this year i am going to read the entire works of philip k dick

"do you like Kipling?" "i don't know, i've never kippled."

probably my favorite of the last few i've read, disregarding rereadings. notable high points regarding both the bizarre humour and mundane terror type stuff.

i am unsure whether i have to reread all the ones i've already read as part of this. i plan on rereading some, at least.

next up: there's three out in gollancz's sci fi masterworks series the bookshop in town has: a maze of death, the simulacra, time out of joint. after that, i think valis plus the divine invasion and the transmigration of timothy archer.

one of my favorite novels of the 90s is michael bishop's remarkable dick pastiche philip k dick is dead, alas, in which the spirit of massively successful mainstream novelist philip k dick starts appearing to his fans after his death to warn them that something has gone wrong with their world.

Solar Lottery [vt World of Chance (1956 UK)](1955)
The World Jones Made (1956)
The Man Who Japed (1956)
The Cosmic Puppets (1957)
Eye in the Sky (1957)
Time Out of Joint (1959)
Dr. Futurity (1960)
Vulcan's Hammer (1960)
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
The Game Players of Titan (1963)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)
Martian Time-Slip (1964)
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
The Simulacra (1964)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Dr. Bloodmoney [vt Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb](1965)
Now Wait for Last Year (1966)
The Crack in Space (1966)
Counter Clock World (1967)
The Ganymede Takeover (1967) with Ray Nelson
The Zap Gun (1967)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [vt Blade Runner](1968)
Ubik (1969)
Galactic Pot Healer (1969)
A Maze of Death (1970)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
We Can Build You (1972)
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
Deus Irae (1976) with Roger Zelazny
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
VALIS (1981)
The Divine Invasion (1981)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
Lies, Inc. [vt The Unteleported Man](1983)
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1984)
Radio Free Albemuth (1985)
Puttering About in a Small Land (1985)
In Milton Lumky Territory (1985)
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1986)
Mary and the Giant (1987)
Nick and the Glimmung (1988)
The Broken Bubble (1988)

ones i've read in italics. recommendations welcomed.

also, a question: does anyone have any idea as to whether the more hokily skiffy of his titles were editorial edicts? because it seems very odd that the same person would want to have titles like "the three stigmata of palmer eldritch" and also "martian time-slip".

um, if you are gonna read everything he wrote this year, then yeah, you have to re-read stuff. otherwise, your thread title should read: this year i am going to read the entire works of philip k dick (except for the stuff i have already read).

I think I will read more PKD this year too! I've only read, um, High Castle, Scanner Darkly, Electric Sheep, and part of Valis.

x-xpost

I thought the biog from the late '80s was Sutin's Divine Invasions? It was biographically comprehensive, but maybe not that literary.

That Sutin biography is okay. If you read the books, some of the interviews, and listen to the Hour 25 interview, you'd probably be just as well served. There was a halfway decent BBC doc floating around at one point too...

update: read time out of joint on the 3rd, halfway through the simulacra.

Does anyone know anything about any of his books after "Radio Free..." coz I have no idea?

Also this is obv. just listing novels -- what about the short stories?

the simulacra has done the least for me of this batch, partly bcz of three-book fatigue, partly bcz i was tired, partly bcz it is the most flawed - large parts of the plot really don't make any sense, and there are more characters than could actually work even for someone who could really write characters.

have ordered solar lottery, divine invasion. found as-yet unread copies of the crack in space, the unteleported man.

the zelazny one - did dick abandon it and give it to zelazny? or am i confusing it with the bester/zelazny novel? & i believe the novels post albemuth are exhumed manuscripts including some of his 'realist' novels, sterling - he died in '82, after all...

the thing with dick is that he seems good at some things we might acclaim a novelist for (like - doing good work with a set of themes, and having them intersect in characters and narratives in interesting ways) whilst being rather bad at the business of, well, writing novel - by which i guess i mean, having a less clunky prose style (although i kind of like dick's prose - it seems like the worst bits are usually the least characteristically dickish), or being able to convince in terms of character, or plot evenly. ...

... i also think he's fairly un-"postmodern" as a novelist, although i've heard the word connected to him. probably bcz i) it provides some kind of grounds for alleviating the stuff he's bad at and ii) lots of his themes (or obsessions, really) were with fairly 'postmodern' notions - the obsession with, uh, simulacra. the fact that these are worked through in a not-really-postmodern way* is part of what makes him so oddly reassuring as an author (well, i find him that way); so's his sort of general faith in human endeavour, i guess.

