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

Does anyone know anything about any of his books after "Radio Free..." coz I have no idea?

Also this is obv. just listing novels -- what about the short stories?

the simulacra has done the least for me of this batch, partly bcz of three-book fatigue, partly bcz i was tired, partly bcz it is the most flawed - large parts of the plot really don't make any sense, and there are more characters than could actually work even for someone who could really write characters.

have ordered solar lottery, divine invasion. found as-yet unread copies of the crack in space, the unteleported man.

the zelazny one - did dick abandon it and give it to zelazny? or am i confusing it with the bester/zelazny novel? & i believe the novels post albemuth are exhumed manuscripts including some of his 'realist' novels, sterling - he died in '82, after all...

the thing with dick is that he seems good at some things we might acclaim a novelist for (like - doing good work with a set of themes, and having them intersect in characters and narratives in interesting ways) whilst being rather bad at the business of, well, writing novel - by which i guess i mean, having a less clunky prose style (although i kind of like dick's prose - it seems like the worst bits are usually the least characteristically dickish), or being able to convince in terms of character, or plot evenly. ...

... i also think he's fairly un-"postmodern" as a novelist, although i've heard the word connected to him. probably bcz i) it provides some kind of grounds for alleviating the stuff he's bad at and ii) lots of his themes (or obsessions, really) were with fairly 'postmodern' notions - the obsession with, uh, simulacra. the fact that these are worked through in a not-really-postmodern way* is part of what makes him so oddly reassuring as an author (well, i find him that way); so's his sort of general faith in human endeavour, i guess.

(*except maybe in the third-person/first-person authorial slippage in VALIS, maybe, and not even particularly that)

the only one of the short stories i can remember is 'second variety', which i read and did not remember who it was by several years prior to reading any other philip k dick, which when i did i was seeking him out deliberately, i think, and this story which i read at seven or eight in some anthology of stories about robots, not knowing who philip k dick was but knowing i liked stories about robots, this story scared the fucking shit out of me.

Sterling's ref to "post-Albemuth" initially confused me, because Albemuth was the original version of what became VALIS. Yeah, all that posthumous stuff was his rejected mainstream novels from when he was trying to make it as a "serious" writer in the late '50s.

the zelazny one - did dick abandon it and give it to zelazny?

I remember hearing something about this on a radio interview with Dick and basically I think it happened something like that-- Dick got stuck on a project in the first couple of chapters, then did it as a "collaboration" with Zelazny completing it.

the thing with dick is that he seems good at some things we might acclaim a novelist for

I thought I read a rumor somewhere that Dick's writing was the actual impetus for Vonnegut's creation of Kilgore Trout? Apparently, Vonnegut was a fan. (Although Trout's example applies to 99.9% of all "classic" SF writers, and the actual character name is a riff on Theodore Sturgeon's name.)

... i also think he's fairly un-"postmodern" as a novelist

Yeah, I don't think Dick was as playfully self-reflective a purveyor of junk culture as the critics who hyped up Ubik wanted him to be. My impression of him was that his standards of taste were very middlebrow-- he was pretty uneducated and was very defensive about it, always trying to rope in references to "highbrow"/"improving" stuff in his work that would prove his depth of knowledge, which he seemed to value in a sort of totemic way as a marker of status. It's endearingly human of him but doesn't make me think of him as possessing any sort of a great intellect-- his attempts at being "serious" in general strike me as being unaware and laughably crude.

this story scared the fucking shit out of me

I had a similar experience with an anthologized version of the Perky Pat short story he did (which was an alternate version of the settler material from Palmer Eldritch). "The Electric Ant" is another good one, and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" gets pretty crazy by the end.

"as possessing any sort of a great intellect" - well, i guess not - but also i think he must have been pretty smart - a similar sort of thinker to Orwell maybe? maybe not - i just feel mean, saying "not any sort of great intellect" really means getting into all sorts of territory about i) his career and ii) his illness - tho i start to feel this looks a bit like eli cash, at some point.

jameson in particular thinks his early stuff is "van vogtish" - anyone ever read much van vogt care to elaborate?

the lottery determines randomly who in the solar system gets to be dictator of the nine planets. this is kind of "weird", although it's a weirdness i find i end up reminding myself is 50s SF weirdness, not particularly dickian weirdness.

i'm enjoying it, mind. but apart from recognising the prose style on the kind of level of recognising prose style one can hardly point out particular features of, i'm not sure what's in it, or in my enjoying it.

The part where I think Abendsen scoffs is when he angrily retorts, "Germany and Japan lost the war." It seems like Juliana is saying that the book is true in a non-literal sense (since it is clearly not true in a literal sense within the universe of the book), but he is mockingly resisting any non-literal interpretation. Then he reconsiders, but in the end, he says, "I'm not sure of anything." I don't think this means he is questioning the very fabric of his reality, but rather that he is admitting that perhaps there is an inner truth to his fiction, but he isn't sure what it could be.

Whoa - the Chick Corea album title! I didn't know this came from the I Ching.

Well, Abendsen himself provides the concise interpretation of the hexagram and Juliana agrees with him. So while it might be interesting to explore the history of interpretation of that hexagram in general, it seems that Dick himself is telegraphing his interpretation as it applies to his story:

"It means, does it, that my book is true?"

