mentioned it, you've read A Scanner Darkly. If not that's definitely a must read. Martian Time-Slip, Now Wait For Last Year, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are all amazing. I think there is a thread for POX PKD novels. I'll find that and link to it.

Oh and UBIK is also amazing.

POX Phillip K Dick

I'm assuming even though you haven't mentioned it, you've read A Scanner Darkly.

not read it, but it is next (or after next) in SF book club.

Confessions of a Crap Artist is the other good non sci-fi one (with Transmigration). I've read a couple of others, they're not bad, but "people moaning about their lives and being dissatisfied and stuff" is pretty much correct and while this can be interesting sometimes, for the most part I can't really recommend it too much, though I guess I did enjoy it enough to finish all the books that I started.

http://www.moesbooks.com/111122-the-exegesis-of-philip-k-dick/

dude I saw that thing for sale at the airport bookstore yesterday. like, amongst this week's batshit NRO hardbacks & the inspirational business tomes...the collected mystic visions of philip k dick

kinda awesome

yeah i was thumbing through a copy at the bookstore. i dont really want it? but i kinda really do

I need to pick this up. Didn't know it was out yet so big thanks.

hah, i didn't know lethem was onboard as editor

no one upthread seems to have mentioned 'chronic city', which is the most dicksian thing he's written in years, whether it's any good or not well, it's a lot better than 'you don't love me yet'

i keep having an urge to reread 'radio free albemuth'.

That's next on my re-reading list too, as I remember not a single thing about it. Deus Irae to follow.

>dude I saw that thing for sale at the airport bookstore yesterday.

that is just perfect

I flipped through a copy yesterday but waiting until tuesday to buy it. I met the co-editor Pamela Jackson last month at a friend's birthday party and she was simultaneously super down to earth and subtly tangential -- they way she talked about whittling 4000 pages to a mere 1000 gave me the impression she was one of the right people for this insane job. from what I skimmed it does not seem like anything you'd devour in order, but there were definitely some sentences jumping out at me

"i keep having an urge to reread 'radio free albemuth'."

This is one of my favorites, much better than Valis IMO.

i look at this as a a companion to that jack spicer anthology

I love Man In The High Castle forever and always.

this is amazing

never seen such a great PKD bio before. Fake "PKD" ads featuring Terry Gilliam and Elvis Costello, commentary from Aldiss, Disch, Powers, wives and friends interviewed etc

I just looked that for a second. Who is doing the narration, the guy from In The Heights?

I have no idea. assume this was some BBC thing

seems like the only PKD confidante that doesn't make an appearance is KW Jeter

got to the credits at the end. readings are credited to ... Greg Proops?! random.

!!! thanks for posting Shakey, I will check this out immediately.

Yup, Greg Proops is the narrator. I think this thing was made about 94-95, which is prime Whose Line era.

http://www.philipkdick.com/images/new_letters_walker-bladerunn.jpg

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-1/

And continuing

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-2/

Sad news that Dick's first literary executor (before that, founder of Crawdaddy) Paul Williams has passed. As noted, he had never been then same after his bicycling accident and injury, but what an amazing legacy to have left behind, the cultural enthusiast as key figure in ensuring further attention for that which he loved.

The World Jones Made is fantastic, just so's you know

Just finished Ubik, very good

The Crack in Space is so great

the upcoming Simpsons Lego ep seems to have more to do with a PKD story than Lego:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYGSpOfIr9Y

well, right you are. books on the bookshelf:

sort my pieces the policefig said
do minifigs dream of plastic sheep
beyond lies the nub
a scanner blockly

Should I get ebook of The Crack In Space, which is on sale today?

I see that calstars is a fan.

I only read it once, but remember it as one of his chuck-it-out-in-a-week-for-the-money jobs, along with Vulcan's Hammer and a couple of others. There are better PKD books really.

Crack started out slowly but then took an insane left turn that carried it through to the end. The book is enjoyable as both as both scifi and also as a commentary on race.

If it's cheap, why not? I like his pulp books a lot tho

I'm reading the Simulacra now, which at about 1/3 through has yet to hit its stride.

Btw if you live in New York, most of his stuff is available as free e-book loans from the public library.

Hm. They all say "0 Availability on 0 Copies." Maybe the system is down.

http://io9.com/last-nights-lego-simpsons-episode-was-filled-with-phili-1571977258

20 years ago I would have maybe thought that was funny

lol at the absence of pun in 'we can build you'

The Simulacra not one of his strongest works. Bit of a hodgepodge of things from his other novels

Lies, inc. takes place in 2014, so it has that going for it

Man In the High Castle on Amazon?!?!?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSI5EHQ/ref=dv_dp_ep1

Apparently this just got released like five minutes ago or something....

Talk about zero pre-release fanfare.

bodes well

Sounds awesome.

