this year i am going to read the entire works of philip k dick

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/18187221884/the-exegete

hey tom have you read 'the exegesis'?

This description and evaluation seems plausibly off-putting (ditto having Lethem involved; he's gotten less reliable)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/books/review/the-exegesis-of-philip-k-dick-edited-by-pamela-jackson-jonathan-lethem-and-erik-davis-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

I can't really get into VALIS

there's ... some other dudes providing annotations for the exegesis, too; that LARB thing goes into a bit more detail: "Jackson, who in the late 1990s wrote a dissertation on the Exegesis at UC Berkeley, did yeoman work puzzling through a jumbled mass of file folders to impose a clear chronological sequence on the material; and associate editor Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, assembled a diverse array of talents — including novelist Steve Erickson, critic N. Katherine Hayles, and blogger David Gill, whose website “Total Dick-head” is the best online compendium of Dickiana — to generate the shrewd, erudite, sometimes quite witty annotations. Lethem probably deserves the most credit (or blame) for persuading Houghton Mifflin to publish it in the first place

aand no i haven't read it. the descriptions make it sound like it belongs in a casebook and not something to be published for people to, you know, "enjoy" --

also i'm aware there's like two of his sf novels i haven't read but i can't remember which ones anymore

i didn't ask if you had enjoyed it!

I enjoyed it, thought it morphed into balancing act of the rational and crackpot, via novelist's professionalism, gift, grit, aelf-observation, and obsession. Meanwhile, I just ordered The Broken Bubble, stii OOP but good price on UK pb. Ordered Humpty Dumpty In Oakland last week, will order In Milton Lumpky Territory...soon (trying to pace my own obsessions). Gather Yourselves Together will be reissued July 12 or 17, according to my handwriting (I'd look it up, but don't want to go screenshopping again tonight). In July, I will have all of PKD's non-sf novels. Mary And The Giant and The Broken Bubble are the ones I've read so far (TBB from library). Apprentice fiction? Maybe, but already satisfies as only PKD's combination of strengths and limitations can. Of course, like Hendrix, Coltrane, Dylan, Hank Williams,Jane Austin and the Brontes, works will keep materializing eternally. How about those high school notebooks,dammit? You know they're out there.

ha, i don't know if i mentioned it but in my conception of 'all of pkd's work' i was for some reason implicitly rejecting the non-SF stuff

Don't do that, VALIS and Ubik will get you. Seems like it's unusual, at least, to have so much of the non-SF in print/readily available at the same time? A fateful convergence.

Fateful because I may read all that when I should be doing something else? Noooooo

confining myself to the SF novels published in his lifetime i have yet to read the following:
The Game Players of Titan (1963)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
The Crack in Space (1966)
The Ganymede Takeover (1967) with Ray Nelson
The Zap Gun (1967)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
Deus Irae (1976) with Roger Zelazny
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

i will probably be done by feb or so

― tom west (thomp), Friday, 5 January 2007 01:38 (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i only read like two of these

maaaaan

still trying to get through VALIS

best part is, there are two more after it :/

i loved 'radio free albemuth' when i was a teenager so i was a little confused as to how 'valis' could be the same material but not as good to me. but i don't remember much about 'valis', i guess it didn't stick at all.

j did you know there was a movie of albemuth starring alanis morrissette? how did i not know this?

-

so i reread 'palmer eldritch' after finding a 70s penguin copy lying around: this is one of the few versions of this cover design that actually works, oddly.

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/images/3399_PHILIP_K_DICK_The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_Eldritch_1973.jpg

this i last read ... ages ago. and i remember not particularly liking or 'getting' it at the time. anyway this is the first one i've read in a while i think; i'd forgotten how all of his novels include either someone trapped in a confining marrage or menaced by a younger, sexually intimidating woman. (or both at once.)

as a novel it's predictably a mess. (richard hnatt's viewpoint vanishes after 50 pages to make space for the novel to be structured around the big hallucinatory setpieces.) i'm curious how much of that is due to incorporating the short story i never read - 'the days of perky pat' - which is where the martian colonists come from, the ones taking a drug which allows imaginative projection into a barbie-doll facsimile of affluent life. (which is, like, the grimmest fable about reification imaginable, and totally fails to work as narrative otherwise.) i don't know if the alignment of this with catholic sacrament exists in the short story or if it's part of the novel. and then there's, um, gnosticism, and stuff. and the garden of eden and candide. and a rather telegraphed explanation in conventional SF terms.