(*except maybe in the third-person/first-person authorial slippage in VALIS, maybe, and not even particularly that)

the only one of the short stories i can remember is 'second variety', which i read and did not remember who it was by several years prior to reading any other philip k dick, which when i did i was seeking him out deliberately, i think, and this story which i read at seven or eight in some anthology of stories about robots, not knowing who philip k dick was but knowing i liked stories about robots, this story scared the fucking shit out of me.

Sterling's ref to "post-Albemuth" initially confused me, because Albemuth was the original version of what became VALIS. Yeah, all that posthumous stuff was his rejected mainstream novels from when he was trying to make it as a "serious" writer in the late '50s.

the zelazny one - did dick abandon it and give it to zelazny?

I remember hearing something about this on a radio interview with Dick and basically I think it happened something like that-- Dick got stuck on a project in the first couple of chapters, then did it as a "collaboration" with Zelazny completing it.

the thing with dick is that he seems good at some things we might acclaim a novelist for

I thought I read a rumor somewhere that Dick's writing was the actual impetus for Vonnegut's creation of Kilgore Trout? Apparently, Vonnegut was a fan. (Although Trout's example applies to 99.9% of all "classic" SF writers, and the actual character name is a riff on Theodore Sturgeon's name.)

... i also think he's fairly un-"postmodern" as a novelist

Yeah, I don't think Dick was as playfully self-reflective a purveyor of junk culture as the critics who hyped up Ubik wanted him to be. My impression of him was that his standards of taste were very middlebrow-- he was pretty uneducated and was very defensive about it, always trying to rope in references to "highbrow"/"improving" stuff in his work that would prove his depth of knowledge, which he seemed to value in a sort of totemic way as a marker of status. It's endearingly human of him but doesn't make me think of him as possessing any sort of a great intellect-- his attempts at being "serious" in general strike me as being unaware and laughably crude.

this story scared the fucking shit out of me

I had a similar experience with an anthologized version of the Perky Pat short story he did (which was an alternate version of the settler material from Palmer Eldritch). "The Electric Ant" is another good one, and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" gets pretty crazy by the end.

"as possessing any sort of a great intellect" - well, i guess not - but also i think he must have been pretty smart - a similar sort of thinker to Orwell maybe? maybe not - i just feel mean, saying "not any sort of great intellect" really means getting into all sorts of territory about i) his career and ii) his illness - tho i start to feel this looks a bit like eli cash, at some point.

jameson in particular thinks his early stuff is "van vogtish" - anyone ever read much van vogt care to elaborate?

the lottery determines randomly who in the solar system gets to be dictator of the nine planets. this is kind of "weird", although it's a weirdness i find i end up reminding myself is 50s SF weirdness, not particularly dickian weirdness.

i'm enjoying it, mind. but apart from recognising the prose style on the kind of level of recognising prose style one can hardly point out particular features of, i'm not sure what's in it, or in my enjoying it.

The part where I think Abendsen scoffs is when he angrily retorts, "Germany and Japan lost the war." It seems like Juliana is saying that the book is true in a non-literal sense (since it is clearly not true in a literal sense within the universe of the book), but he is mockingly resisting any non-literal interpretation. Then he reconsiders, but in the end, he says, "I'm not sure of anything." I don't think this means he is questioning the very fabric of his reality, but rather that he is admitting that perhaps there is an inner truth to his fiction, but he isn't sure what it could be.

Whoa - the Chick Corea album title! I didn't know this came from the I Ching.

Well, Abendsen himself provides the concise interpretation of the hexagram and Juliana agrees with him. So while it might be interesting to explore the history of interpretation of that hexagram in general, it seems that Dick himself is telegraphing his interpretation as it applies to his story:

"It means, does it, that my book is true?"

"Yes," she said.

i think their realisation that their universe is fictional does not necessarilly entail "i am a character in someone's novel", or, rather, that the apparatus of the author of the grasshopper lies heavy is a way of having the realisation have a meaning beyond that

I read VALIS, A Scanner Darkly and Ubik in quick succession and I really wasn't myself for a while afterwards. PKD fucks with your head.