Hopefully there's at least one entire episode devoted to a character trying to make sense of an I Ching reading

i've been on another PKD kick recently, but this time in combination with an emmanuel carrere kick. i read carrere's The Adversary (wonderful book) which led me to go ahead and check out his other stuff. currently reading the mustache, which is heavily influenced by PKD (a man shaves his mustache and then his wife claims that he never had a mustache, leading to mounting psychological agony, paranoid conspiracy theories, sleeping pills, identify confusion, mindwarping, etc), and then realized that carrere wrote a biography of PKD (I am alive and you are dead). i'm still in the first 1/3 of the biography but i love it so far. a lot of carrere's writing exists in a weird zone between fiction and nonfiction, and his biography is no exception. i could see how some people looking for a comprehensive factual account of his life wouldn't like it, but i think it's a fine way to approach a person like PKD - i feel like PKD would approve.

i also recently acquired the exegesis but it's gonna be a while before i get around to it and i'm not sure i'll ever even partly understand it anyway.

"I Am Alive and You Are Dead" is great, probably the best Dick "biography" there is. Although it does ultimately make him out to be a rather sad figure imo.

not really interested in the exegesis myself

Ditto on all three comments.

anybody else watch it?

I'm fairly split. The visuals and world-building, top notch and no expenses spared -- the dialog and acting, almost unwatchably stiff, and the changes they've made to make sure the series can potentially keep going past the framework of the book are all painfully conventional. Watching this actively clouded my memories of the details in the book. But then I went online and saw 800+ four to five star reviews afterwards which was a very PKD kind of experience so it all worked out

This weekend I will but not yet.

milton it's good to know which parts of my critical brain I need to tamp down in advance. I can just about get by on mere world-building I think.

I feel cheated when characters act contrary to their ultimate convictions WHEN ALONE

This has been greenlit by Amazon for a full series.

I liked this. I probably should re-read the book now.

What if the show is the REAL 'Man in the High Castle'??

We'll know if Lady Stoneheart never appears oh wait

only one way to find out - let's ask the i-ching xp

i may come off as a total novice but ... what exactly happens at the end of The Man In The High Castle (the book)? I've always been confused (which may be part of the point).

it's been a while, but don't the main characters get confirmation from the i-ching that they're living in a false/parallel universe and the universe from the book-within-a-book is the real one?

yeahhh, i guess that is my takeaway from it

I think that's implied but it's ambiguous

PKD not great on endings on the whole anyway, ambiguity was a good move for him

his best endings are full of dread and ambiguity - Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, UBIK, Valis. Scanner Darkly not v ambiguous but maybe his best ending.

yeah i like the feeling of the ending of man in the high castle, but i guess i've always been unclear as to whether it's quite as ambiguous as it seems? something like that.

i haven't seen the show yet. is it meant to be an ongoing series, or just a single run, covering the events in the book?

as long as the book is a general premise, and the show develops its own sense of being shortly... this feels like it could be another fringe.

each episode they discover yet another alternate reality

am i misremembering, or did pkd do a kinda/sorta sequel to High Castle?

The whole concept of an alternate universe is expanded upon in the chapters Dick wrote for a proposed sequel to TMITHC. Told from a Nazi perspective, these chapters examine the existence of the Nebenwelt, the alternate reality wherein the Allies won the war. Just in these chapters, it becomes clear that the science fiction element is much stronger in his unfinished sequel. It’s been said that Dick was unable to finish this novel due to his inability to deal and write about the Nazi mentality. For a look at these chapters and a revealing essay by Dick entitled “Nazism and The Man In The High Castle” take a look at The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick – Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings

ah ok, that must be what i'm thinking of.

it's been a while, but don't the main characters get confirmation from the i-ching that they're living in a false/parallel universe and the universe from the book-within-a-book is the real one?

Also, there is the implication that our own universe is also false.

This thing

Will def have to grok that when more time (R. Crumb X PKD!), but yes there was the vision of our universe as a false one too--- at least partially inspired by a dark-haired girl, delivering pizza while wearing a fish Xtian symbol--thing I started seeing in the 70s---our universe is a defective copy, which began to be revealed as such via Watergate, when the continuum of deception cracked or stumbled for a moment: we're really living in the early First Century AD, There's much more, but think this is what I read in The Dark-Haired Girl, which I got from Mark Zeising in the early 90s (think he published it, as well as selling it via mailorder)--mainly letters(?), notes, not really presented as a novel---probably included in The Exegesis.

Looks like that girl or her successor is in Crumb's version.

So cool!

That Crumb comic was linked above 13 years ago. :D It's great!

"Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to"

Dick & lizard conspirary theorists otm re: third panel from the end.

First two eps of Man In The Castle up on Amazon. Remainder coming on 11/20.

best american author of the 20th century or unable to write a decent sentence?

A couple of years ago I decided to see what the fuss was about and I read three of his most admired novels. I am perfectly willing to accept the idea that PK Dick is the greatest writer of sci-fi, if only because so many sci-fi enthusiasts would say the same. Unfortunately, we didn't play well together.

I won't deny that his inventiveness was of a very high order and his themes were far-reaching and challenging, but my pleasure in his inventiveness was greatly impaired by his sloppiness of execution, his disinterest in his characters as people, his stale dialogue and perfunctory plotting. I may read him again, but I'm in no hurry.

a scanner darkly is his best prose imo

the only bad one i've read so far is the game-players of titan. which i thought was really bad. but i think he probably wrote it in 24 hours. i have a lot more of his books at home that i still need to read.