there's so many philip k dick protagonists who are, like, working in management for manufacturing concerns. like he gets assimilated to 'postmodernism' in some fairly tedious ways but i hadn't thought before about how much there is about commodities and being alienated from one's labour in there. (but this stuff directly related to the trippiness and the god stuff and the schizophrenia stuff.) (it'd be amazing if none of the critical efforts on him were any good; by now it seems someone must have managed it; it seems so easy, man. it's all there.)

starring alanis morisette as... who? i forget a lot about that book.

I'd like to see that, she played God in Dogma, so why not. I should get back into PKD's short stories (read "Autofac," think that's the title: about revolt of the human over/underlords, being smothered by super-reliable autoservants, totally fucking tight and good, speculative poetic justice), So many writers can be better when not always pressured into autoserving novels, novels, novels, however expectedly unexpected the results.

i'm reading all of his works right now, these are the ones i have but haven't read yet. just finished time out of joint, before that high castle. my favorite is flow my tears. where should i go next?

Solar Lottery (1955)
The Man Who Japed (1956)
The Game Players of Titan (1963)
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
The Simulacra (1964)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)
The Zap Gun (1967)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
A Maze of Death (1970)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
We Can Build You (1972)
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
The Divine Invasion (1981)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

Crap Artist is very good, like Richard Yates pushed to further extremes, but not SF

From the SF, I'd do Penultimate Truth next--it's very entertaining

Maze of Death is quick and goofy/pulpy, not one of his best but I kinda like it anyway

I remember Alphane and Bloodmoney being tons of fun.

^^^^

love Clans of the Alphane Moon and The Penultimate Truth - v different, i still get a kick of pleasure from Alphane's premise, while TPT seems like platonic Dick.

That's... not a phrase i quite like now I've written it...

still haven't read Crap Artist despite meaning to for years.

another vote for Clans of the Alphane Moon - its configuration of the obsessions is really lively and satisfying, still has pulp energy.

I want to reread We Can Build You; I remember it as oddly intense and unsettling. Slides off in the wrong direction.

We Can Build You - my fave title of all his bks but I can't remember reading that one.

Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) - Great, esp if you can find a copy w Malzberg's essay appended to the end.
The Penultimate Truth (1964) - Can't remember if this is a fixup or not? In my mind it's mixed up with his other fair-to-middling early period.se
Dr. Bloodmoney (1966) - Excellent, makes great use of multiple viewpoints/narrators, and paints a very evocative picture of a post-apocalypse Bay Area community. One of his better "villains" as well.
The Zap Gun (1967) - Unremarkable.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) - I should re-read this, it is quite different from the film and my main memories are of those differences and not whether or not it works on its own terms.
A Maze of Death (1970) - I love this one. Very basic in construction and premise, with a more conventional "twist" ending than one might expect but it's small cast and scope are consistently rewarding.
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970) - Re-read this recently and it's okay, a bit slapdash.
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975) - I have this and don't know why, it's not particularly good.
The Divine Invasion (1981) - Incredible, one of my favorites, deeply moving in the way it combines religious themes and allegories with some deeply felt, more mundane personal tragedy.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) - See above. (what can I say I love the Valis trilogy)

i really didn't like game players of titan which i read last year. read like maybe he wrote it in 10 hours instead of his usual 20 hours.

I don't remember liking DADOES quite as much as bloodmoney or alphane but I do remember it being deeply intriguingly strange and I should really revisit it too-- I read all three of those almost 30 years ago :/

Oh yeah,Shakey, I was thinking endorsing that last one on the list too. In part (?) based on his friendship with mavericky Episcopal Bishop Jim Pike, whose son went even further, disappearing in the backside of Israel. Not really science fiction, but pretty involving.
Re the good discussion of High Castle upthread (not for spoiler-wusses), the point of the ending as I saw it (while reading a long time ago): of course the novelist-within-the-novel rejects the suggestion that he and the others might just be characters in a novel, because who could really believe that, for long, anyway, without going insaaane---although apparently there is a neurlogical condition, in which some people do live, do endure, with such a perception, I've since read.
And, a number of years after writing TMITHC, PKD had a revelation/confirmation---at least in part via the pizza deliverance of the Dark-Haired Girl (delivery person with an xtian fish symbol necklace), that we are really living just a few years AD, that *this* "universe" is a faulty, ongoing copy, which began to jam up and tear open during Watergate.

lol @ Pizza Deliverance

I just remembered reading one of the early non-SF ones long long ago and really digging its antic quality that sort of anticipates James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers(later to be dick's young pals in the 70s) - The Broken Bubble, I think?

wd v much like to read the malzberg essay to Clans.

I really liked The Broken Bubble! Among other matters, it busts exploitation of the young by neurotic middle-aged Bay Area losers (sort of a follow-up to the excellent Mary And The Giant). Young PKD could be a pretty acerbic (to cranky) social observer, though his characters are always unmistakably his own, not types.
xpost "Pizza deliverance" stolen from the title of a Drive-By Truckers album, but it seemed to fit emissary namesake of The Dark-Haired Girl (which I have as a stand-alone published by Makr Ziesing; prob in Lethem's edition of The Exegesis).

*Mark* Ziesing, that is (sorry Marky!)

Mark Ziesing! Names to conjure with. I was ordering lots of obscure Lafferty chapbooks from him circa 1990. Awesome catalog.

flappy u should read 'galactic pot-healer'

Great:
Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
A Maze of Death (1970)
The Divine Invasion (1981)

Good:
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
We Can Build You (1972)
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

OK:
The Game Players of Titan (1963)
The Simulacra (1964)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
The Zap Gun (1967)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)

Not that great:
Solar Lottery (1955)
The Man Who Japed (1956)

Don't remember:
Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

I wonder sometimes if Gather Yourselves Together and Voices From The Street are worth the bother?

flappy u should read 'galactic pot-healer'

― carly are jetson (thomp), Tuesday, January 26, 2016 7:08 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i already did! loved it. really weird. the coolest bit was the coin-op bed, and how everyone dreams the same dreams, written by contest winners.

these are the ones i've read, in order-

VALIS
A Scanner Darkly
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Martian Time-Slip
Now Wait for Last Year
Ubik
Eye in the Sky
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Galactic Pot-Healer
The Cosmic Puppets
The Man in the High Castle
Time Out of Joint

I read Eye In The Sky and Time Out of Joint in the same long ago jag as bloodmoney and alphane and loved both of them a lot, especially TOOJ.

Ubik I never read til last year and it fucking ruled

UBIK is top 5, easily

i read Ubik in two sittings, the second one going from the first bomb blast to the very end. i was vibrating when it was over. ridiculously brilliant book. that's my second favorite after flow my tears

The most widely-renowned ones which I still haven't read are, I guess:

Flow My Tears
Palmer Eldritch
Valis

But it's been so long since I've read the other biggies that I really ought to go back to them

I feel like PKD has been a similar figure to Bowie for me the last couple of decades of my reading life: with Bowie I would just never play the records because I had this feeling like "Oh Bowie, sure, that stuff's in the water at this point, there's more important stuff for me to spend my time listening to." After he died, though, and I went on a still ongoing giant bowie jag I was like "damn why have I been minimizing the power/uniqueness of these records in my mind for so long? There's still so much food for me in these!"

And in the last couple of days reading this PKD thread it has occurred to me that I have been kind of sweeping him under the carpet too for a long time, in some kind of subconscious prickly-ego reaction against the ubiquity (lol) he has now attained as an influence. That's dumb. Honestly the idea of reading and rereading PKD sounds incredibly exciting to me rn. He conquered all of hipsterdom for a very good reason.

you should read all three of those, they're great

i tried getting into him four years ago, borrowed my friend's copy of The Man in the High Castle, and was totally thrown by the workmanlike prose and the relatively simple conceit. gave up 30 pages in. i read VALIS a year later and was hooked for life. Strange that so many people say VALIS is an awful place to start.

Ubik is great, really prime PKD. Obvious choices, I guess,but that and High Castle would be my favourites from his novels

flappy you are living the lyfe

I read about one or two a year, Our Friends from Frolix-8 most recently. Good, but not top tier imo

This was pretty good light zany reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun

Think the copy my local library used to have sported a better cover.