The Essential Philip K. Dick
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“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
One thing that I think goes unnoticed about PKD is how some of his earlier short stories are undeniably, unquestionably bad. Fair Game, for instance. He wrote it in 1953, a decade+ before his work started to get really good: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was written in 1964, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and Ubik in 1969.
I personally find this a bit reassuring. It's nice to know that even someone as influential as PKD took a long time to develop.
Stephenson for me is probably the worst offender for this. I've met so many people both online and offline, particularly other programmers who always told me to read his stuff but he's straight up pasting pages of Wikipedia into his books, I felt like I was being trolled.
When I read Snow Crash the first time it was back when cyberpunk was still a pretty hot style, and I was also reading a lot of Gibson and others. It fit well within that context. Then later I reread it and realized what I wrote above, it was parodying elements of the genre while creating almost a quintessentially action-adventure cyberpunk story with a programmer/pizza delivery driver hero. And then it had the typical Stephenson ending, which is to say
that made me laugh out loud
I had trouble getting through them as well, but for other reasons. For Cryptonomicon it was his "let me prove how smart I am" diversions off the main story for dozens of pages at a time, and for Anathem it was an interesting idea told in a boring yet difficult-to-parse way, at least as far as I got.
The quality of the prose in those other two books seemed better, at least.
Big fan of PKD books, btw, although I think his writing style and characters are pretty plain and not that compelling on their own (but they are quick to read as a result, I could knock one out in about 4-6 hours, usually). The ideas, dialogue, and often the endings make them all worth reading, though.
Dick is a champion of the underdog everyman. His protagonists tend to be humble repairmen and other "losers" in the lower stratum of society... I find those characters very human and relatable.
The other type of Dick protagonists are those who think they're on top of the world, until their world turns upside-down and so they get to experience being dragged through the mud.... usually finding out that what they thought was a perfect world was broken, hostile, and sometimes even evil.
His writing style is direct and economical. I really don't have a problem with it.
Stanislaw Lem, on the other hand. The substance is usually fantastic, but the reality of the characters tends to get obscured by long, intricate sentences that lack the precise objective descriptions of Frank's writing and lose a sense of where everything is in relation to one another. Lem tends to be extremely light on description in many instances. Perhaps that can be partly attributed to translation difficulties, as I've never read the Polish source.
On the other hand I'd disagree about Neal Stephenson, I'm reading Snow Crash for the first time (halfway through it right now) and I loved the opening chapters. There's a real kineticism with Hiro and YT speeding through traffic that I find very evocative and leaves me pining for my days of doing irresponsible shit in traffic. He really has a way of writing action that feels exciting and focused.
Neal has some hilarious descriptions that really paint a picture. There's a great description of the "rat thing" robotic sentry disarming a lawn full of aggressors with blinding speed and he describes one of the aggressors as having "had his trousers torn from the waistband all the way down to the ankle, and a strip of fabric is trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something that was in too much of a hurry to let go of the actual pocket before it left."
That said, if do have one gripe so far it's the five uninterrupted chapters with Hiro expositing hard with the Librarian daemon about Sumerian mythology. The concepts being discussed are really interesting but it becomes tiring after a while, even when broken up by a few interstitial chapters following YT.
Supposedly Dick's experience conceived three published novels--Valis, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Divine invasion. There is a fourth, unpublished novel--Radio Free Albemuth that came from it as well. Valis seem to be the most personal since it someone named Philip Dick (or Horselover Fat) having the exact same experience then trying to make sense of it. Divine Invasion has more of the feel of a traditional Dick novel with someone forced to live in a hovel on an alien planet. Timothy Archer is borderline non-SciFi, with only a tiny influence of SciFi, IIRC. And Radio Free Albemuth felt a bit like a cross between Scanner Darkly and Valis--i.e. the Valis story in a dystopian future surveilance state.
It's watchable, but my experience is soured by the terrible experience of contributing to the KickStarter and then not being able to get my reward for years due to living in the UK rather than the US (licensing issues).
That said, if you are interested in reading more by him, of his books I can recommend:
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
- Martian Time-Slip
- Galactic Pot Healer
- Eye in the Sky
- the middle part of Lies, Inc
Some of his short stories:
- Beyond Lies the Wub
- Faith of Our Fathers
I think, in 2022, people will understand Scanner better than they used to or maybe it is on the verge of being outdated?
It should be noted that Ursula K. Le Guin disagreed with your assessment in her famous essay Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown, in which she felt that The Man in the High Castle was one of the only science fiction novels that had a human character - a Mrs Brown.
Its problem is that it is hard to extract meaning from, and the plot kind of goes nowhere. I found it unsatisfying, but not uninteresting.
I don't think I've read a single well-meaning intelligent woman in a PKD story.
I remember being surprised at the start of one of his books, that the female character introduced at the beginning was clearly competent - turned out she was evil.
