Philip K Dick discussion

Just re-read Three Stigmata and ... it's just the most depressing horror story I've ever read. I'm not convinced by the three-stigmata, it wasn't worthy of title status, for me. As far as retitling it goes, I'd have opted for something like doomish and eternal like "Never-ending Downer".

This really was (whilst entertaining) the most masochistic I've read of Dick's works, the central theme of 'sacrifice' seems pathetic, child-like, pitiable.

For me, Dick didn't write 'science fiction', he wrote social fiction based on drug culture and societal/corporate ills.

When his Stigmata narrator is asked to self-administer Q-EPILEPSY in a Mars hovel -- oh my god.

How more desperate can the demands of corporate psychic industry be? Happens, that's the sadder fact...

No comment from anyone on this EXCELLENT novel?

Maybe Giggsy or Mohammed can GROUP READ this title?

:)

I gave it five stars. Now that you've re-read it what would you rate it? When I read it, I felt that the central theme was the unreliability of human perception and the human struggle to impose meaning, narrative, and order on events when humanity actually has no ability to do so. Can you explain what you mean about the central theme of sacrifice? I'd be fascinated to hear your POV.

Well, 'central theme of sacrifice' was more like 'central theme of original sin' and 'exhonoration of self' in MASSIVELY MASOCHISTIC FASHION. It also highlgihts the demands corporate non-disclosure-agreements ask of 'workers' i.e. to just put up and shut up. The USA is a Corporation i.e. Your Constitution has been dead since the US Corporation of 1871.

Totally depressing and mind-f***ing novel of 5*****ness, just like Flow My Tears, just like Cosmic Puppets.

:)

Hertzan wrote: "Totally depressing and mind-f***ing novel of 5*****ness, just like Flow My Tears, just like Cosmic Puppets....."

Hello. I'm reviving this five-year old discussion because I'm reading this now, and it is blowing my little mind.

Having just read Matian Time-slip, and Ubik before that, I can see this as half-way between the two. Leo parallels the gantse macher plumbers' union boss in Time-slip, and the trippy Can-D and Chew-Z worlds are like the half-life in Ubik.

As far as Hertzan's overall conclusions, for one thing, I haven't finished the book yet, but I do appreciate PKD's contrarian portrayal of space colonization as, basically, a very little house on a very big prairie, so to speak.

Still reading this, still enjoying it very much, but I wonder why, when Mayerson goes to Mars (Purgatory?), he not only loses his pre-cog abilities, which would be fine for the plot, but neither he nor anyone else notices, amid all the theology and 'masochism,' as the OP calls it, - That is pretty strange.

But he foresaw his death earlier, right? So is Mayerson dead now?

Just at the point where Allen Faine, the orbital DJ, is telling Barney he will have to give himself "Q-strain" epilepsy to clinch the case against Chew-Z.

I just started this one. I'll read the comments above later and share my thoughts as well, but I have enjoyed the first couple chapters so far. Is it me, or has PKD started more than one book with the protagonist waking up in bed next to a woman? I think I remember Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? starting this way, and maybe others as well...?

Yes