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Comment by Eupolemos | Hacker News Reader

I just wanted to second this - it is def. worth the short time to read.

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.

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His writing is generally awful, but his thoughts are (no qualification) the most profound I've ever encountered in print - and I've read quite a bit over the years. His short stories are also really worth-while, from his campy early stuff through to his later stuff - there's a vein of "what is reality" throughout, and they provide a relatively soft landing into his worlds.

The "Dick was a bad prose writer" meme is fairly undeserved, in my opinion. He was, if anything, quite inconsistent in that regard, and also capable of fantastically good, searing prose at times.

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’s fair - and I’ll grant that he has moments of sheer style that I find myself quoting decades later.

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author by a country mile, and my several excursions into writing (a novel, two novellas, dozens of short stories, all unpublished as I don’t think they’re even worth pulp) may have inherited his approach ever so slightly, by which I mean they quite definitely have.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.

The dedication for A Scanner Darkly is probably the only thing anyone needs to read to understand drug use and abuse. It’s beautiful and heart breaking.

I've read ~15 of Dick's novels over the past 20 years, and _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ is among my least favorite, despite the excellent movies based on it. This past year I finally read one of his books that awed me without leaving a sour taste re: character development, lackluster ending, etc.: _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_. Nonetheless, despite his novels' shortcomings, I have thoroughly enjoyed many of them.

As a side note I was really disappointed in Blade Runner 2049. The script seems to lack completely that dark feeling of confusion and uncertainty of the original movie. Actually, a lot in it seems to be built around rigid dichotomies: humans and replicants, good and evil, physical and virtual. While in the original replicants were heralds of a new synthetic reality replacing the current one (and the final doubt about the nature of Deckard showed that it was already impossible to tell the one from the other), in the sequel all is reduced to a fight between opposing factions, as if the problem was "who is gonna win in the end?".

I both liked it and was left disappointed.

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.

The plot was pants, but the experience of watching he movie unfold was brilliant. Just the cinematography and the music alone was worth spending that time and money on.

If the plot was terrible, the visual aspects didn't impress me at all (it looked way too shiny and polished, some elements were trite - the snowy-white locations, the red desert ones; or taken from previous movies, for example Spielberg's AI). The music was generic but bombastic. The kung-fu fights completely unnecessary and pointless.

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