Flow my Tears is probably his most accessible novel. Do Androids Dream is very disorienting if you were expecting a novelization of Blade Runner and that probably puts a lot of people off him.
His personal life has some interesting events. But largely he was trying to feed his family by cranking out popular stuff. It's tragic how little he was recognized in his lifetime :(
Regarding Ubik, there is a Russian movie, Koma, that looks like it had Ubik as inspiration, and in that probably is more faithful than most Hollywood adaptations of his work.
Did you also read his short story collections?
I'm predisposed to like anything "time travel": "Martian Time Slip" and it's analysis of autism (sci-fi autism) was a subtle body horror; so Dr. Futurity (reminds me of interactive fiction time-travel puzzles), The World Jones Made (more precog trying to change the future and having "prescience" aka Dune), Time Out of Joint (kinda like The Truman Show or "Time Enough for Love" by Albert Finney), and Counter Clock World about time moving backwards and the religious cults it spawns (just plain nutty, not perfect, but a fun concept to toy with).
He has a recurring theme in some books where the idea of the first Martian settlers from Earth being abandoned-working class drug-addicts is pops up several times, and I think that is one hell of a way to look at it compared to all the other stories about Mars. The idea that they are all failed farmers and sit around taking government-issued mind-altering drugs and playing board games where they become the characters to deal with suburban boredom is just bonkers (Three Stigmata of Palmer E., Martian Time Slip [poverty on mars] and a few others).
"Ubik" is really top-tier though. There's a reason that the standards are called "standards". :)
My preference is SF though, but it's because it's the ideas that are the draw for me; if the ideas start repeating themselves, or even themes, it becomes a lot harder to read a lot faster.
I read for the ideas, too. It's typical for me to discover a wonderful book, search out everything from that author, only to observe the ideas becoming repetitive over a long output. Even Terry Pratchett felt very samey to me after a dozen books.
High-output writing seems to be inevitably uniform in outlook. You can easily change the setting of your plot, but it's a lot harder to alter your philosophical view.
Not all stories there are great, but I think he did better in the short stories arena. Most of the movies based on his work were based on short stories, after all.
People have often pointed out this piece 'predicted the internet age' while ignoring the dystopian collapse at the end of Forsters pice, which is alarmingly similar to the current collapse of some aspects of western civilization IMO...
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
I have PKD's 'the Defenders' mapped to 'the machine stops' in my mind
Quite a lot of his stories have been made into movies, for better or worse. They seem to be enough of a chunk to hang a story on, without getting too much in the way of telling a good story.
Minority Report -- much better in the story. We Can Remember it for You Wholesale -- both worked.
Can’t remember another adaptation with such a striking difference from the original.
How about 'Total Recall' as an adaption of 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale'?
However, after the script was reworked, and Dick read it, he said "you read the screenplay and then you go to the novel, and it’s like they’re two halves to one meta-artwork, one meta-artifact."
This makes for some great reading delving into what Dick thought of the film. https://soothfairy.com/2022/09/16/what-did-philip-k-dick-thi...
I especially like Special Effects Chief David Dryer's recollection of what Dick said after watching the first reels:
> Dick looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘How is this possible? How can this be? Those are not the exact images, but the texture and tone of the images I saw in my head when I was writing the original book! The environment is exactly as how I’d imagined it! How’d you guys do that? How did you know what I was feeling and thinking?’
> “Let me tell you, that was one of the most successful moments of my career,” Dryer concludes. “Dick went away dazed.”
I also particularly liked Dick's comments about what the film meant to him:
> 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 Runer. Thank you … It will prove invincible.
Are we talking in general, or just PKD?
Next - with Nicholas Cage - was a film I actually enjoyed, but is a far cry from The Golden Man (short story).
I read an anecdote after Ex Machina came out about the 'freaky alternative ending' that wasn't used, which felt like a nod to the Golden Man:
"... So in that scene, what used to happen is you’d see her talking, and you wouldn’t hear, but all of a sudden it would cut to her point of view. And her point of view is completely alien to ours. There’s no actual sound; you’d just see pulses and recognitions, and all sorts of crazy stuff ..."
Short story not mentioned but is worth reading if one has not, Second Variety.
The movie The Terminator has some similarities to Second Variety, and I wouldn't be surprised if the movie was somewhat influenced by the story.
the article describes it as the opening time travel part, though it's not clear that's what Cameron said.
See below for another example of this. I really admired him as a writer when I first encountered on him but the more I got to know him the less I enjoyed it :-/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time
In contrast, PKD stories like Second Variety feel astonishingly like the post-apocalyptic environment ruled by Skynet and the plan of hunting down the remaining humans with terminators. I would be very surprised if Cameron or someone on the creative team weren't inspired by it.
