Science Fiction Aficionados discussion

I'm surprised there isn't an existing topic for him! He's one of my favourite writers. Over the past year I've been reading the collections of his short stories and the wealth of ideas he explores is astonishing.

I think I've only read one story so far, but I've got a collection on the shelf that I'll probably get to soon.

There are a quite a few Philip K. Dick short stories available on Project Gutenberg for free. That's where I got my first taste of him. He just... blows my mind. He sets up these crazy stories and then drops a bomb on your head, exploding everything you had assumed. He's awesome.

It took me forever to get around to reading him. But now I've cranked out A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Man in the High Castle in short order. He's really growing on me, though Man in the High Castle was my least favorite of the three. Will definitely continue to plow through his catalog though.

he's one of my top favorites. i love Do Androids, of course, like nearly everyone. and Dr. Bloodmoney. i also had a great time reading A Maze of Death and Clans of the Alphane Moon.

Jennifer wrote: "There are a quite a few Philip K. Dick short stories available on Project Gutenberg for free. That's where I got my first taste of him. He just... blows my mind. He sets up these crazy stories a..."

That's what I love about him too. I read a comment somewhere, I can't remember where, but it was about a line in one of his novels (I want to say Friends from Frolix 8). The line was about how they had found God's dead body drifting in the universe. The comment said (paraphrasing) in any other book finding God's body in space would be the focus of the story, but for Philip K. Dick it's just something to mention offhand.

When I found out he was a drug addict, a lot of that stuff just kind of made more sense all of a sudden! But, yes. He is wonderful.

I started Man in the High Glass Castle, actually fairly into it, but something just stopped pushing me. I haven't finished it, and have read at least 40 books since I put it down. I want to finish it, but I'm waiting for it to call me back. I've been tossing it over a little in my head as of late, though, so maybe the time time is near. Sometimes I just have to marinate on books, especially Dick's. Give it time to process, you know?

Man in the High Castle is a strange one, I found it didn't quite grab me at first either. I think the setting is really interesting but a lot of the plot isn't so much.

I read something about his process, where he used to just hole himself up in a room with a bottle of vodka and write on average 68 pages a day! I've noticed there are a couple of biographies available so I'll get one of those at some point.

What I really like in his short story collections are the notes at the end where he gives insights and little tidbits of information.

Just reading Flow, My Tears, The Policeman Said and there's a Star Trek reference which made me smile.

I'm glad I found this group as I have never read any of Dick's work and I am thinking of starting with "Man In the High Castle". (based on what some say is his "masterpiece"???)

But it sounds somewhat ill-advised for me to start with "Man In The High Castle" based on what some are saying.
Any thoughts as to where would be a good place to start as a "PKD newbie"?

i hate to give the obvious answer, but i would suggest Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Bob wrote: "I'm glad I found this group as I have never read any of Dick's work and I am thinking of starting with "Man In the High Castle". (based on what some say is his "masterpiece"???)

But it sounds some..."

Personally I love his short story collections. There are 5 volumes and they show the full breadth of his imagination.

PKD's my favorite author. Period. I've read 36 of his novels and the full 5 volume set of short stories. The only SF novel of his I haven't read is The Ganymede Takeover (co-authored by Ray Nelson).

Man in the High Castle I thought was good, but not really his best work. It felt like maybe his most mainstream (partly why it's often accepted as his masterpiece?). I often wonder if people over emphasize the alternate history aspect of the novel, as my memory of it was that this aspect was rather subdued (it acting as a backdrop rather than an overt plot device). What I do remember of it is that it predicted the language translation algorithms we have today, which was a minor thing in the book, but it stuck in my mind. I remember it more as a "what is reality" book, as each of its characters is in some way living a lie.

Anyway, his short fiction ranges from trite Twilight Zone with-a-punchline stories (The Cookie Lady), all the way up to plots you'll remember as being more like a full novel because the density of ideas presented is almost overwhelming. It's instructive to note that seven of the movies made based on his work come from his short stories, not novels (Minority Report, Total Recall, Screamers, Impostor, Paycheck, Next and The Adjustment Bureau).

And where to start with Dick is kind of a tricky question. He had several different story types and it really depends on what you're after as to which would fit best.