It is worth reading the short stories, though many of the early ones are obviously practice runs that shouldn't have been published, and wouldn't have been if not for Dick's later fame. Some of the later ones are brilliant though. I think Dick was a natural short story writer; quick, incisive, characters not his strong point... It's a pity all the financial rewards come from novels.

hm xpost.

I'm still not convinced that they have in fact realized that their universe is fictional. Maybe you're right - it just seems like such a strange idea for a writer to have - but maybe if I read more Dick I would come to expect twists like that. In any case, I think a much more effective passage at conveying the sense of someone coming loose from their reality moorings is the passage where Tagomi is contemplating the piece of wu-filled jewelry and becomes disoriented.

anyway my planned reading order right now has it about a dozen novels away so.

next up:
i) divine invasion
ii) the transmigration of timothy archer
iii) carrere bio
iv) the world jones made*
v) the man who japed
vi) the cosmic puppets

* i got a lovely old panther SF ed of this from my amazon marketplace seller when i was expecting a fugly gollancz reissue. this made me happy.

does anyone have a copy of 'eye in the sky' they'd be willing to part with that's less hideous than this one?

fantastic: dick carried on a correspondance with stanislaus lem which tailed off when he accused "lem" of being a front for the communist-roman conspiracy.

slightly remarkable: 'kevin' and 'david' from VALIS are k.w. jeter and tim powers.

on dick's middlebrow-ness: this kinda seems an oversimplification, given his love-hate affair with his lowbrow vocation, and his fondness for working-class figures and craftsmen. and, you know, fucker read kant. i dunno. there's a mentally ill relative of mine who has a masters in phil. & was once going to get a phd in theology, and these days he can't distinguish that books like 'The Bible Code 2' aren't really, you know, where it ought to be at: and i think that dick's bio suggests something similar, on a more terrifying scale.

Ha, this was how I took it. Not in my name, not on my shelf!

I'm currently in the middle of In Milton Lumky Territory, one of his "mainstream" novels. For some reason I seem to get slightly impatient with his non-SF work (I've read a couple of others). It's okay though - the twist of a guy moving back to his old home town and marrying one of his grade school teachers is interesting.

Has anybody heard anything about new editions that would bring back to print some of his other mainstrean novels, like Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, The Broken Bubble or The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (which I'm assuming was mainstream novel, but I'm not sure)?

i'll get back to it, sigh.

i have ordered both lies inc and the unteleported man, as i think reading both might be an interesting experience. thx jeff.

The Man Who Japed (1956)
Dr. Futurity (1960)
Vulcan's Hammer (1960)
The Crack in Space (1966)

Are the short stories still available in 5 volumes? You could probably cut that down to maybe 2 volumes of the really good ones, I'd recommend individual stories but I can't remember which one's which at the momemnt (and I have to go to bed). Maybe tomorrow!

How many film adaptations of Dick are there now? I've seen :

Blade Runner
Total Recall
A Scanner Darkly
Minority Report
Screamers

John Woo made a film version of Paycheck (according to IMDB)?? 3 years ago??? I have no memory of this. There also seem to have been adaptations of Impostor and Confessions Of A Crap artist, and there's some suckass looking version of The Golden Man out soon (called Next) starring Nicolas Cage, great.

Go Tom!

The Game Players of Titan (1963)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
The Crack in Space (1966)
The Ganymede Takeover (1967) with Ray Nelson
The Zap Gun (1967)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
Deus Irae (1976) with Roger Zelazny
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

i will probably be done by feb or so; i was thinking of doing the platonic dialogues this year, tho.

ii) he gets funnier the more you read, i guess. (but i like jokes more when they get repeated or extended, usually.)

iii) i find myself noting the recurring deployment both of standard SF tropes and dick's own more idiosyncratic ones in a way which is kind of new to me, although i am certain not new to people who e.g. read or write book-length studies of henry james. but i like (a lot) finding myself wondering what e.g. the non-realist colonisable and astrologically dated concept of mars is going to mean or represent or do in this particular fiction. (and his other repeated figures: schizophrenic viewpoints, dark-haired women, simulacra, religion...)

