What is the finest Philip K. Dick Novel?

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.

To Live Again is also in there ... not a great book, but fun

pkd could be sloppy for sure -- again, the speed -- but i think his prose takes a lot of undeserved beating. without that weary, sad, self-questioning tone, the later novels might be unreadable for me. they have their rough patches, sure, but you can't say he didn't find the right voice for them.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/Ubik%281stEd%29.jpg

Love that cover so much - that face coming out of the spray!

I've thought many times about getting that as a tattoo.

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

― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Monday, 14 May 2012 23:13 (Yesterday)

I can probably agree with this, Ten Thousand Light Years From Home is so amazing.

Oddly enough Bloodmoney is probably one of my most-hated out of the handful I've read but I loved the ending on that one, with the disc jockey in space. I remember getting such a lift from that...

fwiw 'the man in the high castle' placed highest in the poll i ran last year: THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL RESULTS THREAD & DISCUSSION

personal fave is 'three stigmata' but i cant really remember if its a 'good book' or not i mean all those stupid names in neon from beyond theres a dreary inevitability to it all that doesnt stop the book from being really evocative i guess thats a word its a bad trip

'galactic pot-healer' is p rad too ilx poster 'thomp' has some good things to say about it iirc

I remember having serious questions about what exactly happened at a certain point in Stigmata. I will post itt about it tomorrow if I get the chance

I think Galactic Pot Healer would have a different rep if it was titled Interstellar Vase Repairman tbh (or at least lots of friends who are down w/nice Penguin Man In The High Castle are a bit loldrugs/60s when I bring it up).

pkd could be sloppy for sure -- again, the speed -- but i think his prose takes a lot of undeserved beating. without that weary, sad, self-questioning tone, the later novels might be unreadable for me. they have their rough patches, sure, but you can't say he didn't find the right voice for them.

― jesus christ (strongo hulkington's ghost dad)

Yeah, there's something compelling about his drabness, and I think j0hn d0lan put it pretty well at the eXile ages ago:

"Dick wrote two or three great scenes per book. They're like arias, and he rationed them very carefully. His books are plot and dialogue; the great scenes are the payoff, and they come at the end. The Martian jackal, who looks "like a wizened grandmother," veers at the last second away from its prey, Barney Mayerson, and telepathically asks him, "I can't eat you. I'd be sick. You're unclean; can't you cleanse yourself some way?" The garrulous automatic cab tells the hero of Now Wait for Last Year tells the hero he's "a good man" for sticking with his malevolent, braindamaged wife, as it speeds him home in misery...there are a few such moments in each Dick novel, written as well, line for line, as any Joyce. But a book of great lines is a burden to the reader, and Dick saves them for the end."

i can't even begin to parse the levels of self-delusion involved in writing that paragraph

i reread three stigmata recently and when i finished it i felt like i had a pretty good fix on it and now, er, probably not so much. which is my experience with a lot of these - thinking about them is the process of reading them, the process of reading them is thinking about them. i should probably read them all again.

the run from martian time-slip to pot-healer is where the money is for me. the ending of the last makes sense as capstone to his whole sixties thing on every imaginable level. (of the two that follow it before he slows down 'maze of death' is pretty negligible, don't think i ever got to 'frolix 8'.)

i'm not sure i feel about the late stuff as sci fi; i think by the time you're reading things like 'the divine invasion' or 'flow, my tears' you have a particular investment in him that goes beyond reading him as a science fiction writer of quality, or at least i did. ilx poster 'j.' i think i recall is more fond of 'the divine invasion' than i can understand anyone being. on the other hand, he probably does not find himself thinking about xenogears whenever he reads it or contemplates reading it.

the first-person voice in VALIS would be a remarkable achievement if he hadn't lived it. i mean, it still is, but.

oh, the "i'm turning the car around" moment is hilariously funny and tragic and sad

Wrote long thing, this is all that survives of it:

Voting Scanner because

But basically:

i can't even begin to parse the levels of self-delusion involved in writing that paragraph

otm. His prose does certain things well – comedowny ugliness and flatness of stuff and people in particular – but the stuff inbetween the 'arias' isn't professional point-to-point keep-it-moving hackwork - it's often horribly clunky in ways that mirror the good stuff (like his dialogue is often good at these meta-therapy-speak emotional battles, but that turns into improbable tell-not-show 'i am feeling' dialogues where all the characters sound the same).

And We Can Build You was my vote for 'broken ending'.

And I thought Clans of the Alphane Moon should be renamed as well. Change to something about mental illness and/or an alien paraclete.

For me it's between High Castle, Three Stigmata, Ubik, and Scanner. Went with Ubik. I should re-read a bunch of these.

It's funny that he cites Now Wait For Last Year ending as GREAT writing. It's actually the opposite in my opinion, it's also a great example of one of his "huh endings" and if you read Dick's bio it's pretty creepy to boot to find a taxicab assure one of his proxy's that he's a "good man".

i think there might be some wiggle room to read dick's endless castrating females as at least partly projections of his endless hopeless male narrators, though there's probably more evidence against it than i'd like to countenance. i liked that moment when i read it, i haven't read that one since my teens tho.

where's the thread on Lies, Inc/Unteleported Man? I did not understand that book. Not even a little. As in: I don't really get the basic outline of the plot, past the first ~ 100 pages.

Will somebody please explain PKD's Lies, Inc. / The Unteleported Man to me?

I remember liking Lies, inc., but don't really remember anything about it

from the wiki:

Circumstances had forced Rachmael to abandon his original plans and to journey to Newcolonizedland via energy transfer instead. Sinister modifications to the "Telpor" technology apparently cause its victims to experience a variety of so-called "paraworlds" which are thought to actually exist, somehow, as viable alternate realities. Participants are fearful that consensus or agreement amongst themselves as to the paraworlds' descriptions could somehow cause one or the other paraworld to manifest itself ever more aggressively until eventually displacing the current reality-paradigm altogether. And Rachmael's own paraworld experience is said to be the worst one of all.

seems straightforward enough

anyone know why 'Crack in Space' has been renamed 'Cantata-140'?

Has anyone seen the Bill Pullman/Traci Lords pseudo-biopic from a few years back?

where's the thread on Lies, Inc/Unteleported Man? I did not understand that book. Not even a little. As in: I don't really get the basic outline of the plot, past the first ~ 100 pages.

I think even he regretted expanding the novella into a novel by having the main character undergo a really dull acid trip for about 50 pages.

anyone know why 'Crack in Space' has been renamed 'Cantata-140'?

Dunno, can't imagine the title change saves it from being one of his worst books. I saw a compendium of this, Vulcan's Hammer, Dr Futurity and The Man Who Japed, i.e. all his least readable novels in one handy volume! I'd hate to think anyone picked it up wanting to check him out, it would put anyone off for life.

I can't remember a single thing about Lies Inc. tbh his worst novels - Ganymede Takeover, Crack in Space, Lies Inc, Our Friends from Frolix 8, etc. - all kinda blur together