POX Phillip K Dick

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.

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

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

You can't always get what you want (from a book)

I rarely read anything. And that was the only Dick book I've read

"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.

yeah. I was so happy (well, maybe happy is the wrong word... gratified?) when they appended the afterword in the film.

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.

"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."

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.

it's not so much loose ends as all the ends hastily tied at the last minute.

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.

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.

like whyever the style is like it is, it is a fact of his style, now.

do you read comic books Noodle Vague?

those never end :)

i don't really read comics but yeah I like that in them.

It's not really a dealbreaker -- Hitchcock has terrible endings, too. ("Whoops the killer who got away with it was captured sometime later for morality's sake.")

again I like Hitch's discarded endings - it's because endings don't matter, obviously

except the ones that do. actually his endings aren't really like that, much.

Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Martian Time-Slip
Our Friends from Frolix 8
A Scanner Darkly
Clans of the Alphane Moon
The Game-Players of Titan
UBIK
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Now Wait For Last Year
The Penultimate Truth

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Ubik
The Man in the High Castle
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A Scanner Darkly
Martian Time-Slip
Galactic Pot-Healer
Our Friends From Frolix 8
Eye in the Sky
Clans of the Alphane Moon

The Man in the High Castle ending is awesome fourth-wall breaking reality-questioning metafictional headfuck, and surely prefigures his later extreme and personal obsessions with the nature of reality, VALIS, etc (which I haven't read and am a little bit scared to, I don't find that kind of thinking terribly healthy).

I get a little excited by those promos for Adjustment Bureau because...the John Slattery/Terence Stamp scenes really scream that it's a PKD work

This is, ultimately, not the case. Movie is about true love, lol.

Michel Gondry allegedly developing film of Ubik.

hey philip k dick ppl - which of those volumes of the collected short stories do you recommend to start w/?

Damn. Well, thanks for the warning, Morbs.

re: short stories - whatever volume has 'the electric ant' in it (think its vol 4).

volume 4 is the best, but electric ant is actually in vol 5

thx dudes

I would say... not Volume 1

Michel Gondry allegedly developing film of Ubik.

whatever happened to that Giamatti PKD biopic sorta thing that was supposed to have something to do with Ubik...?

just finished NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR, really phenomenal, don't know why it doesn't get more praise

conversation with the cab at the end is so great

yes! i can't believe it's passed over so often. the mariner editions are either matte (well-known & popular) or glossy (lesser works), i don't understand how THE MAN WHO JAPED is a matte and NWFLY is a glossy

I don't remember it too clearly tbh - reading the wiki on it makes it sound like a jumbled fix-up but I'm not sure if it's based on an earlier story or what. Probably worth re-reading, I think I have this on my shelf.

It's one of my top ten favorite Dick books. Concept and ending are fantastic.

what should i read next: THE MAN WHO JAPED, MAZE OF DEATH, or CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON?

Clans, but Maze is good too.

Maze->Clans------------>Japed

^^^ otm

saw an orig pulp version of clans of the alphane moon in a bookstore window the other day

so palmer eldritch is good? so many people have it in their POX's, but in the notes of my anthology it quotes him as saying "I can't even look at it" less than a year after it was published

oh yeah that one is top 10 easy

it sounded like it was fairly traumatic for him to write (or, at least, it incorporates some traumatic experiences he had)

it was weird the ones that Dick liked and didn't like - pre-Blade Runner he was very hostile towards Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which again wld def be in my Dick Picks

lol whoops i never read Ubik, gonna go with that

the cosmic puppets is another great early one. are the crack in space, vulcan's hammer, and dr. futurity worth reading at all? my impression are most people think those are his third worst

They're all third-rate, yeah

practice makes perfect!

Guys, follow Shakey's lead and read the John Sladek parody, "Solar Shoe-Salesman."

I thought Cosmic Puppets was pretty corny.

at the very least books like cosmic puppets and galactic pot healer have at least one image or bit that stay with me (in puppets, the realization that the curvature of the earth is actually a person, and in pot healer, the concept of everyone dreaming the same dream at night, and can enter a contest to write the dream everyone dreams)