Adam Gopnik on the new Library of America edition of Dick. Most telling sentence:

At the end of a Dick marathon, you end up admiring every one of his conceits and not a single one of his sentences.

hah

that's not entirely true, i think. the first person voices in VALIS and 'timothy archer' are uneven but nuanced, compelling, i guess.

also some of his conceits are lame, duh

gosh, i was trying pretty hard earlier on this thread.

The newly published non-SF one sounds interesting - 'Voices from the Street', I think. I've only read one other of his non-SF books, 'Confessions of a Crap Artist', but I really liked it. 'Ubik' is still my favourite PKD so far, though.

That Gopnik also found Man in the High Castle to be somewhat unrepresentative and a bit too restrained does give me hope to read something else by Dick, since I was also a bit disappointed by it.

I always liked Flow My Tears The Policeman Said but it rarely gets mentioned. The televison personality/identity crisis angle is possibly relevant in our celebrity obsessed reality TV age. Or not.

my faves, beyond valis, are:

three stigmata
ubik
martian time slip

can we speculate about all the chicks named 'pat' or 'patty' or 'peg'?

i think i liked 'eye in the sky' and 'dr. bloodmoney' for sheer weirdness

simulacra, crack, alphane, and lies, inc. all suxor. well, maybe the last one does -- i have no idea what it's about

I was right with you, Remy, till Alphane. Who couldn't love Lord Running Clam, the psychic slime mold?

I am avoiding the Gopnik piece.

i am so with you on Lord Running Clam

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/18187221884/the-exegete

hey tom have you read 'the exegesis'?

This description and evaluation seems plausibly off-putting (ditto having Lethem involved; he's gotten less reliable)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/books/review/the-exegesis-of-philip-k-dick-edited-by-pamela-jackson-jonathan-lethem-and-erik-davis-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

I can't really get into VALIS

there's ... some other dudes providing annotations for the exegesis, too; that LARB thing goes into a bit more detail: "Jackson, who in the late 1990s wrote a dissertation on the Exegesis at UC Berkeley, did yeoman work puzzling through a jumbled mass of file folders to impose a clear chronological sequence on the material; and associate editor Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, assembled a diverse array of talents — including novelist Steve Erickson, critic N. Katherine Hayles, and blogger David Gill, whose website “Total Dick-head” is the best online compendium of Dickiana — to generate the shrewd, erudite, sometimes quite witty annotations. Lethem probably deserves the most credit (or blame) for persuading Houghton Mifflin to publish it in the first place

aand no i haven't read it. the descriptions make it sound like it belongs in a casebook and not something to be published for people to, you know, "enjoy" --

also i'm aware there's like two of his sf novels i haven't read but i can't remember which ones anymore

i didn't ask if you had enjoyed it!

I enjoyed it, thought it morphed into balancing act of the rational and crackpot, via novelist's professionalism, gift, grit, aelf-observation, and obsession. Meanwhile, I just ordered The Broken Bubble, stii OOP but good price on UK pb. Ordered Humpty Dumpty In Oakland last week, will order In Milton Lumpky Territory...soon (trying to pace my own obsessions). Gather Yourselves Together will be reissued July 12 or 17, according to my handwriting (I'd look it up, but don't want to go screenshopping again tonight). In July, I will have all of PKD's non-sf novels. Mary And The Giant and The Broken Bubble are the ones I've read so far (TBB from library). Apprentice fiction? Maybe, but already satisfies as only PKD's combination of strengths and limitations can. Of course, like Hendrix, Coltrane, Dylan, Hank Williams,Jane Austin and the Brontes, works will keep materializing eternally. How about those high school notebooks,dammit? You know they're out there.

ha, i don't know if i mentioned it but in my conception of 'all of pkd's work' i was for some reason implicitly rejecting the non-SF stuff

Don't do that, VALIS and Ubik will get you. Seems like it's unusual, at least, to have so much of the non-SF in print/readily available at the same time? A fateful convergence.

Fateful because I may read all that when I should be doing something else? Noooooo

confining myself to the SF novels published in his lifetime i have yet to read the following:
The Game Players of Titan (1963)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
The Crack in Space (1966)
The Ganymede Takeover (1967) with Ray Nelson
The Zap Gun (1967)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
Deus Irae (1976) with Roger Zelazny
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

i will probably be done by feb or so

― tom west (thomp), Friday, 5 January 2007 01:38 (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i only read like two of these

maaaaan

still trying to get through VALIS

best part is, there are two more after it :/

i loved 'radio free albemuth' when i was a teenager so i was a little confused as to how 'valis' could be the same material but not as good to me. but i don't remember much about 'valis', i guess it didn't stick at all.

j did you know there was a movie of albemuth starring alanis morrissette? how did i not know this?

