Second Variety, by Philip K. Dick (1953) | Hacker News Reader

Second Variety, by Philip K. Dick (1953)

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90 pointsdjoldman27 comments

Anecdote, but I’ve never read this anywhere —

The day after he died Ursula LeGuin was supposed to give the commencement address at Reed College, in Portland. She started by saying, “Yesterday the greatest science fiction author of all time, and the greatest living author in English, died. So I’m going to talk about Philip K Dick instead of give this speech I wrote.”

(Source: I took SF classes at Portland State University with Tony Wolk, a good friend of Ursula LeGuin. He’d often have her come and talk to a class.)

Now, many people I respect would still say LeGuin herself is still the literary pinnacle in SF, and I agree. That she, the most human of writers, saw such humanity in PKD — that’s always struck me.

While I think some details of your anecdote might be wrong (Dick died in early March 1982, which is probably too early for Reed College's commencement), I think it is clear that LeGuin had a lot of admiration for Dick.

She talked extensively about him in a 2012 interview with Wired (https://www.wired.com/2012/07/geeks-guide-ursula-k-le-guin/) and in the introduction to the Folio Society's edition of The Man in the High Castle (included in her essay collection Words are My Matter). In both, she mentioned the Phildickian anecdote that they were both students at the same large high school in Berkeley at the same time, but that none of her friends or acquaintances remember Dick.

I was in a SF bookstore and came across a book of poetry by LeGuin. It was absolutely beautiful. One of my most prized possessions.

Interesting fact: they were classmates at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA.

Le Guin also "terrorized" her writing class by springing Toni Morrison on them.

https://luisurrea.com/2018/01/tolfink-was-here-on-ursula-k-l...

I always have to comment whenever I see a PKD thread. He's my favorite author, and nobody else has impacted the way I see reality as much as he has.

> What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds.

- VALIS

> nobody else has impacted the way I see reality as much as he has.

I would be interested in hearing more about this, if you are willing to expand on it.

Not OP, but this resonates, so I'll speak for myself. One common thread in a lot of PKD is that he takes tons of very esoteric philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas extremely seriously. This includes everything from Buddhist Maya, to Platos circular theory of time, and includes lots of really interesting Gnostic stuff too.

Reading his stuff at 10-15 years old can set you up with a follow-up reading list that lasts decades and reaches way outside of scifi. As a human being, there's some very real benefit to explicitly grappling with ideas like Cartesian solipsism at ~12 instead of hearing about it for the first time at ~20 in philosophy 101, but there's also some real dangers too! Besides being well read, PKD was obviously compelled to imagine the logical conclusion of almost everything he encountered in his life, including socio-political trends. While this inclination obviously bestowed an amazing gift, if you look at biographical elements of his life, it's equally obvious that it was a curse. There's definitely such a thing as being way too smart for your own good.

His prescience on many topics is well known, so I'll skip that and add something more obscure. I'm very pleased that PKD is gradually becoming recognized as way more than just some pulp / SF writer, or just another prolific pop-fiction dude (like say Dan Brown or Stephen King) with an existing audience that Hollywood can monetize. PKD deserves much credit in the high-brow postmodern canon too, and although it's not widely realized yet, probably has done more to pioneer and popularize truly experimental fiction generally, and metafiction in particular, than almost anyone else you could name.

Since I recently reread 3-stigmata, I will also quickly remind everyone that Choosy folks choose Chew-Z. As of today, it's uncanny how much Palmer Eldritch looks like an unholy combination of Zuck+Musk.

I read his SF corpus as a pre-teen and teen, too - but really didn’t “get” his non SF stuff until a lot later in life.

Confessions, Mary and the giant, Milton Lumkey, all the rest - I don’t know if anyone captured the texture of the American mind quite so perfectly.

He may have been a philosopher and a prophet, but the thing that he seemed to really understand was people. Their frailty, their avarice, their comfortable delusions, their prejudices, that love and hate are one and the same. As with his SF work, he poked at this consensus driven thing we call “reality”, and brought it crashing down.

He profoundly shaped my thinking, too - you see a cat, I see a thing that is labelled “cat”.

Shit, Jean Baudrillard developed an entire philosophy after reading his stuff.

I felt like he was a kind of kindred spirit, especially after I read _A Scanner Darkly_. I feel like there's a neighborhood where I would be at home, and his house would be on one of the streets. I don't know many people who would live there. I don't know if anyone would ever live there long. I don't know if we'd ever speak.

I could have written this comment, since it completely applies to me as well.

Screamers (1995) is one of my favourite sci-fi movies and it's more or less The Secondary Variety in film form.

Beware: low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, "frustrating close to being great."

Ah, this one.

Yes, it's close to be great, but lacks to be it. Mostly because it's not another Hollywood sugar story about the good guys killing all the bad ones.

But I would recommend it to anyone who like a serious SF.

I liked the idea of Screamers, how the robots started self replicating and took over. Also liked Total Recall, I was never sure if the whole second part of the movie was real or in his head.

I think the confusion about Total Recall's reality is intentional. My view: there are scenes in the movie that are not from Quaid's point of view and that Quaid could not have direct knowledge of. That seems to imply that it's real.

Maybe, but when I'm dreaming I don't always see things from my point of view and I'm often an observer without me clearly being in the dream at all.

In the TR commentary, Verhoeven says the second half is a brain-damaged dream of Quaid’s.

Quite a lot of Philip K Dick's stories mess with your sense of what's real, quite intentionally.

The short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", on which Total Recall is based, is a fun read - it's not quite the same as the movie.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_W...

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Electric Dreams (2017-2018). A series of pure gems based on PKD's legacy.

I really, really disliked that show. They completely mangled the plots, for one; Autofac is a great story, but the adaptation bears little resemblance to it.

They also made some odd choices that didn't really emphasize the qualities that PKD is known for. "Autofac" is the only really classic story here. Why not "The Electric Ant", "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (rights still owned by the Total Recall producers maybe?), "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts", or "Faith of Our Fathers"? Or, indeed, Second Variety?

This is also available[1] in a bit more processed form as a standard ebook.

[1]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/philip-k-dick/short-fictio...

Dick is one of the writers that accompanied me in my youth, along with the Golden Agers (IA, RAH, AC etc.). His books are the base for many SF tv/movies. Total Recall, The Man in the High Castle, and others. This story, written in the fifties, is eerily evocative of todays drone warfare.

Terminator evoked Second Variety for me more than anything else ever has.

Never understood why Harlan Ellison insisted it was ripping off his work instead.

Actually, when it came out, Fred Saberhagen's Brother Assassin came to mind.

The part that Ellison claimed was ripping off his work was the Terminator traveling back in time to kill someone in the present day, which was similar to his Outer Limits episode "Soldier". There are a lot of things that may or may not have inspired Terminator, from "Soldier" to "Second Variety" to "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (a 1970 movie which featured a military computer taking over the world similar to Skynet).

I also love Dick's essay on fiction writing "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"

Neat story. I hadn't read it before; thanks for sharing.

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