Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975)
depauw.edu
depauw.edu
I came to the conclusion that this indeed is not science fiction; it is not fantasy; it is exactly what Harrison said: futurism. The impact of BLADE RUNNER is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people -- and, I believe, _on science fiction as a field._ … Nothing that we have done, individually or collectively, matches BLADE RUNNER. This is not escapism; it is super realism, so gritty and detailed and authentic and goddam convincing that, well, after the segment I found my normal present-day "reality" pallid by comparison. What I am saying is that all of you collectively may have created a unique new form of graphic, artistic expression, never before seen. And, I think, BLADE RUNNER is going to revolutionize our conceptions of what science fiction is and, more, _can_ be.
… As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER. Thank you...and it is going to be one hell of a commercial success. It will prove invincible.
[1] Philip K. Dick official website, http://web.archive.org/web/20121015191334/http://philipkdick...
I would recommend, and you are welcome to ignore should you choose:
Ubik
Flow my tears, the policeman said
Dr Bloodmoney
Radio Free Albemuth
Time out of joint
A scanner darkly
Mary and the giant
And finally as an aside, 334 by Thomas Disch.
Fun fact: Dick shopped Disch to the feds for in his view pedalling anti-American views. These letters are fascinating - and Radio Free Albemuth might ring some bells.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/07/neo-nazis-syphilis-and-...
PKD has an uncanny grasp on the reality-busting nature of our current reality, and the above books are a decent primer in his way of thinking. The list is by no means complete, just what trips out of my head as “Good PKD”.
His non-sf works, like Mary and the Giant and Confessions of a Crap Artist, I did not understand in the slightest as a younger man. Now I read them, and their realities are palpable, sordid, tawdry, and utterly real.
Most likely the latter, but honestly, I don’t know. Disch’s work did change fairly radically and suddenly, but that’s not to say there was an external influence.
The common denominator in all of Dick’s fiction is a world beset by an unconstrained and monstrous entropy that devours matter and even time
Reference: https://dynamicsubspace.net/2010/05/09/stanislaw-lems-philip...
And also from the linked article:
The writings of Philip Dick have deserved a better fate than that to which they were destined by their birthplace. If they are neither of uniform quality nor fully realized...
Unlike Stephen King, Dick's books aren't very easy to read from cover to cover, but they're filled with rich references of dystopian tragedy.
William Gibson's Neuromancer is a little easier, but leans more stylistic similar to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, who relied on a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat", which takes its name from the Russian suffix that is equivalent to '-teen' in English to inject the character's language with a certain brand of nastiness to go with the subverted plot.
Stanley Kubrick successfully adapted King's The Shining and Clockwork Orange, but failed to wrap his mind fully around Dick, methinks, as he could never bring a Dick-influenced project to its feet, A.I., which Spielberg couldn't do much with either.
Part of the adventure in reading Dick is figuring out what the hell happened before the novel began to have such a devastating effect on the present he so vividly presents.
Since he died, the imaginative powers of Dick have been tapped and retapped by Hollywood, (Bladerunner, Blade Runner 2049, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau, Screamers) ...and sometimes the results are even pretty good (despite the esoteric nature of his writing).
There's a lot to be learned about our existential existence from reading Dick, and I associate him more with Kafka and Camus, than his science fiction genre-mates.
Don't forget The Matrix -- though it wasn't directly based on any of PKD's work, his influence on it is pretty clear. The Truman Show was obviously inspired by Dick's Time Ouf of Joint (though Dick's book was a lot darker than the lighthearted Jim Carrey comedy). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is yet another PKD-lite (featuring Jim Carrey yet again). PKD's influence on Hollywood is vast.
Although his books are hard to read sometimes, the ideas expressed in them more than makes up for the fuzzy/bad form in the which they are conveyed.
It hasn't been updated in a few years, but this site used to regularly take recent news articles and link them to story elements in Dick's stories: http://fraser.typepad.com/frolix_8/philip_k_dick/
Unlike Stephen King, Dick's books aren't very easy to read from cover to cover,
Here's the collection I have. There are others; this is just the one I've got:
Philip K. Dick goes more in the direction of some new invention and its effects or consequences to the human condition. Not that this doesn't happen in other science fiction, but this is just what I've seen in my limited experience.