-

so i reread 'palmer eldritch' after finding a 70s penguin copy lying around: this is one of the few versions of this cover design that actually works, oddly.

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/images/3399_PHILIP_K_DICK_The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_Eldritch_1973.jpg

this i last read ... ages ago. and i remember not particularly liking or 'getting' it at the time. anyway this is the first one i've read in a while i think; i'd forgotten how all of his novels include either someone trapped in a confining marrage or menaced by a younger, sexually intimidating woman. (or both at once.)

as a novel it's predictably a mess. (richard hnatt's viewpoint vanishes after 50 pages to make space for the novel to be structured around the big hallucinatory setpieces.) i'm curious how much of that is due to incorporating the short story i never read - 'the days of perky pat' - which is where the martian colonists come from, the ones taking a drug which allows imaginative projection into a barbie-doll facsimile of affluent life. (which is, like, the grimmest fable about reification imaginable, and totally fails to work as narrative otherwise.) i don't know if the alignment of this with catholic sacrament exists in the short story or if it's part of the novel. and then there's, um, gnosticism, and stuff. and the garden of eden and candide. and a rather telegraphed explanation in conventional SF terms.

there's so many philip k dick protagonists who are, like, working in management for manufacturing concerns. like he gets assimilated to 'postmodernism' in some fairly tedious ways but i hadn't thought before about how much there is about commodities and being alienated from one's labour in there. (but this stuff directly related to the trippiness and the god stuff and the schizophrenia stuff.) (it'd be amazing if none of the critical efforts on him were any good; by now it seems someone must have managed it; it seems so easy, man. it's all there.)

starring alanis morisette as... who? i forget a lot about that book.

I'd like to see that, she played God in Dogma, so why not. I should get back into PKD's short stories (read "Autofac," think that's the title: about revolt of the human over/underlords, being smothered by super-reliable autoservants, totally fucking tight and good, speculative poetic justice), So many writers can be better when not always pressured into autoserving novels, novels, novels, however expectedly unexpected the results.

i'm reading all of his works right now, these are the ones i have but haven't read yet. just finished time out of joint, before that high castle. my favorite is flow my tears. where should i go next?

Solar Lottery (1955)
The Man Who Japed (1956)
The Game Players of Titan (1963)
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
The Simulacra (1964)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)
The Zap Gun (1967)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
A Maze of Death (1970)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
We Can Build You (1972)
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
The Divine Invasion (1981)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

Crap Artist is very good, like Richard Yates pushed to further extremes, but not SF

From the SF, I'd do Penultimate Truth next--it's very entertaining

Maze of Death is quick and goofy/pulpy, not one of his best but I kinda like it anyway

I remember Alphane and Bloodmoney being tons of fun.

^^^^

love Clans of the Alphane Moon and The Penultimate Truth - v different, i still get a kick of pleasure from Alphane's premise, while TPT seems like platonic Dick.

That's... not a phrase i quite like now I've written it...

still haven't read Crap Artist despite meaning to for years.

another vote for Clans of the Alphane Moon - its configuration of the obsessions is really lively and satisfying, still has pulp energy.

I want to reread We Can Build You; I remember it as oddly intense and unsettling. Slides off in the wrong direction.

We Can Build You - my fave title of all his bks but I can't remember reading that one.

Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) - Great, esp if you can find a copy w Malzberg's essay appended to the end.
The Penultimate Truth (1964) - Can't remember if this is a fixup or not? In my mind it's mixed up with his other fair-to-middling early period.se
Dr. Bloodmoney (1966) - Excellent, makes great use of multiple viewpoints/narrators, and paints a very evocative picture of a post-apocalypse Bay Area community. One of his better "villains" as well.
The Zap Gun (1967) - Unremarkable.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) - I should re-read this, it is quite different from the film and my main memories are of those differences and not whether or not it works on its own terms.
A Maze of Death (1970) - I love this one. Very basic in construction and premise, with a more conventional "twist" ending than one might expect but it's small cast and scope are consistently rewarding.
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970) - Re-read this recently and it's okay, a bit slapdash.
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975) - I have this and don't know why, it's not particularly good.
The Divine Invasion (1981) - Incredible, one of my favorites, deeply moving in the way it combines religious themes and allegories with some deeply felt, more mundane personal tragedy.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) - See above. (what can I say I love the Valis trilogy)

i really didn't like game players of titan which i read last year. read like maybe he wrote it in 10 hours instead of his usual 20 hours.

