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I recently bought P. K. Dick’s “Complete Short Stories” published by Folio Society as a big box set.

The stories are in chronological order, which is surprisingly interesting because you get to trace Dick’s evolution as a writer. The first published stories are not very good by any standard, but he keeps gradually honing in on the concepts and atmospheres that eventually mark his work.

As someone who has dabbled in SF writing, it feels like a consolation to see PKD’s humble beginnings laid bare. He never gave up on evolving his craft.

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As far as I remember, Dick's writing was of mixed quality and it wasn't just linearly improving with experience. There were ups and downs. He wrote really a lot, often repeated concepts, and his weaker stuff was often a result of rushing and simply needing a quick buck.

He had a rough life, and it's not hard to see that impact in his work. I read many of his novels, back to back, in the Library of America collections, and by Ubik (my favorite of the bunch) I had the sense that he was barely holding together something moving downhill very quickly.

That energy suits his work in a lot of ways, though not universally, and can be monotonous sometimes.

I grew up in and around San Rafael where he did some of his most important writing and went through possibly the darkest chapters of his life. I always thought there should be a statue of him there...

Also I just felt I should weigh in because of my username.

I just found the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project entry for PKD: [1]

Perhaps there could be something similar in San Rafel.

[1] - https://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/philip-k-dick/

Thats an excellent find, and an excellent idea! Id donate money to that gofundme. Also could have text from his scanner darkly afterword, gets me literally every time. Kindred...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/1hbexo/text_philli...

While I partially agree, I'm not sure your assessment is helpful. There's a treasure trove hidden beyond the words, I'm not sure you're assessing the depth of his writings appropriately.

Not helpful in what? And what is it that I'm missing, or misjudging?

I used to think this but having reread some of the novels recently I tend to disagree. The command of the material and plotting in the likes of ‘... electric sheep’ and ‘ubik’ is streets ahead of his early work and the coherence of the various ideas at play improves massively — the early novels feel like either distended short stories or fixups of multiple different plots. he’s not a fabulous prose stylists but neither is he as bad as his reputation suggests, he’s not a hack and there are some luminous passages in there if you’re looking out for them.

I think he also suffers from being a funny writer, funny writers from PG Wodhouse to Terry Pratchett are often underrated and for me that’s where Dick’s later work really falls down.

Post his breakdown his novels take a much darker edge (i found Valis in particular unbearably bleak), the humour is largely gone and more fundamentally the layered realities now have a single source of truth which in my opinion weakens them considerably compared to the open ended questioning of the mid period.

not a linear improvement perhaps but there’s growth and change in his output over time

Dick certainly refined his skill throughout his career. But at the same time, we can't deny that he wrote a lot of garbage in between his masterpieces.

For example, in the same 4-year time period as masterpieces like Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we got forgettable (and in some cases quite terrible) books like The Ganymede Takeover, The Game-Players of Titan, The Penultimate Truth, The Simulacra, and of course the universally maligned The Crack in Space.

The sad truth is that Dick was fueling his writing habit with drugs (particularly amphetamines) during this time period. He wrote six novels in one 12-month period during 1963-1964. It's a marvel that even the clunkers are fairly readable things, though they're often throwbacks to his earlier pre-1960s work. Another sad truth is that Dick's output was also drive by the need for money (by 1964 he had three ex-wives).

The odd one out from this period is Galactic Pot-Healer, which Dick claimed to have no memory of having written (too many amphetamines), and which he practically disowned. But it's one of his best, a colourful Vonnegutian mix of tragedy and comedy.

yeah, he’s a product of a publishing system that at the time was voraciously hungry for content and the fact that he was good at churning it out. for what it’s worth i think that this kind of set up where quantity is prioritised over quality has lead to some of the most vital cultural flourishings of post ww2 years: electronic dance music in the late 80s early 90s, comic books in the 60 & 70s, video games in the 80s

I have this set, had to buy a 2nd because my first set became too dog-eared from re-reading. To say I read a lot is an understatement. PKD is the first author I "finished", as in having read everything published, and then some more. To me, he is one of the few, in the company of Huxley, Orwell, Burroughs and Joyce, to see the future not being some grand shiny existence, but a chaos of sophisticated manipulations the human race and God in all it's manifestations is lost and consumed by consumerism and commercialized branded religion. I found a Church of PKD in San Francisco once, a tiny space with whacked out meth addicts reading passages of PKD novels to one another. That was an interesting find, and gone when I tried to show some friends.