Kubrick’s AI project was not inspired by Dick, it stemmed from a Brian Aldiss work.
No one in his right mind seeks the psychological truth about crime in detective stories. Whoever seeks such truth will turn rather to Crime and Punishment.
...
Joseph Conrad's elevated description of literature as rendering "the highest kind of truth to the visible universe"
To me the arts deal with the hardest questions, the ones that cannot be quantified, solved with an algorithm, or even with the infinite imagined powers of ML; the ones for which we often can't find the right questions. Despite all our technological advancements, the world around us seems to bend into pointless chaos and conflict, from peace and prosperity to war - but bizarrely with no enemy threatening us. I find the arts have more and more to say to me.
Take Dick for example: whether his writing deals with "the highest kind of truth" is not important to me. I've read just about everything he's written because I enjoy his writing.
I think this is equally true for Dostoevsky, Conrad, and other acclaimed writers. When I read those authors, I have an emotional reaction. It's not research. I didn't come away from Crime and Punishment with a better understanding of why people commit murder. I don't understand "nautical psychology" any better for having read The Shadow Line. I was moved by those novels. I'd say that makes them entertainment.
I don't think acclaimed literature belongs in a different category than teenage supernatural romance. Twilight elicit an emotional response from its audience just like Ubik does. The emotions, technique, and the audience could hardly be more different, but I see no reason that one of those novels should be categorized as "base entertainment" and the other as "high art". They're both entertainment.
Some literature may contain a thesis but, in my opinion, it mostly doesn't. If someone has to "study" a novel to "get the point" then that novel has failed, at least with regard to that reader.
Just my opinion.
More on topic: I enjoy Roberto Bolano's thoughts on Philip K. Dick: http://www.electriccereal.com/roberto-bolano-on-philip-k-dic...
To the extent that art deals with deep issues of critical importance to humanity, it at least strives to rise above the mass of "pure entertainment" which does not strive for anything more than entertaining and distracting its audience from just such serious contemplation. To the extent said art succeeds in what it tries to accomplish, and does so in a profound, engaging, and unforgettable way, it is great.
With the sole exception of an added vampire/werewolf hunk you nailed it. The subject matter though is less problematic than the really abysmal writing. PKD didn’t always have the best writing style, but made up for it with content. Twilight is derivative content delivered in appalling fashion.
Not to nitpick the parent who is entitled to their option, but I think there's an important distinction to add: I can't detect the difference between average and great sake, but the difference exists. I'm not so great at understanding jazz solos, but others know them better. Similarly, the parent might not see what I see in literature, but I promise that those things exist (and almost certainly, vice versa for some other domain of knowledge). And there are people who see more than I do in the same book - I don't think those things are non-existent because I don't understand them; I just assume that I don't see them yet and, if possible, I work a little harder and try to learn a bit more.
Nobody is born with the expertise in any of this. We're all learning as we go. I promise there is so much to see in literature, something I happen to have spent the time to understand.
https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
As an aside, the dreary, rainy atmosphere of Blade Runner was inspired by Dick's residency in Vancouver.
The last story in Mortal Engines - "The Mask" - ranked easily as good as Dick's work and perhaps even bested it in its narrative of eccentric psychological states.
There's a few themes here that are interesting. Firstly, it's Lem's early recognition of Dick as a genius. I'd like to think that one of the things that Lem had in common with Dick was that they were both mentally traumatized (Lem, barely surviving Nazi-occupied Poland, and Dick, suffering from intense depression and psychoses). They both wove stories around the mind dealing with situations that were pervasive and inescapable. Lem went on to translate Ubik into Polish. Dick responded by accusing him of being a Communist party stooge/pseudonym, and held Lem personally responsible for financial shortfalls from the publisher. So much for kindred spirits!