PKD later said he couldn't call writing it, this being the period where he consumed copious amounts of amphetamines, and produced a ridiculous number of novels and short stories. I still think it's one of his most enjoyable books.
The plot is a ramshackle Vonnegutian comic fantasy featuring a totalitarian dystopia, an alien demigod, a man who "heals" broken ceramic pottery, and an early version of the old Internet pasttime where you use machine translation tools to translate English into other languages and then back again in order to produce humorously mangled sentences. It's a weird, fun, sad book.
Also worth mentioning is A Maze of Death (1970), which is a creepy alien planet exploration story that becomes something else and unexpected, and probably the closest Dick came to writing a Harlan Ellison story.
"A Scanner Darkly" is by far the most polished, and also the most twisted.
My recollection is that it's a list of friends who had lost their lives to drugs of one form or another.
> An unreligious friend read it and, evidently, became born-again christian immediately afterward
Super interesting. I could see the book having that effect on somebody. Not my experience, but it doesn't surprise me that it's happened.
1958 Exploring Tomorrow (Campbell's Mutual show) episode (#11 Made in Avack) [https://archive.org/details/ExploringTomorrow/]
I do think PKD improved as a writer in the 1970s, once he kicked his drug habit and slowed down his hyperactive output; from this era, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, and the VALIS trilogy all has some beautiful writing and show Dick as a deeper and more mature writer.
As for the rest of the sci-fi genre, there's a lot of talent among his contemporaries. I would especially suggest:
* John Crowley. Widely recognized as actual an Author of real Literature, though only his earliest works could be called science fiction. Start with The Deep and Engine Summer.
* Harlan Ellison. Some of his stories ("I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", "Jeffty Is Five", etc.) are simply masterfully written.
* Samuel Delaney. He's an acquired taste and certainly gets a bit self-indulgent, but novels like Babel 17 are often beautifully written.
* Ursula LeGuin, e.g. The Left Hand of Darkness.
* Gene Wolfe. Increasingly also recognized as a genius, I also particularly like his short stories. Start with The Fifth Head of Cerberus; graduate with the monumental The Book of the New Sun, which has no equal in or out of the genre.
* J. G. Ballard. A consummate stylist, he eventually drifted away from SF, but his earlic works are fantastic. My favourite is The Crystal World, as well as his numerious short stories, including one of my favourite stories ever [1]).
Of later writers, William Gibson, China Mieville and Iain M. Banks come to mind.
[1] "Report on an Unidentified Space Station": http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/roauss.htm
For something similar to pkd, but perhaps more refined(?) Alfred Beater, "The Stars my Destination".
That's a good way of putting it. I think a lot of his stuff was just published in a time when editors didn't do much, but also he was picked up by publishers who were pushing pulp, so there's a lot writing that feels "in progress".
There was SciFi coming out of the communist block (Lem, Strugatsky brothers, Zamyatin) which was a comment on the system, there was SciFi from England in early 1900s (Wells) - comment on industrial revolution - and later Orwell - post war, societal controls - and Adams - the world should be more worried about external forces. In the US the genre appears to be a constant starting with Poe[1] followed by Huxley, Dick, Clarke, Asimov, Gibson, Bradbury, Heinlein commenting on all sorts of societal issues. And recently China with The Three Body Problem by Liu. France had Jules Verne but that was more for profit than comment on societal issues.
Coming back to the question, is the popularity of SciFi an indicator for potential fears within society? I know that my favourite bookstore recently had a run on PKD, the bookstore happens to be in mainland Europe.
And what is the relationship between SciFi and philosophy? Philosophy being one of those sciences whose purpose is to question societal forms, constructs and norms.
[1]=https://psyche.co/ideas/are-successful-authors-creative-geni...
It's so long that it feels kind of futile to read it end to end, but I jump to a random page sometimes and read for awhile. There's a lot of repetition, but is fascinating.
It honestly changed my life. There were times when I would have dreams and thoughts along similar lines and then end up reading them in the pages that night. It is worth a read if you're in a dark place, because it might give you the same sense of "I'm not alone" that it did to me.
Certainly ain't for everyone, but the reward is great.
After spending decades reading everything I could on the subject of mystical experiences, from Crowley (the English libertine) to Timothy Leary and Mckenna, the only other writers I'd put on the same "absolutely essential reading" list as PKD, worthy of intense study, are Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner.
That a pulp scifi author made this list is, to me, supremely fascinating.
There was, I'd posted it an hour earlier than their comment.
> Why not just use the working workaround link in the first place?
Who knows, who cares. It takes < 20 seconds to get an archive.org copy and post it yourself. Only a few seconds more than it takes to whine, and a lot more productive.
I'm not going to sign up to NYTimes, but journalists do need to receive payment for the work they do and you've got essentially one of the biggest tech forums actively helping users avoid that.