I didn't mind The Game Players of Titan. I thought it was worth it for the trippy scenes of game playing on Titan.

I am perfectly willing to accept the idea that PK Dick is the greatest writer of sci-fi, if only because so many sci-fi enthusiasts would say the same.
--Aimless

Actually very few sci-fi enthusiasts would say this. Some Philip K Dick enthusiasts would I guess.

What PKD and a lot of SF (and a lot of noir writing too) tell you in regards to writing as writing and the craft of the novel is that this isn't everything.

Which could be read as 'fuck a Henry James' but hey ho.

Probably helps to encounter this stuff in your late teens when your grasp of people (and different types of people) isn't as nuanced, so not having this reflected in fiction in a sophisticated way doesn't matter as much.

i read SF for the ideas and also because it - at its best - makes me think about and imagine things that i never would have thought about or imagined! which, to me, is a great gift to give to a reader. i can't say that i look to SF for "great" writing, but there have certainly always been very good writers writing SF and Dick was sometimes one of these people. when he was strong it's like reading some of the best bad dreams you've ever read. and that aren't boring like most dreams.

it's gotten to the point where i really can't read most new/modern straight lit fic. it very seldom makes me stretch or makes me think about things in a way that i've never thought them before. lots of known quantities even when the writing is great. but maybe i just don't see the best new exciting stuff out there. or hear about it.

i liken it to being a metal fan. which i am. i have taken SOOOOOOOOOO much out of metal. just...inspiration and ideas and art and craft where even the most traditional genre worship can give me a lot to learn from and a lot to think about! same with SF. and other people just see goofy covers and titles and wouldn't think twice about it. comic book people probably feel that way too. and genre movie fanatics. they can dig all of life out of the unruly pulpy mass of seemingly endless material and have it inspire them beyond what even the creators of the work probably envisioned.

I really like the way that PKD goes far far beyond the '50s space ships' sci-fi, or the Edgar Rice Burroughs type of John Carter/Conan-in-space sort of stuff. Aldiss said that Dick was writing about the California drug culture 'with a slight twist of lemon' and that sums it up for me. Something that attracts me to sci-fi is that it's a way of exploring present day real world concerns, and PKD's novels are full of that.

. Something that attracts me to sci-fi is that it's a way of exploring present day real world concerns, and PKD's novels are full of that.
--"Tell them I'm in a meeting purlease" (snoball)

A lot of PKD's novels are full of his personal concerns and anxieties and I guess if you are going to look for a reason to isolate him from other sci-fi that would be it. There are very sci-fi writers which feel quite so personal and almost none of them sustained a streak of novels that Dick was able to and achieve that level of success (admittedly Dick is way more famous now, but even within his lifetime he had achieved a level of comfort which had been achieved by very few other writers and even fewer who were still operating near their peak as he still was by A Scanner if not arguably past).

there's gotta be an old college paper about the 60's and the rise of PKD and Dylan and the age of the anxious hermit or whatever. they both changed things to suit their own purposes.

PKD never really changed though. Everything is there in his earliest books pretty much. People just came around to it and he took longer writing the books eventually.

his 60's stuff is what he is mainly remembered for by most people though. starting with the man in the high castle. the "classic" dick era.

it's also when more non-SF fans started reading his books.

To be fair starting with MITHC is pretty much when everyone started reading his books.

And I think you have to get to late 60s/early 70s at least before there is much non-sci-fi attention.

thought the second ep of the amazon man in the high castle was v good

disinterest in his characters as people, his stale dialogue

some of the dialogue and characters in a scanner darkly are brilliantly observed, humane and lolsome at the same time. thinking principally of the bike gears discussion but iirc he sustains that general tone pretty well.

been a while since i read it but i remember thinking the characters in the transmigration of timothy archer were noticeably more nuanced than most of his other stuff too

I feel like you can tell when Dick really cares about his characters or feels close to them as opposed to just being plot vehicles - so many of his sad-sack divorced guys or precocious children or confused young women are really poignant and memorable imo. Of course this varies from book to book, but I think from 1972 on or so he gets pretty consistent with writing sympathetic, believable people.

IIRC Transmigration is the one he wrote after being in communication with Ursula K LeGuin about the deficiencies in his female characters. I wish it was a little more, I don't know, lively? It was clearly well done, but didn't have quite the excitement of so many of his others, which maybe is related to him being finally sober and sane and in declining physical health.

A Scanner Darkly stands apart for me - there's a sense that he's just desperate to keep the memory of these people alive, without sentimentalizing who they were.

What is the general consensus on Radio Free Albemuth?

(sorry to interrupt; I thought Transmigration was outstanding)

I like it. Better than Valis imo (could just be contrarianism though). If you are lukewarm on late period Dick ymmv.

Transmigration has a great backstory.

Scanner always tears me up at the end. The epilogue is just... so true.

Yeah, always thought Scanner was the most moving of the ones I've read. Been two or three decades though.

