POX Phillip K Dick

so I read "The Adjustment Team" a few days ago cuz it's online (public domain) and I have to review the new, no doubt hugely inflated and freely adapted Matt Damon movie made from it tonight. I take it it's not considered a major work, and Hollywood just liked the price?

The best Dick-based film I've seen (tho I like Blade Runner) might be Barjo, a French adap of Confessions of a Crap Artist.

"I take it it's not considered a major work, and Hollywood just liked the price?"

You are correct.

I dig the B-movie vibe of Screamers actually.

re: short stories - whatever volume has 'the electric ant' in it (think its vol 4).

volume 4 is the best, but electric ant is actually in vol 5

thx dudes

I would say... not Volume 1

Michel Gondry allegedly developing film of Ubik.

whatever happened to that Giamatti PKD biopic sorta thing that was supposed to have something to do with Ubik...?

just finished NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR, really phenomenal, don't know why it doesn't get more praise

conversation with the cab at the end is so great

yes! i can't believe it's passed over so often. the mariner editions are either matte (well-known & popular) or glossy (lesser works), i don't understand how THE MAN WHO JAPED is a matte and NWFLY is a glossy

I don't remember it too clearly tbh - reading the wiki on it makes it sound like a jumbled fix-up but I'm not sure if it's based on an earlier story or what. Probably worth re-reading, I think I have this on my shelf.

It's one of my top ten favorite Dick books. Concept and ending are fantastic.

what should i read next: THE MAN WHO JAPED, MAZE OF DEATH, or CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON?

Clans, but Maze is good too.

Maze->Clans------------>Japed

^^^ otm

saw an orig pulp version of clans of the alphane moon in a bookstore window the other day

so palmer eldritch is good? so many people have it in their POX's, but in the notes of my anthology it quotes him as saying "I can't even look at it" less than a year after it was published

oh yeah that one is top 10 easy

it sounded like it was fairly traumatic for him to write (or, at least, it incorporates some traumatic experiences he had)

it was weird the ones that Dick liked and didn't like - pre-Blade Runner he was very hostile towards Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which again wld def be in my Dick Picks

lol whoops i never read Ubik, gonna go with that

the cosmic puppets is another great early one. are the crack in space, vulcan's hammer, and dr. futurity worth reading at all? my impression are most people think those are his third worst

They're all third-rate, yeah

practice makes perfect!

Guys, follow Shakey's lead and read the John Sladek parody, "Solar Shoe-Salesman."

I thought Cosmic Puppets was pretty corny.

at the very least books like cosmic puppets and galactic pot healer have at least one image or bit that stay with me (in puppets, the realization that the curvature of the earth is actually a person, and in pot healer, the concept of everyone dreaming the same dream at night, and can enter a contest to write the dream everyone dreams)

The Library of America box set of PK Dick is really nice. There are six novels in the collection that I had not read before. I'm reading Ubik for the first time, it's the last novel of the first volume.

Reading 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', 'Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' and 'Ubik' back to back to back there were some small mentions and themes that almost seem to reference each other like they are of the same world.

i still haven't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep but was reminded that I need to, after watching Blade Runner again the other night.

There isn't a thread for the Man in the High Castle show, I guess? Even though the second season just started? I just watched all of S1 for the first time a few weeks ago and was pleased to learn that the second season was coming out now. Accidentally great timing. It's really good, I think.

I read the book quite a while ago and don't really remember too many details, so I can't speak to the differences, but my guess is that they've added some characters and plotlines, and those additions were a good move. Man in the High Castle is obv one of PKD's more highly regarded novels but to be honest it was never one of my favorites (Ubik and Valis are my current faves), but the tv version is pretty gripping.

Blade Runner is definitely different than the book. The novel is much more sad and gets into some other thematic areas that the movie doesn't utilize. The movie seems to be a scifi nod to the LA detective like Sam Spade, it's fantastic but it is a very different. Deckard in the book is much more of a sad sack obsessed with his pet book and is married. There is a very PK Dick future religion called Mercerism and a device called a Mood Organ that are somewhat elements in the novel.