Neither one of them wrote "entertaining" stories, at least not according to popular trends. The main thrust of the article is how to consider literary greatness in the midst of contemporary entertainment. But, the striking thing to me is that Dick's works are entertainment now. It's one thing for genius to be recognized after the author has passed, but why are Hollywood and Netflix churning out Phillip Dick (and related) stories decades later? Most ideas about future technology from that period are laughably wrong or outdated.
After the events of the past few years or so, I have to wonder if people feel the same sense of paranoia and dissociation echoed in the stories. It's pretty clear modern society is unraveling, and we're heading towards some awful disaster, whether it's ecological, technological, or political. Dick's stories follow those mental patterns and somehow feel familiar.
Finally, I am grateful for taking Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's Science Fiction class at Depauw all those years ago. He maintains this page and the rest of the archives : https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/index.htm
Not only that, but science fiction editors back then were actively hostile to the direction Dick's stories were headed. Here's what Dick himself had to say about it:
"At the beginning of my writing career in the early Fifties, Galaxy was my economic mainstay. Horace Gold at Galaxy liked my writing whereas John W. Campbell, Jr. at Astounding considered my writing not only worthless but as he put it, "Nuts." By and large I liked reading Galaxy because it had the broadest range of ideas, venturing into the soft sciences such as sociology and psychology, at a time when Campbell (as he once wrote me!) considered psionics a necessary premise for science fiction. Also, Campbell said, the psionic character in the story had to be in charge of what was going on. So Galaxy provided a latitude which Astounding did not. However, I was to get into an awful quarrel with Horace Gold; he had the habit of changing your stories without telling you: adding scenes, adding characters, removing downbeat endings in favor of upbeat endings. Many writers resented this. I did more than resent this; despite the fact that Galaxy was my main source of income I told Gold that I would not sell to him unless he stopped altering my stories--after which he bought nothing from me at all."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Kandel
>Kandel is perhaps best known for his translations of the works of Stanisław Lem from Polish to English. Recently he has also been translating works of other Polish science fiction authors, such as Jacek Dukaj, Marek Huberath and Andrzej Sapkowski. The quality of his translations is considered to be excellent; his skill is especially notable in the case of Lem's writing, which makes heavy use of wordplay and other difficult-to-translate devices.
http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/lem/HorribleP...
Oft, in that wickless chalet all begorn,
Where whilom soughed the mossy sappertort
And you were wont to bong --
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
[...]
>[...] Includes autolips, aphrodisial philanderoids, and satyriacal panderynes as standard accessories.
Something well-written of course, like Consider Phlebas [1]. But good literature doesn't necessarily need to have "more self-knowledge than talent". The Odyssey and the Illiad, are not particularly known for their deep philosophical understanding, and yet they were passed down generation to generation, mouth-to-ear for thousands of years. There is something precious and unique to be found in great stories that are nothing more than great stories. We should welcome and celebrate work that goes a bit further than that, but well-crafted tales of a specific genre also have value.
Also, they're much easier to write and read.
_____________________
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=997
>The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers... Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.
>As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure - the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next...
>In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him - or her - was meaningless.
When the movie came along, I was disappointed in the scramble suit effect they used, since it looked like a bunch of flickering concrete glimpses of different people, instead of an abstract glimpse of one generic unmemorable person. If somebody looked like they did in the movie, you'd sure notice them in a crowd, which is the opposite effect the scramble suit was supposed to provide.
It was a great try, it looked really cool, but it couldn't work because Philip K Dick wrote something that was easy to imagine, just impossible to draw.
Scanner Darkly Scramble Suit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqWBCsWRdw4
A Scanner Darkly - FX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWne23FfKW8
>They wear these suits called scramble suits, where it hides their identity, and instead replaces pieces of parts. It gives you the idea that you're seeing the person, but you just can't focus on it.
>You read in the novel and it describes it as a vague blur, or millions of different representations of people. That makes sense when you're reading it. But then we have to visualize that, and actually present that, how do you do that? A blue eye for one second, and I'll shift it to a brown eye, to a different mouth, to a mustache, to a full beard, to nothing.
There's just no way to capture the "just can't focus on it" part of the scramble suit on film, because the scrambling on film draws your attention instead of repelling it.