It holds up. His most emotionally affecting work for sure.

Radio Free Albemuth is worth reading if you enjoyed VALIS. I don't think it's nearly as good though. It's a bit more out there but the characters aren't as good and therefore doesn't have the same emotional impact as VALIS. It's probably been about 15 years since I read it though.

I have finally read "The man in the high castle" lately.
I had been considering reading it for a long time.
The pitch is great and exciting but I found the book very boring. I couldn't care less about the characters and what happens to them, the History/Uchronia/plot twists don't really go anywhere interesting past the initial idea and eventually, I don't really see why all the fuss...
very disappointed... one of the rare times in my life where I was almost angry at the author by the end of the book !
or maybe I simply didn't get it !

i thought albemuth was interesting as a companion piece to valis but not great in its own right.

a scanner darkly is a total masterpiece, yeah. i need to watch the linklater film again sometime, i thought it did a great job of capturing the frazzled tragicomedy of the book.

i like high castle less than almost any of the others

It's sort of the least typical isn't it. Much less of his standard fractured paranoia and much more verging on tedious alternate history.

not a fan of High Castle

I like Radio Free Albemuth so much more than either Valis or Transmigration, it seems to me to most clearly articulate the later PKD wordlview

the ending of flow my tears is the most moving piece of PKD i've read

followed closely by a scanner darkly...

Scott's two longer posts from the 24th OTM in all kindsa ways.

Reminds me: Scott led off this discussion on ILB's Rolling Science Fiction:

did you know that UKL and PKD went to high school together and were in the same class and they didn't even know each other at all? you can't make that stuff up.

JP: Were you thinking about Philip K. Dick while writing Lathe of Heaven?

UL: Oh yeah. It’s sort of an homage to him.

JP: Was it something you shared with him and discussed with him?

UL: We wrote letters back and forth some. We never met. I was rather scared of Phil. He was very heavily into drugs, and drugs do scare me. I had three kids at home, and was not enthusiastic about having a real—not a pothead but a heavy drug user around. Phil went off the rails periodically, and so I was not really looking to meet him. But we did correspond, very friendly, for some while. We seemed to respect each other’s writing, were interested in what each other was trying to do.

JP: I read you had gone to high school together. That’s not true?

UL: That is so weird. Yes, we were complete contemporaries at Berkeley High School, but he’s not in the yearbook. His name is in the yearbook, but there is no photograph. I think Phil dropped out before graduation.
I don’t know many people anymore that were at Berkeley High with me. When there were more of us alive we tried to find out anything about him. Nobody remembers him. Not one person in this group remembered him physically. He worked at a store where I bought records when I had the money, so I might have met him there. But what he looked like then, as a teenager? [Shrugs.] He is absolutely the invisible man at Berkeley High.

― scott seward, Friday, August 7, 2015 10:06 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is so wild

― Roberto Spiralli, Friday, August 7, 2015 10:22 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow!

― ledge, Friday, August 7, 2015 10:49 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, terrific.

― the pinefox, Friday, August 7, 2015 11:01 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Speaking of weird Berkeley connections, PKD at 19 also lived in a warehouse loft with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan for a while: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20090323/cheney-c.shtml

― one way street, Friday, August 7, 2015 11:05 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read somewhere that moving from the rainy world of his native Berkeley to the artificial paradise of Southern Cali was a revelation, maybe even before Disneyland opened, and there he became fascinated with, for instance, families' familial concern when the Abraham Lincoln simulacrum started seeing a little off, like it wasn't feeling well. (Also wrote some stories as by as A. Lincoln-Simulacrum.)
The Bay Area seems not to have turned him on so much, although the acerbic non-SF Mary And The Giant is v. readable, and unmistakably young PKD.

― dow, Friday, August 7, 2015 2:01 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"turned him on in so many ways" might be a better way of putting it; he copped some inspiration there, anyway. (Speaking of the record store, he owned or managed his own for a while, and even had his own radio show---classical, I think.)

― dow, Friday, August 7, 2015 2:05 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Great piece, one way street! I'll have to check out more Spicer. The affinities of SF and Beat (-era) poetry, h'mmm....

― dow, Friday, August 7, 2015 2:13 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That record store or something like it, fictionalized, figures prominently in Radio Free Albemuth, iirc. You should definitely check out Spicer! Even with the Spicer revival of the last several years (i.e. since the bulk of his poetry came back into print in 2008), he deserves to be read much more widely.

― one way street, Friday, August 7, 2015 2:23 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm obliged to link to his 1965 lectures on poetics, since his notion of composition as dictation from the Outside gets fairly Dickian: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238196?page=1

It’s impossible for the source of energy to come to you in Martian or North Korean or Tamil or any language you don’t know. It’s impossible for the source of energy to use images you don’t have, or at least don’t have something of. It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message. This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it.

