what a DICK!

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Is it just me, or have people been bringing up Philip K. Dick all the time lately? Is Dick "hot" now? I have never read anything by this Dick. Should I get some Dick? What's your favourite Dick? How much Dick do I need? Are you sick of Dick?

― fritz, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I almost bought "The Man In The High Tower" yesterday, but the jacket blurb oddly boasted "A POOR MAN'S PYNCHON! - The Village Voice" in huge suburban letters, which just made feel guilty about giving up on "V". Jerks.

― fritz, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I can't believe Tom Cruise is in a film version of Minority Report. This kind of thing is WRONG, kids.

― Archel, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

A Scanner Darkly is probably my favorite late-period Dick book. Now Wait For Last Year and The Martian Time-Slip are my favorite middle period Dick books. Almost all of his stuff is worth reading though.

― Alex in SF, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

If they could do Arnie in Total Recall...

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

oops. "Man in the High Castle", I meant. Is that a good place to start?

― , Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I've read a stack of his stuff, and it's all great. I can never get enough Dick.

― Sean, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is FANTASTIC and required reading.

― Dan Perry, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I like his short stories best: Beyond Lies the Wub and We Can Remember For It You Wholesale are my favourite anthology's.

― jel --, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Man In The High Castle is an enjoyable read. It is a bit Dick- lite (I gather), but has a lot to recommend it.

Like every other book he wrote it is all about reality-breakdown and stuff.

― DV, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

"A beautiful mind" was like a dick novel gone terribly right.

― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I can never get enough Dick, in any sense of the word. Actually, that's not true. Your sense of the word might refer to Tricky Dicky Nixon, for instance.

Favourites (and I've read them all, mostly more than once): Ubik, Man In The High Castle, Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Martian Time-Slip and the short stories Second Variety and Minority Verdict. Everything he wrote is worth reading, including the mainstream fiction he couldn't get published during his life.

I've mentioned this website before (re Pynchon), but The Modern Word's page on Dick is good too.

― Martin Skidmore, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I stopped reading dick when I got tired of his not being a better writer in the 'literary' sense (ah to be 20 again) but 'radio free albemuth' was a particular favorite, as the extra realism, over some of his books, made the conspiracy-alien-mindfuck stuff much creepier.

― Josh, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

One dark-horse favorite of mine: _A Maze of Death_. Basically "...And Then There Were None" in outer space, except that God demonstrably exists and regularly intervenes in human affairs.

― Douglas, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Martian Time Slip & Ubik.

― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

god i haven't read any of this for years yet i haf a whole shelf-full: dr bloodmoney has illustrations!! haha the tiny mummified head which is able to levitate

― mark s, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

have read ubik which i recommend. tried to read valis but didn't get very far, sometimes i find his attitude towards women a bit trying.

― di, Wednesday, 29 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I read him amongst a lot of other science fiction when I was 12 and only read 'Gollancz'. So as a purist I think you ought only to read the Gollancz editions. Those yellow labels really used to stick out. He's great before you hit puberty. After that he's a drag because of things like his above-mentioned attitude to women. Who's gonna pretend he's not childish and vain? When I read 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' it was comparable to the experience of reading 'Crime and Punishment' before I could understand it. I can't complain about his style at all. I have no problems with the use of adverbs - I mean Dick's books are full of vague phrases like 'Abba was a tender and wise entity, huge and furry and pretty' - but I have few problems with that; to me it's better than Hemingway-esque 'Style and Grace' editing. And obviously the ideas he deals with and his willingness to go with a dream (not a 'fantasy') over a plot make him better than most sci-fi writers. It's a gift to impoverished readers to have some Kafka or Dostoevsky inserted into a pulp novel - a novel that doesn't take you a year to recover from, as a 'masterpiece' would.

― maryann, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I admire the guy, but he's always been a blind spot for me. Reading descriptions of the plots and ideas of his novels has always topped actually reading his novels for me. I haven't given up - eventually I'll get around to reading "A Scanner Darkly" (particularly if Richard Linklater's actually going to film it) - but so far his words don't hit me like Pynchon's, DeLillo's, Barthelme's, Coover's, etc.