Re-reading the original novel a couple months backa nd then checking out the Wiki page is how I found out that there was actually two Blade Runner sequel novels written by a KW Jeter. I'm guessing the first one "Blade Runner: The Edge of Human" is going to be partially the basis for the film that is coming out. From what I gather this sequel novel utilizes some of the John Isidore story line from the original novel, whose character was somewhat adapted into the Sebastian character in the movie, but was tied in a totally different way. These sequels can be gotten for a penny plus shipping at Amazon, but I haven't been curious enough to buy it to check it out.

i'll add do androids dream of electric sheep? to my spring 2017 reading list. that way at least something good will happen next year.

i'm surprised there isn't more of following for the show here. esp compared to the number of posts expended on a show like Westworld. i think part of it comes down to the way they're released - there's no reason to have a high castle thread because they all come out on the same day, so there's always going to be someone with the flu that watches the whole season in a single day and hovers over the thread like a demigod. whereas with westworld there are always 6 more days before the next very obvious plotpoint is revealed in a manner that subtly references the other dozen times that the twist was foreshadowed 5 million times earlier in the season.

every character in high castle seems so much more believable to me

earl, KW Jeter is an excellent writer, at least in the non-franchise original novels I've read. He was also part of the little gang of young california writers whom Dick befriended and played poker with on the regular (Jeter, Tim Powers, and James P. Blaylock). I'll wager the Jeter BR novels are worthwhile.

I wrote what I thought of Man in the High Castle somewhere on this board. I thought the characters and/or actors were kind of weak (with the exception of the Obergruppenfuhrer), but I thought it got much better by the last couple of episodes and am actually looking forward to season 2.

I'm hoping it turns into one of those shows where the first season is kind of terrible but they eventually figure it out and it gets good.

Jeter's got some great stuff and I will stan for him altho I haven't read his franchise novels (incl Bladerunner). He tends to be more mysanthropic and gorier than PKD.

I bought one of the Jeter sequels (I think it cost a dollar), I read part of it, eventually I figured out that it was actually the second book of the series (or third if you think of the movie as the first). It did not seem particularly good.

If you want more bladerunner, a better option is maybe the 90s videogame, which I remember being pretty good.

after taking a ~6 month PKD break, I just started A Maze of Death, psyched to get into it. Over the summer I finally got to The Divine Invasion and Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Loved the latter, thought it was remarkable how well PKD could write from the POV of a female character.

i absolutely love transmigration - it really feels like a development in his writing for exactly that reason, which makes it even sadder that he died before he had the chance to properly follow up on it

all three of those are great, for v different reasons.

Electric dreams

Impossible planet on channel 4 now and it's not bad at all

I haven't seen the first yet. According to the Graun review last week, that was the best ep and subsequent ones are not as good. But I might dip into this at some point. Brooker not having anything to do with it is a plus.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Ubik
A Scanner Darkly
VALIS
Now Wait for Last Year
Eye in the Sky
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Galactic Pot-Healer
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
The Cosmic Puppets

reading Androids rn. gonna read Dr. Bloodmoney next

Newcombers also note philip k dick C/D, S+D

Not read the story but I thought Impossible Planet was a snooze and the ending a let down.

Brooker not having anything to do with it is a plus.

Other script writers thinking they can improve on Dick's stories is a minus.

decent enough I thought, despite Channel 4's annoyingly aggressive advert schedule

don't know most of the short stories but most of what I love about PKD is unfilmable so

it's generally a good thing to have a series of self-contained 1 hour SF dramas without a fecking story arc or a fecking canon tbh

I don't care about canon but 99% sure Dick had more interesting ideas than anyone working in TV today. But ok I'll wait until I've seen this episode and discovered how far it differs from the original story before imparting my negative opinion.

as I say, he's too good to be dramatized imo and that's largely because of the ideas he deals with, but his name is surely attached to this mainly for advertising purposes

they advertised an eighties synth-pop compilation called 'Electric Dreams' during Electric Dreams lol

it's generally a good thing to have a series of self-contained 1 hour SF dramas without a fecking story arc or a fecking canon tbh

― be the cringe you want to see in the world (Noodle Vague), Monday, 25 September 2017 08:05 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

V much the spirit in which I watched

Looked like some kind of first draft script where they hadn't quite figured out the characters' motivations yet. Interesting premises left hanging, out-of-character behaviour at the climax, the whole thing salvaged by Geraldine Chaplin's performance. The feel of it was more like a Ray Bradbury story than PKD I thought.

Better than the first one I thought, at least it didn't jettison a perfectly good story in favour of some flimsy rubbish. "Out-of-character behaviour" was I presume due to oxygen deprivation.