― one way street, Friday, August 7, 2015 2:28 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eye in the sky is great!

yeah that's my favorite of his early ones

halfway through re-reading Our Friends From Frolix 8 - using the real name of one of his ex-wives for a an ex-wife character that one of the main protagonists fantasizes about murdering is a lil grim

Jack Spicer was a great poet

i'm 100 pages into three stigmata, eager to see where it goes, trying to keep my expectations in check knowing how many people rate it as their #1. UBIK seriously fucked with my head, i read it in two sittings and was literally vibrating when i finished it, really scared, late at night...

Also from Rolling Science Fiction etc.:

"The local heroin rehab center assured Phil that the break-in was undoubtedly the work of the Terra Linda Minutemen..." Paul Williams' epic coverage (prob his best journalism) of PKD for Rolling Stone, via time capsule mirror.pdf of the original issue---come along if you can:http://www.philipkdickfans.com/mirror/articles/1974_Rolling_Stone.pdf"> http://www.philipkdickfans.com/mirror/articles/1974_Rolling_Stone.pdf

― dow, Sunday, November 15, 2015 5:12 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've been looking for that story, thanks dow! have you read Only Apparently Real?

No, what is that?

a book by Paul Williams about PKD, I just ordered it. The cover is the same illustration used in the RS piece.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517JMN0APZL._SX303_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Has anyone seen the Man in the High Castle show on Amazon? It just got renewed for another season, I thought it was a limited miniseries. How are they going to stretch it out like that considering the ending? Is it radically different from the book?

haven't seen it yet, but from the little tidbits i read the series was already quite a bit different than the book (a PKD adaptation tradition i guess) so it doesn't surprise me.

did you read the paul williams book? how was it?

in related news i continue to believe the Exegesis is one of the best bathroom books out there

haven't read much of it yet, it has the RS story from 1974 and other conversations with PKD. highly recommended from all the fans i know. i'm working my way through all of his novels rn, just started time out of joint

I ended up subscribing to Amazon Prime in order to get a christmas gift out in time and decided to check out Man in the High Castle. I have not read a lot of PKD, and haven't read the book, but judging on its own merits the show was pretty middling. Basically I was fascinated by any of the characters who had a role in government, and found the rest veering between incredibly tiresome to downright idiotic. The plotting is generally good at keeping up tension but to what end? Parts of it seem like LOST-level stringing the viewer along. The writing- especially the dialogue, is pretty bad, way too much reliance on contemporary usage of "fuck" & "fucking" for emphasis. It's not the kind of thing I could imagine another 10 hours of.

I loved the pilot when it came out a year ago but I'm struggling to finish the series. The universe they're in is so much more fascinating than the story they're telling. I want a big city detective show in Nazi-controlled America.

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The universe they're in is so much more fascinating than the story they're telling. I want a big city detective show in Nazi-controlled America.

I would totally watch a procedural with Tagomi and Chief Inspector Kido

This is neat. Awesome soundtrack, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcatGSYtzQ0

If all goes well, next week I'll be moving into the neighborhood several blocks away from where PKD had his 2-3-74 visions.

Wasn't intentional, just worked out that way.

Recently I've been reading a lot of the novels I'd passed on before: Eye in the Sky, Game Players of Titan, The Simulacra, The Penultimate Truth and (currently) Lies, Inc. ... most of these are from his freakish burst of 10 novels in 1963-64, when he was running wild with the multiple-point-of-view approach developed for The Man in the High Castle.

Of these I've enjoyed Game Players the most for its creepiness and high-speed closing chapters, The Simulacra least as more disjointed and less energetic in its treatment of his usual themes (propaganda accepted as reality, hapless Everymen living in collectives, is-he-or-isn't-he human?). But the cover of this library copy is nice:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/TheSimulacra(1stEd).jpg

The Man in the High Castle (TV show) isn't very good is it? The world is impressively realised, but the characters are mostly boring, not helped by the casting of generic pretty young things. The older cast members are generally decent, but it's not enough really. Also, I know a show about Nazi controlled America is never going to be a barrel of laughs but this is humourless to the point of dreary. Plus it has even worse opening credit music than Homeland. Eight episodes in and not sure I can even be bothered to watch the final two.

The final 2 episodes is where it sort of gets interesting.

Ha:

http://www.clickhole.com/quiz/how-many-these-philip-k-dick-novels-have-you-read-4579

huh Conduit for Sale! does sound like a PKD title

I already posted this in the clickhole thread, but I liked the result I got:

You’re A True Philip K. Addickt!

Lord alive, but when it comes to Philip K. Dick, you’re unstoppable! From the beginningless daymares of Runcifer Cale to the unforgettable twist of Blind, Underwater! (it’s apples), you’ve experienced just about everything his tortured mind had to offer! And now he’s dead, and each re-read milks a little less magic out of his words, and bit by bit, the spark behind them will fade and flicker out, until you’re left in a colder, darker world, a prisoner of an empty future! Wow!

accurate!

Not a prob, I still haven't read nearly everything, incl. most of his non-SF novels. They're all towering here and there, in this room and the next, not really waiting.

You’re A Dick Disdainer!

It looks like you haven’t read a word of Philip K. Dick! You couldn’t know less about how our reality actually exists only in the mind of a young girl trapped in perpetual cryogenesis to halt the spread of her genetically engineered cancer! You have just no idea that that’s what reality actually is! Get out there and read more, for Phil’s sake!