"Yes," she said.

i think their realisation that their universe is fictional does not necessarilly entail "i am a character in someone's novel", or, rather, that the apparatus of the author of the grasshopper lies heavy is a way of having the realisation have a meaning beyond that

I read VALIS, A Scanner Darkly and Ubik in quick succession and I really wasn't myself for a while afterwards. PKD fucks with your head.

It is worth reading the short stories, though many of the early ones are obviously practice runs that shouldn't have been published, and wouldn't have been if not for Dick's later fame. Some of the later ones are brilliant though. I think Dick was a natural short story writer; quick, incisive, characters not his strong point... It's a pity all the financial rewards come from novels.

hm xpost.

I'm still not convinced that they have in fact realized that their universe is fictional. Maybe you're right - it just seems like such a strange idea for a writer to have - but maybe if I read more Dick I would come to expect twists like that. In any case, I think a much more effective passage at conveying the sense of someone coming loose from their reality moorings is the passage where Tagomi is contemplating the piece of wu-filled jewelry and becomes disoriented.

anyway my planned reading order right now has it about a dozen novels away so.

next up:
i) divine invasion
ii) the transmigration of timothy archer
iii) carrere bio
iv) the world jones made*
v) the man who japed
vi) the cosmic puppets

* i got a lovely old panther SF ed of this from my amazon marketplace seller when i was expecting a fugly gollancz reissue. this made me happy.

does anyone have a copy of 'eye in the sky' they'd be willing to part with that's less hideous than this one?

fantastic: dick carried on a correspondance with stanislaus lem which tailed off when he accused "lem" of being a front for the communist-roman conspiracy.

slightly remarkable: 'kevin' and 'david' from VALIS are k.w. jeter and tim powers.

on dick's middlebrow-ness: this kinda seems an oversimplification, given his love-hate affair with his lowbrow vocation, and his fondness for working-class figures and craftsmen. and, you know, fucker read kant. i dunno. there's a mentally ill relative of mine who has a masters in phil. & was once going to get a phd in theology, and these days he can't distinguish that books like 'The Bible Code 2' aren't really, you know, where it ought to be at: and i think that dick's bio suggests something similar, on a more terrifying scale.

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.

Clans is so much fun

it's funny how much of Dick's b-grade material just runs together for me, given that he recycled so many tropes and types and scenarios I always have a hard time remembering which one is about the people living underground in a post-nuclear drug-induced haze as opposed to which one is about the people living in a drug-induced haze and being controlled by telepathic aliens and Richard Nixon automatons or time-traveling idiot savants

so many homeopapes and conapts and wubfurs

and battleaxe ex-wives

and mysteriously alluring innocent ingenues

slime molds

flapples

rubbish

GUBBISH

it would be kind of interesting to run data on his themes and motifs, intentional or un-.

slender dark-haired woman?
character named 'pat'
pottery?
black iron prisons?
WASPy guy with two-syllable name who works in HVAC or equivalent? Jim Gunt? Hank Zip? Gord Hapfh?
gormless alien schmo?

WASPy guy with two-syllable name who works in HVAC or equivalent? Jim Gunt? Hank Zip? Gord Hapfh?

oh man i never even noticed this one!

i thought and still think a good critical study could be written of dick that focuses on the themes/motifs/obsessions, not as psychologically revealing or whatever (blah) but as a kind of key to the processes of a certain kind of paraliterary reading, idk

character named 'pat'
pottery?
black iron prisons?

tbf these are only in a couple.

I would swap in "powerful male businessman w/fluid ethics and/or bitchy ex-wife"

that pynchon thread revive makes me think that PKD is my TP. only PKD's shaggy hepcat hijinx easier for me to read and more entertaining and i get more WOW factor than i ever did from TP. PKD slays all beatniks too. in my book. no need to try to endure burroughs with him around.

(i never tried very hard with pynchon though. would get frustrated and bored and give up...)

this is neat, i had no idea The Owl in Daylight was basically the premise of TRON, which came out seven months after PKD died http://www.avclub.com/article/read-philip-k-dicks-unfinished-final-novel-might-h-231491

huh. never heard that before.

I have put holds on three P.K. Dick books at the library and plan to read one of them as my next book. Among these three titles, which should I read first:

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
Valis

scanner darkly is my favorite of those three

Mine too

Scanner is the most powerful of these three, but it's depressing

I like Flow My Tears, it's sort of a throwback (from 1974) to his classic style of the 1960s

Valis is theological metafiction, not my favorite of his modes but biographically important

scanner fucked me up, but is prob the best.

Valis def for last, though I like them all, it's just a particular thing that is probably best coming at after you've read a few.

yeah i think i've said it before on another thread (maybe the one about the film adaptation) but the end of scanner destroyed me

a more astute reader might see what's coming, but i didn't :(

Scanner was the first thing by PKD I read, and though nothing else I've read by him has quite measured up to it, it wasn't a bad place to start. I actually think it gave me a lot more patience with his less coherent books than I would have had otherwise.

So I'd say Scanner, then Flow My Tears, then Valis.

Had totally forgotten about this thread (incl. my posts), thanks! On ILE, also worth keeping up with: philip k dick C/D, S+D