Rare Philip K Dick interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ewcp6Nm-rQ
>The position which writers such as myself hold in America, those positions are very lowly. Science Fiction is considered something for adolescents. For just high school kids, and for disturbed people in general to read in America. So we are limited in our writing to books that have no sex, no violence, and no deep ideas. Just something of an adventure kind of nature, which we call "Space Opera", which is just Westerns set in the future.
I still can't imagine how they could ever make The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, or Faith of Our Fathers into movies. But that's more because of the plots and the subject matter, than the visuals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_of_Our_Fathers_(short_st...
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html
>Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.
https://blog.canary.is/from-tesla-to-touchscreens-the-journe...
>One year earlier, in 1998, Mark Weiser described it a little differently, stating that, “Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world,” Weiser asserted,“ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.” This wasn’t the first time someone broached the idea of IoT. In the early 1980s, students at Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science department created the first IoT Coke machine. Author Philip K. Dick wrote about the smart home in the 1969 sci-fi novel Ubik, and four decades before, inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla addressed the concept in Colliers Magazine. In an amazingly prescient 1926 interview, Tesla said,
>"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain…We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance…and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik
“Five cents, please,” his front door said when he tried to open it. One thing, anyhow, hadn’t changed. The toll door had an innate stubbornness to it; probably it would hold out after everything else. After everything except it had long since reverted, perhaps in the whole city … if not the whole world.
He paid the door a nickel, hurried down the hall to the moving ramp which he had used only minutes ago.
[…]
“I don’t have any more nickels,” G. G. said. “I can’t get out.”
Glancing at Joe, then at G. G., Pat said, “Have one of mine.” She tossed G. G. a coin, which he caught, an expression of bewilderment on his face. The bewilderment then, by degrees, changed to aggrieved sullenness.
“You sure shot me down,” he said as he deposited the nickel in the door’s slot. “Both of you,” he muttered as the door closed after him. “I discovered her. This is really a cutthroat business, when —“ His voice faded out as the door clamped shut. There was, then, silence.
[…]
“I’ll go get my test equipment from the car,” Joe said, starting towards the door.
“Five cents, please,”
“Pay the door,” Hoe said to G. G. Ashwood.
[...]
“Can I borrow a couple of poscreds from you?” Joe said. “So I can eat breakfast?”
“Mr. Hammond warned me that you would try to borrow money from me. He informed me that he already provided you with sufficient funds to pay for your hotel room, plus a round of drinks, as well as —“
“Al based his estimate on the assumption that I would rent a more modest room than this."
"What the absence of such model works leads to is shown, more plainly than by any abstract discussions, by the change of heart which Damon Knight, both author and respected critic, expressed in SFS #3. Knight declared himself to have been mistaken earlier in attacking books by van Vogt for their incoherence and irrationalism, on the grounds that, if van Vogt enjoys an enormous readership, he must by that very fact be on the right track as an author, and that it is wrong for criticism to discredit such writing in the name of arbitrary values, if the reading public does not want to recognize such values."
Might be rendered:
"We can see what happens when there are no model works to refer to. Damon Knight's recent change of heart illustrates it best. Mr Knight, an author and respected critic writing in SFS #3 said he had been wrong to attack the work of van Vogt for their incoherence and irrationalism. He conceded that van Vogt's popularity proved that the author was on the right track. He now feels that criticism is wrong to discredit such writing in the name of arbitrary values, if the reading public does not want to recognize such values."
I think most modern readers probably prefer that style (which I may not have done justice)...but actually I follow the flow of Lem's thought better in the long, connected sentences which seem to make the thought all of a piece and I find I absorb the meaning in a single uninterrupted ... blob.
"This is, be it said forthwith, apposite as a castigation of historiographic diagnostics..."
I don't know Polish, but it seems suspect that all of "forthwith," "apposite," "castigation," "historiographic," and "diagnostics" have direct 1:1 equivalents, leading me to believe that we're getting more of the translator's voice than Lem's.
See also the (controversial?) retranslation of Solaris a few years ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-t...