At those who scroll the comments first, this was well worth the ten minutes to read. I don't think I've wrapped my head around all the ideas enough to summarize it yet. But it really describes everything I love about the medium of scifi.
I decided to finally read "Do Androids..." after watching Blade Runner 2049 and have tried reading some of Dick's other work. It is a weird discrepancy between the low quality of writing and high quality of thinking.
This essay will give you the reasons why Dick is worth reading; maybe you haven't read any yet, or maybe you can't explain (to yourself or others) why you think he was worth reading.
Either way, my time was well spent.
The almost theatrically pulpy Ubik, for example, contains something of his finest writing (unlike much of what he wrote, it nails a certain unnerving combination of slapstick drollness and outright creepiness). Sure, some of his prose is a bit creaky, exposing his pulp roots, but not consistently so.
His writing matured once he slowed down in the late 1960s, and Flow My Tears and A Scanner Darkly both contain some damn fine writing. His essays, lectures, letters and the Exegesis also showed him to be a very good writer.
That said, I don’t think saying his writing is awful is necessarily derogatory - if anything, he just didn’t let good prose get in the way of a good story or a good idea - and frankly, his style actually enhances his literature - it’s almost part of the narrative.
He’s my favourite author by a country mile, and my several excursions into writing (a novel, two novellas, dozens of short stories, all unpublished as I don’t think they’re even worth pulp) may have inherited his approach ever so slightly, by which I mean they quite definitely have.
The Exegesis is pretty much my Bible.
I didn't like its overly biblical take on the universe with replicants as angels and Wallace as an old testament God, Luv an allusion to Lucifer.
Joi, on the other hand, could have been a high point. We'd have several "layers" of real with a hologram, an old Nexus 6 replicant like K and the new obedient replicants like Luv and her ilk.
But that vein was (AFAIK) just left as a gutpunch to K by the commercial hologram and didn't feel like the central theme in any way. For me, the "you play beautifully" line was the lynchpin of the old movie.
Having said all that, I only got to see it once and I may have missed something. I was awed by the movie back them, but not moved. Still left it as one of the better cinema-experiences of last year for me.