I don't remember liking DADOES quite as much as bloodmoney or alphane but I do remember it being deeply intriguingly strange and I should really revisit it too-- I read all three of those almost 30 years ago :/

Oh yeah,Shakey, I was thinking endorsing that last one on the list too. In part (?) based on his friendship with mavericky Episcopal Bishop Jim Pike, whose son went even further, disappearing in the backside of Israel. Not really science fiction, but pretty involving.
Re the good discussion of High Castle upthread (not for spoiler-wusses), the point of the ending as I saw it (while reading a long time ago): of course the novelist-within-the-novel rejects the suggestion that he and the others might just be characters in a novel, because who could really believe that, for long, anyway, without going insaaane---although apparently there is a neurlogical condition, in which some people do live, do endure, with such a perception, I've since read.
And, a number of years after writing TMITHC, PKD had a revelation/confirmation---at least in part via the pizza deliverance of the Dark-Haired Girl (delivery person with an xtian fish symbol necklace), that we are really living just a few years AD, that *this* "universe" is a faulty, ongoing copy, which began to jam up and tear open during Watergate.

lol @ Pizza Deliverance

I just remembered reading one of the early non-SF ones long long ago and really digging its antic quality that sort of anticipates James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers(later to be dick's young pals in the 70s) - The Broken Bubble, I think?

wd v much like to read the malzberg essay to Clans.

I really liked The Broken Bubble! Among other matters, it busts exploitation of the young by neurotic middle-aged Bay Area losers (sort of a follow-up to the excellent Mary And The Giant). Young PKD could be a pretty acerbic (to cranky) social observer, though his characters are always unmistakably his own, not types.
xpost "Pizza deliverance" stolen from the title of a Drive-By Truckers album, but it seemed to fit emissary namesake of The Dark-Haired Girl (which I have as a stand-alone published by Makr Ziesing; prob in Lethem's edition of The Exegesis).

*Mark* Ziesing, that is (sorry Marky!)

Mark Ziesing! Names to conjure with. I was ordering lots of obscure Lafferty chapbooks from him circa 1990. Awesome catalog.

flappy u should read 'galactic pot-healer'

Great:
Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
A Maze of Death (1970)
The Divine Invasion (1981)

Good:
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
We Can Build You (1972)
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

OK:
The Game Players of Titan (1963)
The Simulacra (1964)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
The Zap Gun (1967)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)

Not that great:
Solar Lottery (1955)
The Man Who Japed (1956)

Don't remember:
Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

I wonder sometimes if Gather Yourselves Together and Voices From The Street are worth the bother?

flappy u should read 'galactic pot-healer'

― carly are jetson (thomp), Tuesday, January 26, 2016 7:08 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i already did! loved it. really weird. the coolest bit was the coin-op bed, and how everyone dreams the same dreams, written by contest winners.

these are the ones i've read, in order-

VALIS
A Scanner Darkly
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Martian Time-Slip
Now Wait for Last Year
Ubik
Eye in the Sky
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Galactic Pot-Healer
The Cosmic Puppets
The Man in the High Castle
Time Out of Joint

I read Eye In The Sky and Time Out of Joint in the same long ago jag as bloodmoney and alphane and loved both of them a lot, especially TOOJ.

Ubik I never read til last year and it fucking ruled

UBIK is top 5, easily

i read Ubik in two sittings, the second one going from the first bomb blast to the very end. i was vibrating when it was over. ridiculously brilliant book. that's my second favorite after flow my tears

The most widely-renowned ones which I still haven't read are, I guess:

Flow My Tears
Palmer Eldritch
Valis

But it's been so long since I've read the other biggies that I really ought to go back to them

I feel like PKD has been a similar figure to Bowie for me the last couple of decades of my reading life: with Bowie I would just never play the records because I had this feeling like "Oh Bowie, sure, that stuff's in the water at this point, there's more important stuff for me to spend my time listening to." After he died, though, and I went on a still ongoing giant bowie jag I was like "damn why have I been minimizing the power/uniqueness of these records in my mind for so long? There's still so much food for me in these!"