I would have to say of all the writings, that compilation is the best. You get a taste of everything he had to offer. All his other books are based off of these stories IIRC.

Where can you find it though? It's a sold out special edition with only 750 copies in print.

Ah, I thought the original comment was talking about this https://www.amazon.ca/Remember-Wholesale-Other-Classic-Stori... but I was not aware there are many more!

Sorry to contact you there but I do not see an email in your profile.

I just read your comment on derasterize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997236

> Based on your project I inferred that adding more matches seems to add more resolution and yeah, outputs are looking even nicer now. I updated the repo!

This is the right approach, but there's a combinatory explosion when computing the matches: you want to select a subset of shapes that in practice are more often right, to save on the matching computation time.

Also, when you are operating with time constraints (ex: video to text), keeping the FPS rate is often more important that the accuracy, as the human eye does a lot of interpolation.

Having different subsets of different sizes and a command-line toggle between them seems like the simpler approach to support multiple uses.

> I also used shapes which are less sharp rather than "perfect match".

Selecting some "less sharp" glyphs is a very daring and unique idea: in retrospect, it should help the bad cases by adding some "blur".

I really like you idea!

Would you be interested in a collaboration to inspect fonts and select glyphs based on 1) their availability (ascii>ansi>unicode) 2) their usefulness (by defining some subsets)

I saw your message but was hesitant to respond with disappointment.

I'm sorry my interest in this is not as large as yours!

I think the end result could be cool, but overall not very practical. I wrote my program to include "images" in my text-only articles (http://len.falken.ink/philosophy/is-privacy-in-all-our-inter...), but really I can't imagine a real useful application. We (the world) is much better off to adopt a real "images with text" format which works nicely with terminals (for now this appears to be sixel and the proposal by kiTTY).

My email is inbox at lee <this username> dot ca :)

> My email is inbox at lee <this username> dot ca :)

Thanks, I will get in touch!

I want to release a new version of tmux-sixel first.

> really I can't imagine a real useful application

Plots of datasets are extremely helpful! It is much faster to use gnuplot over ssh than to download a subset of data

"The first published stories are not very good by any standard"

I loved PKD's Beyond Lies the Wub, which was his first published story (published in 1952). I also really liked the story he wrote the year before (but which didn't get published until the year after) called Roog.

Make sure you also read "Not by Its Cover", a sort of sequel to "Beyond Lies the Wub".

Thanks for the recommendation. I found a copy here: [1]

I enjoyed the story, though the ending was a little weak.

[1] - http://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd035-0.html

Dick is one of my go-to SF authors when I'm using the public library's book lending app (Hoopla) and want to type in a novelist name and read some completely random piece of their work.

He was so incredibly prolific that there is always more to explore. It's … not always great, huh.

One quiet theme I've seen in sampling his work at different stages is the evolution of San Francisco the city -- Dick has a bunch of stories which paint a particular picture of the mid 20th century Bay Area that of course feels very different from what the place is like today. It reminds me of the place we see in "The Crying of Lot 49".

A few years back while visiting the city I tried to get something fixed at a repair shop in a small office suite in a very old building (I think probably https://www.yelp.com/biz/setraks-watch-repair-san-francisco ) and it looked and felt exactly like the older time SF of Dick's stories.

I just looked up what the folio society is and that book set. Wow! It looks absolutely gorgeous. I really wish I found out about it, guessing they never do reprints?

No, but this is like the third edition of the collected stories anyway. You should be able to find copies of the Citadel paperback at reasonable prices. I have the Underwood-Miller edition, but that is now fairly scarce.

I don't think we are talking about the same thing at all. You are referring to a story I am referring to this:

https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-complete-short-stories....

Underwood-Miller put out a "The Collected Stories of Phillip K. Dick" 5 book collection in 1987.

I have a first-edition set on my bookshelves back when I bought it back then.

I assume the Folio Society collection is the same material, redone into 4 books and fancy covers and illustrations.

I have two copies of the '87 set, and have compared them to the Folio set and they are the same.

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