― J Blount, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

It's all about the ideas in his books. The actual "writing", character creation, dialogue, sentences, are pretty hack. I've enjoyed his books nonetheless -- I'm in counter-clock world at the mo, but I always prefer his short stories, as that's where you get the ideas without wading through the unpretty words.

― Alan T, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Yeah, not meaning to be snobbish (while nevertheless proceeding to be so), whenever I read Dick I'll get excited by the description on the back of the book, but two paragraphs in I'll go "Aw, Christ, it's just science fiction." Short stories definitely sound like a way to go.

― J Blount, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

"A Scanner Darkly" (particularly if Richard Linklater's actually going to film it)

! If he pulls that off, it could be his best film ever. If he doesn't, he should be killed.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I can't agree that it's just his ideas. The ideas are ways into exploring some of the big themes of metaphysics and ethics, and there are too few writers willing to grapple and play with such matters. Also, while his prose is pretty middling (though there are far worse with far bigger literary reputations, such as Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis), his characters are often very strong and complex and memorable. He certainly didn't understand women well, and I wouldn't argue against claims of misogyny, but even that gives some of his female characters great potency (the sister in Flow My Tears, best of all). The thing I like best in his characters is his representation of their thought processes and the moment-to-moment flux and flow of their feelings, which I find very compelling and convincing - as much as that of, say, Updike (whose books I love). He also produces some very exciting twists and overall plots - I know these are hardly central in most systems of literary aesthetics nowadays, but I don't think it should be discounted. The endings of Second Variety and Minority Verdict are dazzling, and not just arbitrary: they work with the thematic content.

I wouldn't try to argue that he's a greater writer than Pynchon or Barthelme, say: I'm happy to be hearing people saying "not as good as Pynchon" (hardly a vicious insult) when I remember when it was hard to get anyone to compare him with any writer outside SF.

― Martin Skidmore, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

(I fear the random Googlers this thread will attract.)

― Dan Perry, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The problem isn't that he's no worse than Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. The problem is he's no better. And yeah, being the 'poor man's Pynchon' is still a better fate than most.

― J Blount, Friday, 31 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Well obviously he's a better stylist than Pynchon. Ideas are style - like there's some separation. Saying that you can get it all from reading the back of the book and are disappointed by the content - NO - because like Andy Warhol said, 'it's not intelligence that counts, it's viewpoint' - it's his treatment of ideas, simultaneously cynical and hopeless but also awfully romantic and wishful. You know you CAN kind of pick that up from the ideas he chooses to treat but still, it's a 'stylish treatment of the ideas' thing. He's very flamboyant and emotional. He's not at all repressed like Pynchon, and even Barthelme, who I like.

― maryann, Saturday, 1 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

gollancz!! blimey i had a massive sat.morn.madeleine!!

― mark s, Saturday, 1 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Madeleine for me too. (Due to arcane territorial copyright shite all Canadian public libraries carried Brit eds. of everything, including sci-fi, shelves and shelves of those yellow covers.) Zelazny's 'Dream Master' is KEWL!!!!

― dave q, Saturday, 1 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

get to my andre norton/sci-fi for kids thread NOW dave q

― mark s, Saturday, 1 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

My oldest friend (in a review in a magazine I edited) described the old Gollancz SF covers with the lovely neologism "wasptat". Spot on.

― Martin Skidmore, Saturday, 1 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

one year passes...

heh. reading this thread makes me glad that i didn't learn english properly bcz stuff like I never really learnt to write sentences in 'proper' english so things like 'prose' or 'grammar' escape me. 'Proper' english is not something i'm that aware of.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Tuesday, 8 July 2003 10:26 (twenty-two years ago)

Wasptat is ideal. The only distinguishing feature twixt any of the Gollancz Yellow hardbacks would be their fonts (this got especially important if you were getting Crime fiction). Back then I guess fonts were a big deal. These days they'd be called bad design.