Crazy mind-blowing weird WTF stories? Ubik, A Maze of Death

Pulp style SF? Solar Lottery, Vulcan's Hammer

Post apocalyptic dystopia? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Penultimate Truth (roll over Wool, this one's the original, Dr Bloodmoney, Deus Irae (co-written by Roger Zelazny)

Metaphysical/religious strange stuff? The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth, The Divine Invasion

Quirky social commentary? The Zap Gun, Ubik (again)

Darkl, depressing and oppressive? Martian Time-Slip, A Scanner Darkly (this one's got a good sense of humor thrown in as well, but as it's really about the drug ravaged people PKD knew in the 60s, it's pretty heavy)

OR...just grab any of them and plow through them. They're quick reads, but they are denser in ideas than most 800 page novels.

hey I really appreciate you dividing Dick's books up like this. I'm a sucker for both Dick (pardon the pun) and organized book lists. helpful! thanks Micah

No problem. But take it with a grain of salt. Dick blends a lot of his themes together. And then there are a lot of his books that don't neatly fit into my hastily considered groupings. He has a lot that are mainly explorations of dysfunctional relationships...Game Players of Titan has a lot of that in it IIRC. And then I forgot all his multidimensional works like Now Wait For Next Year.

To me he's the kind of author who if you like any of his work, you might as well take up the quest to read it all. Makes a pretty impressive bookshelf, I can tell you.

Hmm, I feel another round of revisiting PKD land coming on!

PKD is one of my favorite authors and I've definitely read more of his work than anyone else. I've read all his SF novels, some story collections and all but one of his non-SF novels.

My first time through Man In The High Castle, I didn't like it much, but I was pretty young when I read it. I read it again a couple of years ago and loved it. There are a lot of overt things going on in it, which makes you miss some of the very subtle things he does in it. I love that he made plot decisions using the I Ching while he wrote it. I think having read a couple of biographies made it more personal too. It was nice knowing which parts he pulled from his own life.

I've read four biographies of him too. I think my favorite was the one by Greg Rickman. Sutin's book is good too and has a nice bibliography of all the novels with ratings. Most recently, I read Ann Dick's bio of him. It was nice to get his wives's perspective on the events I'd read about in other bios mostly from Dick's viewpoint or that of an outsider. He was a very complicated man.

Micah wrote: "...What I do remember of it is that it predicted the language translation algorithms we have today..."

So I started re-reading The Man in the High Castle and, uh, the above statement was wrong. That was actually in Galactic Pot-Healer not Man in the High Castle **D'OH!**

Bob wrote: "I'm glad I found this group as I have never read any of Dick's work and I am thinking of starting with "Man In the High Castle". (based on what some say is his "masterpiece"???)

But it sounds some..."

Hi Bob, personally I recommend

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

This is Dick at his best and arguably as good as Bradbury's Fahrenheit.

regards martyn

Lawrence Sutin rates all the novels and gives a short description of each in the back of his biography of PKD. While I don't agree with all the ratings there, it's a good place to get an idea what to start with.

I think it might be good to start with a biography too. There are a lot of places in his books where he uses real events from his life to fill out the story, like the jewelry making in The Man In The High Castle. It makes it a little more fun when you come to those things in his books.

Hi David,

I've stayed away from P. K. Dick for many years mainly because of some of the reviews of his work that seem to hint he can be a bit "convoluted" and "intimidating".
Do you find this to be the case with Dick or am I just reading too many reviews?

Without knowing the reading history and the tastes of any particular reviewer, I'd really take reviews with a huge grain of salt.

Dick can be both convoluted and potentially intimidating if you're not a person who likes to read idea-dense SF. However, all his books are pretty short, and there are many which are more in the pulp action realm that should be OK for any SF reader.

Two good places to start are his short stories--which range from standard Twilight Zone type tales, all the way to stories that almost seem like full novels because of their idea density--and the Look Inside fearures on amazon.com.

With PKD's work, if you can handle what's in those Look Inside samples, I think you'll be OK for the whole books.

The language in them is certainly not hard to read. And I think his more difficult concepts really start showing up in his latter work, which is highly metaphysical in a twisted kind of way. So, maybe review the chronology of his bibliography and try samples from his different periods. I'm sure there will be something you can connect with on some level.

Then grab one and get your weird on.

UBIK bored the crap out of me. I was 75% through and shelved it. I will try A Scanner Darkly after I get though about 15 other books. I hate to write off such a beloved author based on one book.

