What is the finest Philip K. Dick Novel?

90s PKD covers have crossed the hump into the "so bad its good" category a la "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" gifs from geocities websites in 1995

I think it's either We Can Build You or Flow My Tears, although I have a bizarre love for Now Wait For Last Year (which normally goes unregarded).

― I must be old, I recognise nobody in ITV2 idents (aldo), Sunday, 13 May 2012 10:35 (5 hours ago)

oh yeah I forgot to list that one, it is excellent and iirc from that same 64-66 period that I mentioned above.

Really good :
1958 Time Out of Joint 1959
1961 The Man in the High Castle 1962
1962 Martian Time-Slip 1964
1963 Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb 1965
1964 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch 1965
1966 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968
1966 Ubik 1969
1973 A Scanner Darkly 1977
1978 VALIS 1981
1980 The Divine Invasion 1981

Good :
1953 The Cosmic Puppets 1957
1955 Eye in the Sky 1957
1962 We Can Build You 1972
1963 The Game-Players of Titan 1963
1963 The Simulacra 1964
1963 Now Wait for Last Year 1966
1964 Clans of the Alphane Moon 1964
1964 The Penultimate Truth 1964
1965 Counter-Clock World 1967
1968 Galactic Pot-Healer 1969
1968 A Maze of Death 1970
1969 Our Friends from Frolix 8 1970
1970 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said 1974
1981 The Transmigration of Timothy Archer 1982

Pretty good :
1954 Solar Lottery 1955
1954 Mary and the Giant 1987
1954 The World Jones Made 1956
1956 The Broken Bubble 1988
1957 Puttering About in a Small Land 1985
1958 In Milton Lumky Territory 1985
1959 Confessions of a Crap Artist 1975
1960 The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike 1984
1960 Humpty Dumpty in Oakland 1986
1964 The Zap Gun 1967
1964 The Unteleported Man 1966 as Lies, Inc. (1984)
1965 The Ganymede Takeover 1967 with Ray Nelson

Actually not very good :
1953 Vulcan's Hammer 1960
1953 Dr. Futurity 1960
1955 The Man Who Japed 1956
1963 The Crack in Space 1966

Really don’t remember, should re-read :
1964 Deus Irae 1976 with Roger Zelazny
1976 Radio Free Albemuth 1985

Haven’t read, apparently not great though :
1950 Gather Yourselves Together 1994
1952 Voices from the Street 2007

Ubik, just over Man in the High Castle. I've only really read a few, the only one I didn't care for was A Scanner Darkly.

I am halfway through VALIS and I'm not getting it. The narrator seems just as insane as the Fat persona. Being familiar with a wide variety of religious topics does not make the logic less mad.

I am halfway through VALIS and I'm not getting it. The narrator seems just as insane as the Fat persona. Being familiar with a wide variety of religious topics does not make the logic less mad.

Seems like youre getting it to me!

"Roog" might be my favorite thing he ever wrote. I tend to like PKD as a short story writer more than as a novelist actually...

Galactic Pot Healer, Clans of the Alphane Moon and Transmigration of Timothy Archer will need more votes.

OTOH it's hard to fuck with Three Stigmata/Flow My Tears/High Castle. Should be a ballot-style poll!

Three Stigmata/Flow My Tears/High Castle are great, but I find everything else by PKD uneven or insane (in a sad way). voting Flow My Tears.

voted VALIS over Transmigration; the latter is super moving, a god-shaped hole, a keen understanding of loss & longing for redemption in the face of doubt

but VALIS is so batshit exciting; I just want it all to be real

read Galactic Pot Healer on my honeymoon btw, that book defines "lol drugs" to me though; still would vote it over High Castle which was the only one of his books (& I've read just about all of them) that I disliked, mostly because of the ending.

He never could end a book well, could he?

I think the ending of Timothy Archer is pretty good; well, at least it works for the subject's open-endedness

I need to read High Castle again; it was my first PKD and was exactly not what I was expecting--having heard it was the original alternate-history novel--but in retrospect I have a lot of respect for the Zen vibe, the meta fascinations, the use of I Ching as not only a plot device but also as a plotting agent...I remember reading that PKD wanted the book to be similar in tone to a lot of post-Hiroshima Japanese novels.

Anyways, I voted VALIS for reasons listed above (well-written, batshit exciting) though, Z S you might want to give The Penultimate Truth which struck me as being more coherent than the typical 60s paranoia speed-rush PKD novel...

He never could end a book well, could he?
--A++++++ would deal with again (Matt #2)

Uh again Scanner?

OK, Scanner, Timothy Archer, Valis all have good endings. Ubik, Time Out Of Joint and most of the others, not so good. Although I don't read the guy for concise plotting, deep characterisation or flowing prose so none of it is really a problem.

What's wrong with the High Castle ending?

Actually one of my bugbears is the seemingly consesus agreement in the non-genre press that he was a "terrible" writer, I guess because he's the SF writer literary types end up reading. Next to Asimov or whoever his prose looks like fucking Tolstoy.

