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

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i love the PKD robot.

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

tom west (thomp), Sunday, 5 February 2006 01:21 (eighteen years ago) link

i finished VALIS and read the carrere bio, which i don't really know about: it seems really really reductive, and not smart enough about mental illness - it keeps hinging on dick's self-diagnoses (and diagnoses of others!), which is a whole world of wrong. that said it is pretty damn good as narrative, although it makes his novels fit a little too smugly and snugly into his biography. also there's an underdeveloped reader-response gimmick. the section according to a scanner darkly is maybe the strongest; reminds me of we shall all be healed, kinda.

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.

tom west (thomp), Monday, 6 February 2006 13:51 (eighteen years ago) link

one month passes...
Anyone read A Crack In Space?

Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 20 March 2006 13:17 (eighteen years ago) link

(checks list) no.

tom west (thomp), Monday, 20 March 2006 14:29 (eighteen years ago) link

I bought it the other day, 'cause it looked interesting and I don't usually see it stocked or hear it mentioned.

Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 20 March 2006 14:39 (eighteen years ago) link

Uh, no. Not on my shelf.

Zora (Zora), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 00:39 (eighteen years ago) link

?

Jordan (Jordan), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 01:38 (eighteen years ago) link

I'm not sure if this has come up before - The Religious Experience of Philip K Dick as drawn by Robert Crumb.

Philip Alderman (Phil A), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 11:12 (eighteen years ago) link

... meaning I thought I had everything but I haven't got that. Not in a Not on my shelf! kinda way.

Zora (Zora), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 11:27 (eighteen years ago) link

Not on my shelf=teh hot new ILB meme.

The Day The World Turned Dayglo Redd (Ken L), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 12:13 (eighteen years ago) link

i just noticed it a few days ago at a bookstore (in a quality paperback edition, no less). i've read most of his books at this point, but there are some that were out of print when i went through my big phase and that must be one of them. there were a few other ones as well in new glossy bindings that previously were only available in mass market editions. i assume this is related to the scanner darkly release? at any rate, i want to read it. have you started it yet, jordan?

lauren (laurenp), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 13:40 (eighteen years ago) link

Not yet, I have to finish something else first. I'll post my thoughts when I get to it, though.

Jordan (Jordan), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 15:13 (eighteen years ago) link

Not in a Not on my shelf! kinda way.

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

Jordan (Jordan), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 16:27 (eighteen years ago) link

Maybe we should have an all-VALIS thread?

remy (x Jeremy), Tuesday, 21 March 2006 19:55 (eighteen years ago) link

two months pass...
Tom - we're almost halfway through the year... how is the project going?

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)?

Jeff LeVine (Jeff LeVine), Thursday, 15 June 2006 04:41 (eighteen years ago) link

i got sidetracked by the donald barthelme syllabus and crit on joyce and uh having a job, is what happened

i'll get back to it, sigh.

tom west (thomp), Thursday, 15 June 2006 04:59 (eighteen years ago) link

job, pff, would that stop a pkd character?

Josh (Josh), Friday, 16 June 2006 05:17 (eighteen years ago) link

Givf list please; read vs not-yet-read

Zora (Zora), Friday, 16 June 2006 12:26 (eighteen years ago) link

two months pass...
This weekend I read The Crack in Space. Despite some good central ideas (they find a small hole to an alternative earth where Peking Man became the dominate species), this is really one of Dick's weaker efforts. From chapter to chapter weird pieces of the plot don't match up, or are repeated clunkily, slightly differently - as if Dick didn't recall what he had actually arleady written and wouldn't slow down enough to flip back and double check. The conclusion feels particularly rushed and hacked out, like "time to get this piece of crap over with and to the publisher - need my check."

Jeff LeVine (Jeff LeVine), Monday, 11 September 2006 16:03 (eighteen years ago) link

which is the good version of lies inc / unteleported man?

tom west (thomp), Monday, 11 September 2006 17:05 (eighteen years ago) link

Good luck with "The World Jones Made." It really turned me off of early PKD.

Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Monday, 11 September 2006 23:20 (eighteen years ago) link

Lies Inc is the "updated" re-write (or whatever) of The Unteleported Man - I don't think either is supposed to be really good. I've read Lies Inc and I can't remember a damn thing about it!

