The Eyes Have It (1953)
gutenberg.org
gutenberg.org
He was a prolific writer well before he had his visions. You could say he used visions as source material, but I think it is more accurate to way the he used writing to try to make sense out of his visions.
The latest issue has this sterling example : "I nodded at her and walked toward the suite door, feeling her eyes like ice cubes sliding down my back all the way out."
Very funny and worth reading in the New Yorker archives if you have a subscription.
I don't get this. Is this some other misunderstanding by the character?
So... it's a short story about a man recounting a book he read that claims aliens are invading the earth while describing a selfless alien woman who donates her body-parts to other people and the story ends with him playing Monopoly... I don't see a story here.
I know Philip K. Dick is a celebrated author, so I assume my not-getting-it problem is all-me - can someone please explain it to me?
I went back and read the italicized lines only. I got the joke now.
Here's my trippy understanding.
> I had had enough of the thing. I want to hear no more about it. Let them come on. Let them invade Earth. I don’t want to get mixed up in it.
> I have absolutely no stomach for it.
The author is finally mutated and someone took his stomach as well ?
He did not realize it because, someone stole his brain ?
Daaaaang, I never considered that.
From the preface: "A little whimsy, now and then, makes for good balance. Theoretically, you could find this type of humor anywhere. But only a topflight science-fictionist, we thought, could have written this story, in just this way…."
Project Gutenberg will give you some hints to its status, but it is not exhaustive:
> This etext was produced from Science Fiction Stories 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
That is, there is always a risk that some troll will pop up one day claiming it holds the copyrights for a certain work. If you are not backed by a publisher who can handle the legal stuff, than your safest bet it to stick with much older works (generally pre-1900, but weird exceptions seem to exist in some countries). If you are only concerned with US law, pre-1926 is safe.
Update: uh, just saw it's so short.
But I also believe that isn't what it was at all, but cannot bring to mind what it really did.
It is similar to the reasoning about unstable existence of any time machine that can send you back to before it was made.
That said what I recall was that the main character was a weapons designer for coalition of western countries that had some name to signify they were an amalgamation of the US and Western Europe.
Weapons were designed but never used, they were designed to be destroyed thereby keeping the peace. There was also a similar designer for the communist bloc of countries, old USSR China amalgamation.
It turns out there is a comic book writer / artist in some African country that has been producing comics with their designs before even done. This threatens to collapse the whole clown show. I think there is a comic with the Zap Gun, nobody knows what it does, and neither of the weapons designers have thought it up on their own.
Don't remember much else.
An alien invasion is involved evidently, which I still have not memory of. The probably brainwiped me, darn aliens, when they took over the Earth.
Like but not like Iain M. Banks' Lazy Guns [0]. When you pulled their triggers, literally anything could happen to the target, ranging IIRC from a cartoon anvil dropping on their head to a devastating volcanic eruption. Again IIRC, they weighed more when held upside down.
It turns out I forgot I read A Terran Oddessy...
This quote from Ubik perfectly reflects how I feel on a regular basis.
Reality is weird. What's even going on here, anyway? Perhaps we should just put our faith in Ubik. It's safe when taken as directed, of course.
That's essentially the point of the ending, yeah. Well, less so that "it doesn't make sense" and more "actually, it's entirely unclear what is even going on".
Reality is slippery -- at the very moment you think you've got a grip on what's going on, it jumps out of your hands.
You'll see this same theme reflected in many of his other books, if you end up reading and more.
That's a good way of putting it and it does fit the theme of the book. I just spent a bit thinking about the ending again and while it's not any clearer I do like it more now.
Dick was a fantastic writer. Noone can alienate me like he can.
Most fiction doesn't make any sense if you really think about it, much less Science Fiction, much less Science Fiction in which Reality mutates unrecognizably several times in the course of the book.
But seriously, Ubik is a great book - one of Dick's best.
e.g., remember when Horselover Fat gets beamed secret information from a faraway satellite through a pink light to his forehead? Or when he learns we are secretly still living in first century Rome? Both things that PKD actually believed happened to him.
The lucidity with which PKD explored his mental illness in VALIS is pretty extraordinary.
Have you read How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days?
Check it out
But it's very Star Trekky, full of hope of "doing better" even when failing at times, and much unlike everything else I've watched! And I love it!!
Like most famous sci-fi writers, Phillip K. Dick likely worried about the things he wrote about and hoped technologists would take it as advice against when faced with the same choices as the people in the stories.
One of the most fascinating writers in history, I think, but can definitely be depressing to read sometimes.
Yet the book is full of subtle humor, and a profound understanding of individuals' tragedy at the same time.
There is a great movie made after the novel, with the same name. The movie does capture the spirit of the book, even as switching the medium, a noteworthy achievement.
I don't. I think he paints up depressing worlds often, but there's also a spirit of perseverance, of ingenuity, of "life goes on". His characters are occasionally soldiers, but more often workers and everyday people doing their things. In a Nazi alt-history dystopia, he takes the time to explain how an antiquarian earns his living. [1]
In some dystopia were mankind loses a war against aliens, he makes the aliens sympathetic enough to give the remaining humans a fiction to believe in that will make them want to keep on living. The aliens are also quite forgiving and want to rebuild Earth after the war. [2]
When robots take over humanity, hidden in underground caves after a terrible war between the East and the West Blocs, they are actually hiding the fact they rebuilt the world and it's green and healthy, ready for us to re-enter it. [3]
When an alien invader supplants the horrible husband of the woman protagonist, she finds the alien is actually loving and caring, and prefers it to her husband. [4]
When a (possibly deranged) dog sees threats to the family it loves in everyday things, like the milkman or the garbage truck "stealing their garbage", it does this out of love and fierce loyalty -- however misplaced. [5] (or is it..?)
When an authoritarian interstellar military force wants to punish Earth for having ruined it all, those cheeky earthers invent an elusive rebel leader, Benny Cemoli, and pin all the blame on him; keeping the military force occupied chasing ghosts seemingly forever. [6]
When an underhanded authoritarian government is shaping up covertly in Callisto, Earth agents find the way to dismantle it -- and in the process, PKD shows his vision that there's no concept as absurd and easy to subvert as the concept of "a just war". The good guys win though. [7]
I agree PKD often imagined visions of dystopian hell, but he just as often offered nuggets of hope and everyday life. A bit like Bradbury, only more surreal.
----
[1] "The Man in the High Castle"
[2] "Precious Artifact"
[3] Can't remember the title of this one, sorry
[4] Also cannot remember the title. It was included as an episode of PKD's Electric Dreams.
[5] "Roog"
[6] "If there were no Benny Cemoli"
[7] "The mold of Yancy"
I find most (maybe all?) of PKD's novels were born of a short story with the same theme.
I reflected on this and realised that he's right. In his stories the hero often courageously penetrates through the facade and gets to the truth of things. What's more, there is generally an objective truth underneath the facade. It's not turtles all the way down. There is a reasonable explanation and once the hero figures it out they manage to take some control of their own destiny.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/philip-k-dick/short-fictio...
The best description of his over arching theme that I've heard was: he explored the slippery nature of reality.
Sure, he explored technology, the future, dystopias, and a number of other things. But the one concept he seemed to continue to return to was the idea that you can never truly know what's actually going on.