High Castle ending just seems like a bit of a damp squib, like he couldn't think of how to end it properly. Ubik is the same.

i love the ending of ubik, totally shifts the reality gears once again, but yeah, nothing matches the ending of scanner for sheer heartbreaking sadness and terror

I love the HC ending, it's like "and it was all a dream!" except it's the characters in the dream, not the dreamer, who have the realisation.

xpost
if anything, it's the opening chapter of ubik that's a bit clunky - lots of fairly raw exposition + comedy germanic names oh-oh

I'm gonna vote for The Divine Invasion, I'm not sure it's his best, but there is some absolutely amazing stuff in that book, and I feel like it should get at least one vote.

The Divine Invasion also has a nice twist on the "it's all a dream" thing, i.e. thinking you're in a dream when you really aren't (maybe)

anyway, looking at the poll options, I can't believe I've read all but three of these

matt, your list and mine are nearly the same w/ the exception of bloodmoney

i can't remember which of these i've read and which i haven't anymore! must revisit.

idly re-reading Now Wait For Last Year over the last few days. it's kinda clunky and gross and the concept of time flowing backwards doesn't really make any sense but it is still oddly compelling. the black power stuff is something I don't think he ever really dug into elsewhere.

surprised at lack of support for Dr. Bloodmoney - I think that was one of his first novels where he really nailed the multiple-narrator thing. the half-absorbed telepathic twin is really the core of the book's appeal to me.

well not multiple narrator but multiple-POV. think this was one of his better literary tricks, makes him stand out a bit from his peers at the time, who were largely penning straightforward first-person or third-person omniscient linear plots.

isn't that Counter-Clock World? xxp

I don't really remember much about Now Wait For Last Year, but I'm pretty sure Counter-Clock World's the only one where he does the backwards time thing

ah right yeah sorry gettin my titles mixed up

I've read about a dozen, I think, the last one being about 20 years ago. I never got to some of the most canonically important (Eldritch, Scanner, Flow My Tears.) For whatever reason, I was always checking out the batshit insane ones like Bloodmoney and Alphane, both of which I still remember with love.

Really the only guy who produced as much amazing work in novel length was Silverberg and most of his best work was crammed in an eight year period which precipitated a burn-out.

What period of Silverberg is this btw? I don't know his stuff well.

all the disgorging food/aging backwards until your a fetus that gets absorbed by a nearby womb/pasting on whiskers borders on Cronenberg body-horror really

xp

I definitely prefer his short stories to his novels. Seems like his flaws as a writer are less of a big deal in the short story form and you still get all the great ideas! Of his actual novels, the ones I liked the most are Ubik and Martian Time-Slip. Voted Ubik.

Alex has sold me on Silverberg as well, after initially only being familiar with his 80s "comeback" period.

Silverberg's The World Inside is really good. Dying Inside is sort of the period-capper and is also great, more in the vein of Malzberg than anyone else imho

voted Scanner narrowly over Ubik and Flow My Tears

He never could end a book well, could he?

― A++++++ would deal with again (Matt #2), Monday, May 14, 2012 1:32 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Eye in the Sky was just ridiculous for this, ends very prematurely, so that it just comes across that he couldn't really be arsed to take everything to its furthest conclusion.

Clans of the Alphane Moon for me, probably. Palmer Eldritch and Martian Time Slip in the running as well.

yeah Eye in the Sky is one of his first "it was all a dream!"-style endings (see also: Maze of Death) - he got better at these as he went along, usually injecting a little paranoid "...or was it?" (see also: Ubik, Palmer Eldritch, etc.) for added ambiguity.

surprised at lack of support for Dr. Bloodmoney

Isn't that the one with the homunculus named Herbie? and the phrase "Herbie flushed red" appears every three pages or so? Man that irritated me.

"Scanner" is too obvious, so I think I'll go with "Martian Time-Slip"

...OK, right novel, wrong detail - he's actually a phocomelus named Hoppy

I definitely prefer his short stories to his novels. Seems like his flaws as a writer are less of a big deal in the short story form and you still get all the great ideas!

This is pretty much every sf writer really.

there are actual decent sf prose stylists imho

Thomas Disch for ex.

Ballard obviously

Yes true, let me amend that to "a lot of sf writers". Not so much the prose style, more the ability to tie the crazy ideas into a coherent narrative. Dunno, I think for SF in particular the "one idea per story" short fiction form works really well. That said, it's a shame PKD never expanded "Roog" into a novel.

Yeah, I was referring more to mashing up ideas into a compelling narrative. The ideas are always good, the storytelling sometimes lacks. But in the more focused setting of a short story he's less able to lose his way. Never really had a problem with his prose style.

Ultimate short-story-beats-novel SF master is R.A. Lafferty IMO.

James Tiptree is the real ultimate. Don't even bother with the novels, but she's probably the best short story writer ever.

"What period of Silverberg is this btw? I don't know his stuff well."

Basically Thorns (so 1967) to Shadrach in the Furnace (1976). In between you've got Hawksbill Station, The Masks of Time, Up the Line, Nightwings, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, A Time of Changes, The Book of Skulls (which I've not read), Dying Inside, The Stochastic Man (also not read) and like 4 or 5 great short story collections.