Jeff LeVine (Jeff LeVine), Tuesday, 12 September 2006 16:45 (eighteen years ago) link

I didn't think Spacecrack was as bad as all that, but my expectations were low and I'm apparently pretty forgiving when it comes to PKD. I agree that it seems kind of tossed off, but for what it is (60's straight sci-fi shot through with Dickian (heh) themes), it's enjoyable.

Jordan (Jordan), Tuesday, 12 September 2006 18:08 (eighteen years ago) link

"spacecrack" sounds like the notion behind a really bad novel by some kind of stephen donaldson - piers anthony hybrid.

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

tom west (thomp), Tuesday, 12 September 2006 18:50 (eighteen years ago) link

Plus you are going to read all of them within the next few months.

Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 13 September 2006 03:44 (eighteen years ago) link

look i've been busy okay? i've been busy

tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 13 September 2006 14:01 (eighteen years ago) link

More like you've been spending too much time with the wrong Dick.

Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 13 September 2006 14:16 (eighteen years ago) link

This weekend I was in a bookstore in Toronto and they had a bunch of Dick books and I nearly bought one because I've never read one and I tried to remember which one I was supposed to get and I thought of this thread and how Tom has not yet read the entire works of PKD and I got sad and didn't buy anything.

Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 13 September 2006 14:19 (eighteen years ago) link

The really substandard, not-really-worth-reading Dick books are, as I recall :

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!

Matt #2 (Matt #2), Wednesday, 13 September 2006 22:47 (eighteen years ago) link

Do you mean the film Paycheck with Uma T and Ben Affleck? It was okay.

Nathalie (stevie nixed), Wednesday, 13 September 2006 23:41 (eighteen years ago) link

Oh, I enjoyed Dr. Futurity.

Paul Eater (eater), Thursday, 14 September 2006 17:53 (eighteen years ago) link

three months pass...
well?

Marmot (marmotwolof), Friday, 5 January 2007 00:12 (seventeen years ago) link

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; i was thinking of doing the platonic dialogues this year, tho.

tom west (thomp), Friday, 5 January 2007 01:38 (seventeen years ago) link

i) the uh "mind-expanding" stuff i might once have found in dick - leave that alone - has largely evaporated, i think: there's very few or no points, now, where i find myself suddenly wowed, disorientated, or have my perceptions realigned in any way i can't fit into my usual vocabulary of how (speculative) fiction works.

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...)

tom west (thomp), Friday, 5 January 2007 01:45 (seventeen years ago) link

The Game Players of Titan is ok, haven't read any of the others you just listed.

Marmot (marmotwolof), Friday, 5 January 2007 10:43 (seventeen years ago) link

The Penultimate Truth is beautifully paranoid.

Paul Eater (eater), Friday, 5 January 2007 22:28 (seventeen years ago) link

seven months pass...

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.

o. nate, Tuesday, 21 August 2007 16:37 (seventeen years ago) link

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

thomp, Tuesday, 21 August 2007 21:48 (seventeen years ago) link

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

thomp, Tuesday, 21 August 2007 21:50 (seventeen years ago) link

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.

James Morrison, Wednesday, 22 August 2007 01:45 (seventeen years ago) link

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.

o. nate, Wednesday, 22 August 2007 16:46 (seventeen years ago) link

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.

m coleman, Wednesday, 22 August 2007 22:02 (seventeen years ago) link

my faves, beyond valis, are:

three stigmata
ubik
martian time slip

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

remy bean, Thursday, 23 August 2007 04:56 (seventeen years ago) link

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

remy bean, Thursday, 23 August 2007 04:58 (seventeen years ago) link

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

remy bean, Thursday, 23 August 2007 04:59 (seventeen years ago) link

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.

eater, Thursday, 23 August 2007 15:19 (seventeen years ago) link

i am so with you on Lord Running Clam

thomp, Sunday, 26 August 2007 08:36 (seventeen years ago) link

four years pass...

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

hey tom have you read 'the exegesis'?

j., Friday, 24 February 2012 20:39 (twelve years ago) link

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

dow, Sunday, 26 February 2012 01:52 (twelve years ago) link

I can't really get into VALIS

flagp∞st (dayo), Sunday, 26 February 2012 02:01 (twelve years ago) link


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