― Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 05:01 (seventeen years ago) link
― peter in montreal, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 08:44 (seventeen years ago) link
― peter in montreal, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 08:47 (seventeen years ago) link
― Matt #2, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 09:46 (seventeen years ago) link
so I read "The Adjustment Team" a few days ago cuz it's online (public domain) and I have to review the new, no doubt hugely inflated and freely adapted Matt Damon movie made from it tonight. I take it it's not considered a major work, and Hollywood just liked the price?
The best Dick-based film I've seen (tho I like Blade Runner) might be Barjo, a French adap of Confessions of a Crap Artist.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 17 February 2011 12:49 (thirteen years ago) link
"I take it it's not considered a major work, and Hollywood just liked the price?"
You are correct.
― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 February 2011 13:11 (thirteen years ago) link
I dig the B-movie vibe of Screamers actually.
― sex cells (S-), Thursday, 17 February 2011 13:17 (thirteen years ago) link
william mayne, earthfasts (not the sequels)joan aiken, the wolves of willoughby chase (and the sequels, maybe)
― thomp, Thursday, 17 February 2011 13:57 (thirteen years ago) link
You've taken a wrong turn methinks.
― Also unknown as Zora (Surfing At Work), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:28 (thirteen years ago) link
Do Andoids Dream of Electric Sheep?Martian Time SlipGalactic Pot-HealerA Scanner DarklyConfessions of a Crap ArtistFlow My Tears, the Policeman Said
I really need to read VALIS.
― Also unknown as Zora (Surfing At Work), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:32 (thirteen years ago) link
Is Barjo available anywhere? I was looking and it's not on Netflix, but that's no surprise.
― w/no hesitation (mh), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:33 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah Hollywood is not equipped to deal with his major works, they pretty much stick to his early, more easily adaptable short stories
― never meant to heart anyone (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:34 (thirteen years ago) link
It appears that Barjo was only released on VHS eons ago.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:39 (thirteen years ago) link
I get a little excited by those promos for Adjustment Bureau because, with the exception of the melodrama and chase scenes in the trailer, the John Slattery/Terence Stamp scenes really scream that it's a PKD work.
― w/no hesitation (mh), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:43 (thirteen years ago) link
I read the Hugo award winning The Man in the High Castle last year. My only complaint is that it is unfinished - the ending was anticlimatic. Dick was too disturbed by WWII that he could never gather the strength to write the sequel (and he tried several times - often resulting in other books). The BBC One is supposedly making a 4 part miniseries of The Man in the High Castle to be directed by Ridley Scott but I haven't heard any new news since October 2010.
― call me king bubbles and sound like a sheik sheik (CaptainLorax), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:43 (thirteen years ago) link
The Man in the High Castle is overrated
― never meant to heart anyone (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:48 (thirteen years ago) link
I mean it's good, but it isn't anywhere close to his best
― never meant to heart anyone (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:49 (thirteen years ago) link
Does anyone actually think it's his best though? Just because people thought it was the best sci-fi novel the year it was published doesn't mean they think it was his best novel.
― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 February 2011 20:55 (thirteen years ago) link
Was gonna say that in 1998 Thomas M. Disch thought it was, but now I see that, though he liked it a lot, he said "Dick blossomed as a writer after finishing The Man In The High Castle"
― Poll Man River: The Jerome Kern Poll (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:00 (thirteen years ago) link
I thought it was the only major award he ever won but now I see he got some memorial award for Flow My Tears and some Brit award for A Scanner Darkly
― never meant to heart anyone (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:02 (thirteen years ago) link
Flow My Tears won the Campbell and was nominated for Hugo/Nebula.
― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:03 (thirteen years ago) link
Losing to the Dispossessed for both btw (334, which is better, was also nom'd for the Nebula.)
― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:05 (thirteen years ago) link
1963 was a weak year for sci-fi novels judging by his Hugo competition.
― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:08 (thirteen years ago) link
Not a lot of love for H. Beam Piper around here.
― Poll Man River: The Jerome Kern Poll (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:10 (thirteen years ago) link
kinda agree that 334 > Dispossessed > Flow My Tears. Flow My Tears is pretty good, but it's basically an extended Twilight Zone episode. Linklater's OTM in that the best/most striking thing about it is the weird biblical allegory towards the end
― never meant to heart anyone (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:11 (thirteen years ago) link
As I said on another thread I love Dick, but its not like he's some unassailable giant of sci-fi. There are dozens of sci-fi authors from the 50s-60s-70s who were equally great writers and just as prolific.
― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:16 (thirteen years ago) link
PKD has never clicked with me, despite 2-3 extended good-faith attempts to get into his work. Dunno why.
― old man yells at poop first thing in the morning (pixel farmer), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:17 (thirteen years ago) link
Reminds me that skot just said something about sci-fi writers and graphomania.(xp)
― Poll Makossa (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:19 (thirteen years ago) link
I love his mid-to-late 60's stuff the most, I think. Sure there's lots of other good writers but I don't know of anyone who wrote more deliciously paranoid, dystopian short stories.
all 5 collected storiesDr. BloodmoneyRadio Free AlbemuthWe Can Build YouClans Of The Alphane MoonThe Simulacra
― sleeve, Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:21 (thirteen years ago) link
Lots of writers are nuts, lots of writers are coherent, but I do think it's a rare commodity to be coherently nuts like PKD, which trumps a lot of other things, like say writing good endings.
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:23 (thirteen years ago) link
Man in the High Castle is the only PKD published as a Penguin Modern Classic in the UK, which I think partly accounts for its high reputation here.
― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:43 (thirteen years ago) link
Barjo was pretty good, but it annoyed me that they cut out the whole last act of Confessions of a Crap Artist, which I thought was the best part.
― peter in montreal, Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:51 (thirteen years ago) link
Man in the High Castle is great and worth its reputation. It's not my favourite PKD, and it's probably more highly regarded amongst non-SF readers because of its relative lack of hard SF elements, but you're very wrong about it being "unfinished", Captain L.
The anti-ending (in general) is my favourite device in 20th century fiction I think.
― Elmer Fuiud (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:56 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't think I got to the end of High Castle (because someone had ripped out the pages!), but in general PKD's endings were not ... the best, particularly in the ones adapted for movies. They weren't really anti-endings so much as not-very-good endings, but it probably reflects the kind of "crank them out so I have money to eat" mode he was in.
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:04 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't know what you guys are talking about, he has some of my favorite endings ever - Ubik, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Scanner Darkly, Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Eye in the Sky
― never meant to heart anyone (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:06 (thirteen years ago) link
someone on the internet reviewing TMitHC:"The ending is maddeningly inconclusive, loose ends popping up everywhere. Dick has taken, in a literal sense, slices of life and left them as they stand. They begin messily and end messily, just as in "real life" (a phrase every serious reader of PKD should have doubts about)."
I mean, I guess it's not unfinished but was at a loss when I got to the end of the book. I wanted it to keep going
― call me king bubbles and sound like a sheik sheik (CaptainLorax), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:07 (thirteen years ago) link
You can't always get what you want (from a book)
― Elmer Fuiud (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:07 (thirteen years ago) link
I rarely read anything. And that was the only Dick book I've read
― call me king bubbles and sound like a sheik sheik (CaptainLorax), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:09 (thirteen years ago) link
"A Scanner Darkly"
This is maybe my favorite ending of any book. Gets me misty just thinking about it. And then the afterword, oh boy.
― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:09 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah. I was so happy (well, maybe happy is the wrong word... gratified?) when they appended the afterword in the film.
― never meant to heart anyone (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:11 (thirteen years ago) link
xxpost
Ok. I'm not trying to be mean or sniffy. For me leaving "loose ends popping up everywhere" is an important literary device and speaks to my distrust of narrative arcs. It's not the only satisfying way of ending a book, obv.
― Elmer Fuiud (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:12 (thirteen years ago) link
"I might as well put those packets of proof-artifacts away, McClane said to himself resignedly. He walked, step by step, back to his office. Including the citation from the UN Secretary General. After all, the real one probably would not be long in coming."
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:13 (thirteen years ago) link
In fact the dissatisfaction is part of the point? If the book is a nightmare alternate world, or if it's just a writer's nightmare vision of/in this world - and the leaks make me think that's closer to what it is - then waking up is not a very viable plot option.
― Elmer Fuiud (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:15 (thirteen years ago) link
it's not so much loose ends as all the ends hastily tied at the last minute.
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:15 (thirteen years ago) link
i mean they affect the short stories much more than the serious novels, but it's the short stories that have the more quintessentially PKD elements.
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:17 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't wanna question the books as they stand in terms of PKD's autobiography tho - whether they're a fact of his business life or a deliberate artistic statement they stand as they are and you have to appreciate them or not within the book's context. To me it works v. well.
― Elmer Fuiud (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:18 (thirteen years ago) link
like whyever the style is like it is, it is a fact of his style, now.
― Elmer Fuiud (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:19 (thirteen years ago) link
do you read comic books Noodle Vague?
― call me king bubbles and sound like a sheik sheik (CaptainLorax), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:19 (thirteen years ago) link
those never end :)
― call me king bubbles and sound like a sheik sheik (CaptainLorax), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:20 (thirteen years ago) link
i don't really read comics but yeah I like that in them.
― Elmer Fuiud (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 17 February 2011 22:21 (thirteen years ago) link
it's generally a good thing to have a series of self-contained 1 hour SF dramas without a fecking story arc or a fecking canon tbh
― be the cringe you want to see in the world (Noodle Vague), Monday, 25 September 2017 08:05 (six years ago) link
I don't care about canon but 99% sure Dick had more interesting ideas than anyone working in TV today. But ok I'll wait until I've seen this episode and discovered how far it differs from the original story before imparting my negative opinion.
― angelo irishagreementi (ledge), Monday, 25 September 2017 08:16 (six years ago) link
as I say, he's too good to be dramatized imo and that's largely because of the ideas he deals with, but his name is surely attached to this mainly for advertising purposes
― be the cringe you want to see in the world (Noodle Vague), Monday, 25 September 2017 08:19 (six years ago) link
they advertised an eighties synth-pop compilation called 'Electric Dreams' during Electric Dreams lol
― Shat Parp (dog latin), Monday, 25 September 2017 08:22 (six years ago) link
― be the cringe you want to see in the world (Noodle Vague), Monday, 25 September 2017 08:05 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
V much the spirit in which I watched
― passé aggresif (darraghmac), Monday, 25 September 2017 10:01 (six years ago) link
Looked like some kind of first draft script where they hadn't quite figured out the characters' motivations yet. Interesting premises left hanging, out-of-character behaviour at the climax, the whole thing salvaged by Geraldine Chaplin's performance. The feel of it was more like a Ray Bradbury story than PKD I thought.
― めんどくさかった (Matt #2), Monday, 25 September 2017 10:44 (six years ago) link
Better than the first one I thought, at least it didn't jettison a perfectly good story in favour of some flimsy rubbish. "Out-of-character behaviour" was I presume due to oxygen deprivation.
― angelo irishagreementi (ledge), Thursday, 28 September 2017 20:15 (six years ago) link