I'm thinking Ubik is a tough PKD book to try as your first. I also think A Scanner Darkly could be not the greatest for a first PKD read because it's so heavily autobiographical and based on his heaviest drug days, unless you're into that sort of reading experience. I'm thinking Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Bladerunner) might be a better place to start. That probably sounds like too obvious a choice, but then there's a reason why it's obvious and why it was the first successful movie made from his work.

A Scanner Darkly was amazing. I rarely give five stars to books, but this was exceptional. His note at the end about children playing in the street really struck a chord with me. It's a message that is as germane today as it was in the sixties. I will come back to PKDs later books.

It is a remarkable work. At once funny and darkly depressing, insightful and inventive. The ending note by PKD is enough to rip you up after finishing the book. Probably his most powerful novel in a real world sense.

I've read Ubik. It was too weird, too cerebral, and the characters just didn't stand out. I just can't get into it. But did read it for another sci-fi book group.

I dropped in at my favorite local used book shop yesterday and asked, "Is it an act of futility to look for first-printing PKD paperbacks in a used bookshop?"

The shop owner happily led me to the featured titles wall where she pulled down a first print bookclub edition of A Scanner Darkly!

I said "I'll take it."

She nodded and said, "wise choice."

This will be my first of his books. Looking at the comments above, I do enjoy "cerebral" and "idea-dense" SF. I welcome any other thoughts or suggested next-reads. I imagine Androids is the next I should look for?

If you like Scanner, you'll probably like a lot of PKD. The Library of America collections of his novels might be a good next step. You'll get Androids that way and also a bunch of others you'll want to read.

I finished Androids today, a really exceptional piece.I only wish Ridley did a complete movie adaptation and not just stole the idea. I think that way even more people could've caught a glimpse of PKD's brilliance. I love the way he described Edward Munch's "Scream" in the book :)

I've always fantasized about doing Androids, the real movie. Base it as closely as possible on the original and use the real title to set it apart from Ridley's take on it. I actually adore (The Final Cut version) Bladerunner, but it twists the main character and changes the plot to fit a different vision, while leaving out a lot of what I liked in the book.

I find it hard to read Dick. But I do want to read the book Blade Runner is based on. Just not sure my brain is wired right for Dick. (Or is UBIK an outlier?)

UBIK is one of his more bizarre works for sure, but a lot of them are pretty mind twisting.

Androids has some scenes that really mess with your head, but overall it's more even keeled.

I don't mind having my mind twisted. It's when it's twisting 20 feet over my head that bothers me.

Well......when it comes to Philip K. Dick, YMMV.

;D

I ran across a site that offers 13 free downloads of Dick short stories. There's even six audio books, and a documentary film, all available for free. Pretty cool!

http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/fr...

I've read about a third of PKD's novels over the last 10 years or so. My personal favourites have been Now Wait for Last Year (the first of his I read) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and to some extent I think your favourites will depend upon the order you read them in, for example when I got to Ubik, I almost felt I'd read it already, a whole bunch of the late 60s/early 70s books have very similar scenarios, so it's best to leave a bit of time in between books.

I just finished The Man in the High Castle ahead of the TV series and to be honest I wasn't hugely impressed - the text is a bit clunky and it barely scratches the potential of the world it's created (something the TV series will hopefully expand upon), it's far from his best work.

I felt the same way about Man in The High Castle the first time I read it. It was one of the first of his I read. After reading most of his other work and a few biographies I reread it. It became one of my favorites. I think it's one of his more subtle books. There are a lot of things going on in it you miss the first time around.

Well, Man in The High Castle actually has much more in common with his non-SF works than his SF works. The only real SF elements in it are the alternate history and some of the transportation tech, which he never really dwelt on, and of course the open ending that leaves you wondering.

What it's really about is the personal lives of the characters and how political realities can alter the inner landscape of people's psyche.

And the TV show trampled all over the book's content in its pilot. So much so that some of the main characters have become exactly the opposite of how Dick conceived them. Basically they're pulling a Peter Jackson on it: putting it in a world that looks and feels like the book and then crapping all over the characters and plot.

But I'm not bitter.

Micah wrote: "Well, Man in The High Castle actually has much more in common with his non-SF works than his SF works. The only real SF elements in it are the alternate history and some of the transportation tech,..."

Since I've enjoyed all his non-SF I've read and there are only 2 I haven't read, this makes some sense to me. But then I've enjoyed most of his books on some level.