You’re A Bit Of A Phil-O-Phile!

Hey, all right! You’ve read your fair share of Phil Dick! You’re probably plenty familiar with concepts like the Twin Planes of Electrific Dissonance, the Klein-Byrne device, and meta-anamnetic counter-remembrance, and if you found out that you were just a shell persona engineered by chess-playing androids from outside of linear time, you wouldn’t be all that surprised. That is a good and healthy way for your brain to be!

You’re A True Philip K. Addickt!

Lord alive, but when it comes to Philip K. Dick, you’re unstoppable! From the beginningless daymares of Runcifer Cale to the unforgettable twist of Blind, Underwater! (it’s apples), you’ve experienced just about everything his tortured mind had to offer! And now he’s dead, and each re-read milks a little less magic out of his words, and bit by bit, the spark behind them will fade and flicker out, until you’re left in a colder, darker world, a prisoner of an empty future! Wow!

"Father Of Plasma, Mother Of Centipedes!"

lmao @ 'And the Plexi-Bishop Played Dice'

i just finished The Divine invasion, really good, but fuck i'm gonna need to read that one again.

Silverbob argues in one of his essays that all fictional stories follow a single template: protagonist -> conflict -> transformation. Made me think that Dick's rather unique contribution to this paradigm was to constantly undermine the reader's certainty that any of this does, in fact, happen in his stories. So many instances where these various elements are put into doubt (is the protagonist really transformed, or is he just crazy? Was the conflict illusory? etc)

I read a version of that argument in Silverberg's anthology Worlds of Wonder quite recently. He doesn't quite say that "all fictional stories follow a single template", rather that the protagonist>conflict>transformation formula (which is also the Syd Field three act screenwriting formula) was especially well suited to producing consistently saleable science fiction short stories in the 1950s (and even then, he acknowledges that certain writers didn't follow the formula, or successfully inverted or subverted it).

^Highly recommend that anthology.

I can't remember the specific essay I was thinking of - I think it was in this: http://nonstoppress.com/2010/12/silverbergs-musings-meditations/. I don't disagree that there are nuances to this theory but I do recall him literally saying "really, there's only ONE story, and it goes like this..."

Didn't attend but found out about a Spanish PKD adaptation through this post: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/back-to-the-future-androids-dream-and-el-futuro

Late but wow, I'd like to see that.

Also I'm re-reading Confessions of a Crap Artist. Just so y'all know.

I thought Confessions was really good, and made me wonder about a world where he'd been a mainstream-only writer. A sadder, emptier world, obviously.

I have been working through the Library of America collection of PK Dick on and off over the past year. Just recently finished reading Dr. Bloodmoney and Martian Time-Slip for the first time. Dr. Bloodmoney was pretty good. There is such a odd dreaminess to his stories. Most of the first volume I had read before except Ubik.

Bloodmoney's one of my favorites

I love Bloodmoney, too, and Ubik.

I thought Confessions was really good, and made me wonder about a world where he'd been a mainstream-only writer.

I'm really enjoying it - I'd forgotten most of it so it's sort of fresh, it really has a unique feel. It's definitely making me want to check out what other non sci-fi stuff I can find by him.

I liked The Broken Bubble a lot

I've got The Exegesis Of but don't think I really give a toss about the endless gnostic / Manichean speculations except where distilled as metaphysical fiction.

The Exegesis has value as an art object and as a grand publishing folly, rather than as a text to be read and deciphered, imho.

great bathroom book

I've very gradually (as they come back into affordable print) accumulated all the non-SF PKD novels I know of, but so far have only read Mary and the Giant and The Broken Bubble, which is kind of a follow-up, though I guess several deal with Bay Area culture of the early 50s---not Beat (so far), but a different kind of realism anyway...I liked these two.

Also ones finally in print, incl. Gather Yourselves Together (apparently completed in 1950, pub. '95) and Voices From The Street (1952/2007!)

This looks like it might be legitimately amazing:

http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/philip-k-dicks-electric-dreams

Also I clearly need to read more of his short stories - I only have vol 1 out of the collection of 5. Might now wait till after this airs though.

presumably this is channel 4's reaction to losing black mirror to netflix but either way i'm psyched to see more dick on teevee

don't see any dates on air time, any ideas?

to be announced - here as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick%27s_Electric_Dreams

I visited PKD's grave in Fort Morgan, Colorado today. Someone had left a toy car on it, another had left a button with a vintage cartoon robot picture. Both had been there for a long time.

I'd post pictures right now but I'm drunk in a Nebraska cattle pasture awaiting the solar eclipse.

Elvis appears to be having the best day ever

lol

Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Award winner Steve Buscemi (Boardwalk Empire, Boss Baby)

The cat looks like him

https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4425/36729235205_cee1c301b4_z.jpg

9.00 on ch4 tonight, first of the Electric Dreams. Just a reminder for UKer's

eh

is this any cop? The Graun seem to like it, but I have no faith in Ch4's ability to not make a dog's breakfast out of sci-fi dystopias.

Den of Geek gave it a good right up too

*write

have any of you watched it? what did you think?

Watched about 10 minutes earlier but then stopped as thought my wife might want to watch it too (she's not usually a big fan of sci-fi).

Seemed pretty decent and well shot with a bit of a film noir vibe about it. As it's an anthology series I guess some episodes will be better than others.

an hour - it's brief, almost like a short story, a sketch of a world and some characters, a situation

I didn't think much of last night's

I thought it was pretty good.

Having around 50 minutes to create a world and characters is never going to be wholly satisfying but I thought they did pretty well and Grainger gave an excellent central performance.

an hour - it's brief, almost like a short story, a sketch of a world and some characters, a situation

always thought they managed to pack a lot into e.g. 45 minutes of star trek or buffy, or even 25 of the simpsons.

this was ok, well constructed, strong echoes of blade runner. but i thought the story was a bit lacking, subsequently discovered it was basically cut from whole cloth and the only things taken from dick were the teeps & the hoods - which weren't even actual hoods in the original. they turned it from a story about a surveillance state and a totalitarian revolution into a will-they-won't-they romance. by making the teeps facially distinctive they completely removed the 'who can you trust' element, which was such a strong element of the handmaid's tale. what's the point in filming dick if you're not actually going to film dick?

Found it quite disappointing.

it's funny how hard his stuff is to adapt, 9 times out of 10 things just don't work on basic tonal or structural levels

I've never understood how in "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" they are trapped in a time loop but there are periods that they can observe this from the outside and know what happened the previous loops and attend their own funerals. How can they do this? Is it supposed to make complete sense?

Episode one had a very nothing plot, and shamelessly nicked most of its aesthetic from Bladerunner - don't have much hope for the rest of the series if this was its flagship.

I was hoping that they would maybe do some stories as multiple episodes to have room to adapt some of the novels.

After reading and re-reading quite a few PKD novels in the last year or so also while there was no indication in any of the novels, but so many of them circling around Mars and various views of the Bay area, one could almost envision them being put together as a tapestry kind of like how Cronenburg's Naked Lunch and the Kafka movie.

it seems like the perpetual problems with PKD adaptations is that people who don't understand his work always try to shoehorn the basic elements into some other kind of story/framework, and everything that makes the material unique or engaging gets muddled or stripped out. Really the only ones I think are successful are Bladerunner and A Scanner Darkly.

Yup

Don't remember any problems with the time loop in Tempunauts apart from the usual. Do like the fact that it was inspired by a - somewhat similar?- Sladek story.

I think Bladerunner and A Scanner Darkly both work in part because they fully embrace the sadness that is part of the core of PKD's work, these very empathetic evocations of loss, failure, sacrifice

It's going to be on Prime Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=470TG3AdA1A

Second episode had Dr Who level production values

I'll give this a shot but the reviews here don't inspire confidence

"The Father Thing" seems like it would be impossible to fuck up but maybe they find a way lol

Mark E Smith, last fall, on film adaps:

"I think the original Blade Runner is the most obscene film ever made, I fucking hated it. The Man in the High Castle is one of my favorite books; how they fucked that TV show up I don’t know. It gets blander and blander. In the book the level of comprehension of that world is fucking astounding, in the show it’s just everybody going around normally except they’ve got swastika armbands on. The only good Philip K. Dick film is Total Recall, it’s faithful to the book. Arnie gets it. I was physically sick watching A Scanner Darkly, it was like an episode of Cheers painted over except they all smoke dope and imagine women with no clothes on."

brb going to spend the next few months painting over an episode of Cheers

The Father Thing kicked off part 2 of the Electric Dreams series last night.

Ended up being a run of the mill Body Snatchers thing. Though I didn't think the original story was much cop either tbf.

Also, did we really need the fifteen minutes of baseball guff at the start ?

I read Valis at the weekend, holy crap pretty amazing.

A friend of mine has never read any of his stuff and wants me to recommend one to start off with, suggestions? At the monent I'm thinking Ubik.

I like ELECTRIC DREAMS. It's good to have this kind of thing on UK TV.

I would not start with UBIK but with the short stories.

man in the high castle might be a good starting point too - although alternate-post-ww2 is a cliche now, it's maybe his most conventionally well-written book and it introduces a lot of his traditional themes/obsessions

I agree - of the novels, great starting point.

actually now i'm thinking about it the transmigration of timothy archer might be his most conventionally well-written book as far as character goes but it might be a bit uh philosophically daunting for a newbie

Man in the High Castle is the Kind of Blue of PKD recommendations.

I've only read Ubik but loved it. I have Scanner Darkly and Electric Sheep - are they good next steps?

well yeah - i was erring on the side of caution cuz i suspect throwing a new reader into pages-long discussions about the hagia sophia and gnosis via pink lasers from outer space might be a bit... offputting

chuck, those are both all-time greats

The first one I read (like most people I suspect) is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I enjoyed it, but the ones that really hooked me were Three Stigmata and Ubik.

I liked most of the short stories too

i might be the exception, but Man in the High Castle was the first PKD i read, and although i liked it enough, i didn't end up reading anything else by him for years. when i dipped back into the pool, it was with Ubik and VALIS and they blew my mind

yeah i guess ste's friend's tolerance for wiggy reality-melting divine-invasion fiction is gonna be the deciding factor

I'd recommend Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. not as far out as VALIS (which is the book that got me obsessed), not as procedural as Man in the High Castle (which disappointed me), not as conventional and non-representative as Transmigration of Timothy Archer. the short stories are great but you can read most of his novels in a day or two. UBIK is another great place to start. but I'd say Flow My Tears because it has a great, fascinating, and simple conceit, it's more considered than the books he cranked out in a week, and it has inklings of the gnostic weirdness of the work that would immediately proceed it. if you're going for realistic, I'd say A Scanner Darkly over Timothy Archer.

that's about where my PKD taste is, too. (except i still haven't Transmigration for some reason)

still haven't ^read^ Transmigration

I think Ubik is the best intro, it’s a nice balance of what he’s about. Timothy Archer is good but atypically low-key, VALIS is probably easier if you’ve read a couple of his other books, A Scanner Darkly is amazing but maybe sets a standard of writing that a lot of the earlier books won’t quite live up to. Man in the High Castle is cool but I know several people who found it frustrating and disappointing, maybe because it’s operating in a more established format but doesn’t obey that format’s rules.

tolerance for wiggy reality-melting divine-invasion fiction is gonna be the deciding factor

I'm not sure really, but I know she really likes Blade Runner so maybe Android is the best start.

UBIK or Flow My Tears. otm about Timothy Archer being atypically low-key. Karl i'd recommend it only if you've read The Divine Invasion, which is somehow even wilder than VALIS and makes Timothy Archer seem even more straightforward. even though it's an unintended trilogy, I think it works- there are hints of mysticism/gnosticism in Timothy Archer that are explicit throughout the other two books. but its strongest suit is the voice: Ursula K. LeGuin criticized PKD's lack of well developed female characters, and he wrote Timothy Archer from the POV of a woman, and imo did a surprisingly good job.

as far as Scanner Darkly setting the bar high... I mean, that's bound to happen if you start with any of the books mentioned. like I wouldn't recommend Eye in the Sky (even though I love it) first over Flow My Tears.

Flow My Tears just has a classic, simple setup (famous person wakes up and no one knows who he is), and its peculiarity unfolds more gradually than other of the later works. like the whole first bit with the girl he's following around the city is paced very strangely, and then how it all ends up with the incest thing and the woman in bondage, and then she's a skeleton? that shit rules

I recall I was just constantly wtfing and pausing for mental breath reading Three Stigmata.

I just mean that Ubik still has a somewhat unpolished and pulpy style to the writing (though it’s funny and fast-paced). It doesn’t bother me, but A Scanner Darkly stands apart in terms of his writing imo, and going from that to something like Three Stigmata (which I love) might be startling.

Xp yeah Three Stigmata has like 15 insane plot twists in the last 50 pages I think.

you've definitely gotta be primed for Three Stigmata, that was maybe the 10th novel of his that I read and honestly I missed a lot, and knowing its reputation, was let down when I finished it. I really need to revisit it. agree that UBIK is pulpy but it's probably the best work of that period of his writing.

I read “Faith of Our Fathers” recently. All-time line - “And I will tell you this: there are things worse than I. But you won't meet them because by then I will have killed you.”

Dr. Bloodmoney for total insanity

I read Martian Time-Slip today, not quite out there like most of his work but man I can't stop loving his books.

yea i wasn't keen on that one either, a lot of people like it

Electric dreams: Autofac was pretty good. Janelle Monae as a customer service bot!

I would not start with UBIK but with the short stories.

This is madness

Just started Skull. Hurrah

PKD's widow Tessa has a youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/busby777/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ee_H1VMX0AUzLRG?format=jpg&name=small

Schmowen
@themoosemingles

Philip K. Dick, The Germs’ manager Nicole Panter, author KW Jeter, and artist Gary Panter at Philip K. Dick’s Santa Ana condo. Note poster of Fat Freddy of Freak Bros fame.

Marc ʄⁿ Laidlaw
@marc_laidlaw
·
7h

Paul Mavrides tells an amazing story about how he was ghost-drawing a Fat Freddy poster for Shelton just when "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (which hinges on such a poster, and the possibility it's a forgery (in a forged reality)) appeared in Playboy.

Whole thread is worth reading, but got to go now.

Whole Twitter thread, that is (this one too o course)

Poster is the 'Keed Spills' Freddy anti-speed warning, appropriately/ironically.

PDK seems to have been speed-dependent, to an extent, during extended bouts of writing---for reasons of inspiration, obsession, and/or financial desperation---think he acknowledged it in intro to at least one of his books (A Scanner Darkly, maybe?), and it may well have shortened his life---as William Burroughs observed, there were some old junkies, hardly any old speed freaks.

I think nearly every major work was written in a speed haze or post-74 theophany (tho he still used speed, like that speech in France 1977)

"Non-woven masks better to stop Covid-19, says Japanese supercomputer."