philip k dick C/D, S+D

"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