I just watched the first episode of Man In The High Castle. I think the part I found hardest to accept was having The Grasshopper Lies Heavy become a collection of film reels. I suppose they wanted it to become a film within a film, where Grasshopper is a novel within the novel in the book version. It still bothered me enormously. I think it would have worked better to keep it as a book.

David wrote: "I just watched the first episode of Man In The High Castle. I think the part I found hardest to accept was having The Grasshopper Lies Heavy become a collection of film reels. I suppose they wanted..."

I agree about the film w/in a film vs book w/in a book issue. By translating it into a visual, they've basically established that the reality you're seeing in the story isn't the real reality because the film clips are actual war footage of an "alternate" reality (i.e., what we know of as real history). While in the book w/in a book idea a huge element of ambiguity is preserved. It's just something someone wrote, right? Of course we the readers know it as historical reality...so in terms of the book's plot does that mean Dick is just engaging in ironic play (in an alternate history world, our historical world would actually be alternative history!), or is it a hint from Dick that all is not as it seems?

Again, I think that's a Peter Jackson move: explain everything in certainties because the lowest common denominator viewer is too dumb and too impatient to figure things out or wait a few hours to find out what's going on.

It seems to be a tendency with Dick to misinterpret him perhaps because of the perceived pessimism of his work. Blade Runner - androids are given the 'becoming human' treatment - antithesis of their status in the book

It's rather surprising it was done, since Dick's children were involved in the production.

I love the movie, it's one of my favorites. the book is as well. but it's interesting how they are complete opposites in so many ways. a striking but not surprising decision that the filmmakers went in the complete opposite direction with the androids. I remember thinking that the book & film do have a certain fatalistic, melancholy tone in common, but not much else.

Totally agree. Love that movie (well, the Final Cut version anyway). But it's so wrong in a lot of ways that should annoy me (but don't).

I'd still love to see Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as a movie. I mean like the real thing: his wife's still alive, mood organs, the cult of Mercer and all that.

Craig wrote: "It seems to be a tendency with Dick to misinterpret him perhaps because of the perceived pessimism of his work. Blade Runner - androids are given the 'becoming human' treatment - antithesis of thei..."

Thing is about a lot of his books is that they're so easy to transform into chase movies. And that's what most films turn them into. It's too tempting.

Perfect example was Imposter starring Gary Sinise. I rented the DVD once. One of the special features on the DVD was a 40 minute (or so) promotional cut of the film that was used to get funding for the movie. It literally was the entire story told w/out all the extraneous chase scenes. It was one of the most faithful adaptations of Dick's work yet. Well worth watching...While the theatrical releaase was just kind of meh because of all the dumb chase stuff.

Micah wrote: "I'd still love to see Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as a movie. I mean like the real thing: his wife's still alive, mood organs, the cult of Mercer and all that. ..."

as directed by a Brazil-era Terry Gilliam! we should go back in time and make this happen.

I've only read two of his novels yet, and some of his short stories. I have to say I like the short stories much more than the novels. The ending of The Paycheck made me jump in joy. ;)

I had a hard time with Ubik. I always asked myself the weird question "What's the point?". It left me unsatisfied at the end.

I intend to get back to him with Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Somewhere in the reviews I read you could hear Dicks heart break while reading it. That sparked my interest.

I wonder does he have anything space operaish?

PKD never really did space opera.

He was more concerned with questions like what is the true nature of reality, what makes us human, what is the difference between psychosis and religious revelation.

If you like the short stories more, you might want to try some of his earlier works, like maybe Solar Lottery. IIRC, that one reads a lot more like the short stories The Minority Report, The Paycheck, Second Variety, and We Can Remember it Wholesale.

Ubik is one of his stranger (and I think funnier), more psychedelic mind-f stories. Topped on the WTF scale perhaps only by A Maze of Death. They are my favorite of his books.

You can't expect his works to wrap the stories up in nice little neat bows at the end. They aren't about resolution, they are about ideas blazing by so fast you're left with carpet burns. They're about takiing what you think you know and turning it on its head (again and again and again). His endings are full of ambiguity and twists of the knife.

Personally, I love that.

Later in his career he got more absorbed in his own psychotic/psychic/religious experiences. But he fictionalized them so well, and still never hung his hat on "this is what's going on, definitely, for sure" because he was trying to figure out some strange things that happened to him, which he would never actually figure out in real life.

At this point I think it's obligatory to link to this exposition of PKD's late life story as compiled and illustrated by Robert Crumb in Weirdo magazine:

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick