Spend a day with Philip K
Jun. 12th, 2007 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gregographyWhen I was in high school someone loaned me Philip K Dick's novel _Ubik_. I was hooked. Like most "Dick Heads" I sought out everything of his I could find, never passing a used book store until I checked to see if there was something I didn't have or one of my favorites that I could pass on to someone else.
It was quite a quest; he wrote 44 novels and 121 short stories.
His writing style has been described as "torrential"; you get the feeling from his novels that he sat done to write with a carton of cigarettes and a large bottle of speed and didn't stop until the book was finished. Many of his characters were two-dimensional but it didn't matter - they were who they needed to be at the time they needed to be it. What was amazing to me was his take on how fragile our realities are, both because of the weakness of our perception and the lies and manipulations we're constantly presented with. You don't have to be gullible to be wrong in his books; it's just the way things work. The short story _Minority Report_ was his first story where the plot twisted seemingly every two paragraphs, that what the characters and you believed to be true was simply wrong, often with the truth (or the current version of it) presented with disdain for your stupidity.
I think five of his short stories/books have been made into films but no film, even _Blade Runner_, expresses the core ideas much less even follows the same plotline.
Four of his books from the 60's have been collected into a Library of America volume; apparently this is a big deal, with phrases like "American canon" showing up in reviews. The novels they choose - _The Man in the High Castle_, _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_, _Ubik_, and _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ - are favorites of mine and I highly highly recommend getting this book and then, as is probable, becoming obsessive about reading everything you can get your hands on.
Reading them at one sitting is another recommendation - they hurl along through alternate headspaces in a way that trying to come in and out of it can be jarring.
It was quite a quest; he wrote 44 novels and 121 short stories.
His writing style has been described as "torrential"; you get the feeling from his novels that he sat done to write with a carton of cigarettes and a large bottle of speed and didn't stop until the book was finished. Many of his characters were two-dimensional but it didn't matter - they were who they needed to be at the time they needed to be it. What was amazing to me was his take on how fragile our realities are, both because of the weakness of our perception and the lies and manipulations we're constantly presented with. You don't have to be gullible to be wrong in his books; it's just the way things work. The short story _Minority Report_ was his first story where the plot twisted seemingly every two paragraphs, that what the characters and you believed to be true was simply wrong, often with the truth (or the current version of it) presented with disdain for your stupidity.
I think five of his short stories/books have been made into films but no film, even _Blade Runner_, expresses the core ideas much less even follows the same plotline.
Four of his books from the 60's have been collected into a Library of America volume; apparently this is a big deal, with phrases like "American canon" showing up in reviews. The novels they choose - _The Man in the High Castle_, _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_, _Ubik_, and _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ - are favorites of mine and I highly highly recommend getting this book and then, as is probable, becoming obsessive about reading everything you can get your hands on.
Reading them at one sitting is another recommendation - they hurl along through alternate headspaces in a way that trying to come in and out of it can be jarring.
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Date: 2007-06-13 05:12 am (UTC)I'm also a big fan -- I've read, well, except for a couple of the early unpublished novels that are impossible to find, basically all of it. And the short stories, the letters, blah, blah . . .
I've always told people to treat the books like roller coaster rides w/o guard rails -- you never quite know if it's going to get to end of the ride w/o sailing off the tracks, but that's the kick. And to look for the humanity of the characters amidst all the absurdity -- deep down PKD is an amazing, questioning, philosophical humanist.