And in the last couple of days reading this PKD thread it has occurred to me that I have been kind of sweeping him under the carpet too for a long time, in some kind of subconscious prickly-ego reaction against the ubiquity (lol) he has now attained as an influence. That's dumb. Honestly the idea of reading and rereading PKD sounds incredibly exciting to me rn. He conquered all of hipsterdom for a very good reason.

you should read all three of those, they're great

i tried getting into him four years ago, borrowed my friend's copy of The Man in the High Castle, and was totally thrown by the workmanlike prose and the relatively simple conceit. gave up 30 pages in. i read VALIS a year later and was hooked for life. Strange that so many people say VALIS is an awful place to start.

Ubik is great, really prime PKD. Obvious choices, I guess,but that and High Castle would be my favourites from his novels

flappy you are living the lyfe

I read about one or two a year, Our Friends from Frolix-8 most recently. Good, but not top tier imo

This was pretty good light zany reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun

Think the copy my local library used to have sported a better cover.

Clans is so much fun

it's funny how much of Dick's b-grade material just runs together for me, given that he recycled so many tropes and types and scenarios I always have a hard time remembering which one is about the people living underground in a post-nuclear drug-induced haze as opposed to which one is about the people living in a drug-induced haze and being controlled by telepathic aliens and Richard Nixon automatons or time-traveling idiot savants

so many homeopapes and conapts and wubfurs

and battleaxe ex-wives

and mysteriously alluring innocent ingenues

slime molds

flapples

rubbish

GUBBISH

it would be kind of interesting to run data on his themes and motifs, intentional or un-.

slender dark-haired woman?
character named 'pat'
pottery?
black iron prisons?
WASPy guy with two-syllable name who works in HVAC or equivalent? Jim Gunt? Hank Zip? Gord Hapfh?
gormless alien schmo?

WASPy guy with two-syllable name who works in HVAC or equivalent? Jim Gunt? Hank Zip? Gord Hapfh?

oh man i never even noticed this one!

i thought and still think a good critical study could be written of dick that focuses on the themes/motifs/obsessions, not as psychologically revealing or whatever (blah) but as a kind of key to the processes of a certain kind of paraliterary reading, idk

character named 'pat'
pottery?
black iron prisons?

tbf these are only in a couple.

I would swap in "powerful male businessman w/fluid ethics and/or bitchy ex-wife"

that pynchon thread revive makes me think that PKD is my TP. only PKD's shaggy hepcat hijinx easier for me to read and more entertaining and i get more WOW factor than i ever did from TP. PKD slays all beatniks too. in my book. no need to try to endure burroughs with him around.

(i never tried very hard with pynchon though. would get frustrated and bored and give up...)

this is neat, i had no idea The Owl in Daylight was basically the premise of TRON, which came out seven months after PKD died http://www.avclub.com/article/read-philip-k-dicks-unfinished-final-novel-might-h-231491

huh. never heard that before.

I have put holds on three P.K. Dick books at the library and plan to read one of them as my next book. Among these three titles, which should I read first:

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
Valis

scanner darkly is my favorite of those three

Mine too

Scanner is the most powerful of these three, but it's depressing

I like Flow My Tears, it's sort of a throwback (from 1974) to his classic style of the 1960s

Valis is theological metafiction, not my favorite of his modes but biographically important

scanner fucked me up, but is prob the best.

Valis def for last, though I like them all, it's just a particular thing that is probably best coming at after you've read a few.

yeah i think i've said it before on another thread (maybe the one about the film adaptation) but the end of scanner destroyed me

a more astute reader might see what's coming, but i didn't :(

Scanner was the first thing by PKD I read, and though nothing else I've read by him has quite measured up to it, it wasn't a bad place to start. I actually think it gave me a lot more patience with his less coherent books than I would have had otherwise.

So I'd say Scanner, then Flow My Tears, then Valis.

Had totally forgotten about this thread (incl. my posts), thanks! On ILE, also worth keeping up with: philip k dick C/D, S+D