Murder One on CHXRd still has loads of these (in the New WOrlds bit you can compare and contrast design). Did Victor just buy a job lot of yellow cardboard one day or what.

― Pete (Pete), Tuesday, 8 July 2003 10:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Maryann - Dick's undeniably misogynist, but have a read of his last book, The Transmigration of Timothy ARcher, written first person from a woman's point of view. He does it brilliantly.

And to echo other voices here, his writing is thin but not without occasional lurches into lyricism (no books handy, so I can't quote).

― Jamie Conway (Jamie Conway), Tuesday, 8 July 2003 10:51 (twenty-two years ago)

his writing is thin in the way doestoevskii's writing is thin
haha "lurches"

― etc, Tuesday, 8 July 2003 10:53 (twenty-two years ago)

haha pete you bastard you know what i'm talking abt. I don't get the whole 'he's not a good writer' thing. maybe the fact that he has so many ideas just burns all such considerations away from me.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Tuesday, 8 July 2003 11:17 (twenty-two years ago)

seven months pass...

Most everything he wrote before he took his break from science fiction is pretty dismal (except maybe Time Out of Joint). He never got great at characterization but the characters in the early stuff are so thin it is embarrasing. I think Dick peaked(!) with his densely plotted novels after his return in 63 (Man in the High Castle and Martian Time Slip). He kept up a high quality of work throughout the 60's but his later novels get a bit frazzled (side effect of speed no doubt). First interesting but nonsensical stuff starts to pop up (like the Android run police station with a token human officer in Electric Sheep) and then it just gets burnt out and depressing (the Galactic Pot Healer). In any case avoid most of the non-fiction and any novels where he works out his hostility to his ex-wives (Clans of the Alphane Moon and Now Wait for Last Year esp.).

― Maxine Blanco, Monday, 23 February 2004 08:27 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh but I really like Clans of the Alphane Moon! It's a bit DO YOU SEE, but what the hell. Martian Timeslip is terrifying, though, one of the creepiest endings evah. Have never managed to get beyond the first page of Man in the High Castle while I had access to my mum's copy, but I think that's because she was always bigging it up as the best Dick ever, hoho. I have issues about book recommendations from family members, which is weird considering that we all have very similar tastes.

― Liz :x (Liz :x), Monday, 23 February 2004 10:53 (twenty-one years ago)

I also loved Clans of the Alphane Moon. I have the Ace Double edition. Can't remember the upside-down book on the other side. "We go to celebrate," the slime mold said. "I know of a bar willing to serve non-T's. It's on me -- the check, I mean."

This is probably the only book I managed to read, from beginning to end, while on acid.

― Salmon Pink (Salmon Pink), Monday, 23 February 2004 16:15 (twenty-one years ago)

Okay, so I just finished We Can Build You, and my reaction on finishing was "what the...?" To me it seemed like Dick just got bored with the story about the ethics involved with creating artificial life, and just headed off on another completely unrelated tangent to close the thing off. Am I missing something?

― Sean Carruthers (SeanC), Sunday, 29 February 2004 19:03 (twenty-one years ago)

three months pass...

Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is going to be rotoscoped, ala Waking Life. Weird.

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Sunday, 13 June 2004 02:51 (twenty-one years ago)

"Flow my tears the new Police song
The slogan of peace is You Must Live"

Listen to the Sirens
by Tubeway Army

― Moth, Sunday, 13 June 2004 22:18 (twenty-one years ago)

one year passes...

still awesome

― kingfish du lac (kingfish 2.0), Friday, 9 June 2006 05:19 (nineteen years ago)

Is Dick "hot" now?

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Friday, 9 June 2006 05:32 (nineteen years ago)

eight years pass...

The Amazon pilot for The Man In The High Castle is fantastic and beautiful. I don't know if they can afford to keep production values that high but I dearly hope Amazon picks it up.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Monday, 19 January 2015 07:00 (ten years ago)

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