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

one of my favorite novels of the 90s is michael bishop's remarkable dick pastiche philip k dick is dead, alas, in which the spirit of massively successful mainstream novelist philip k dick starts appearing to his fans after his death to warn them that something has gone wrong with their world.

Solar Lottery [vt World of Chance (1956 UK)](1955)
The World Jones Made (1956)
The Man Who Japed (1956)
The Cosmic Puppets (1957)
Eye in the Sky (1957)
Time Out of Joint (1959)
Dr. Futurity (1960)
Vulcan's Hammer (1960)
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
The Game Players of Titan (1963)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)
Martian Time-Slip (1964)
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
The Simulacra (1964)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Dr. Bloodmoney [vt Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb](1965)
Now Wait for Last Year (1966)
The Crack in Space (1966)
Counter Clock World (1967)
The Ganymede Takeover (1967) with Ray Nelson
The Zap Gun (1967)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [vt Blade Runner](1968)
Ubik (1969)
Galactic Pot Healer (1969)
A Maze of Death (1970)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
We Can Build You (1972)
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
Deus Irae (1976) with Roger Zelazny
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
VALIS (1981)
The Divine Invasion (1981)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
Lies, Inc. [vt The Unteleported Man](1983)
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1984)
Radio Free Albemuth (1985)
Puttering About in a Small Land (1985)
In Milton Lumky Territory (1985)
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1986)
Mary and the Giant (1987)
Nick and the Glimmung (1988)
The Broken Bubble (1988)

ones i've read in italics. recommendations welcomed.

also, a question: does anyone have any idea as to whether the more hokily skiffy of his titles were editorial edicts? because it seems very odd that the same person would want to have titles like "the three stigmata of palmer eldritch" and also "martian time-slip".

um, if you are gonna read everything he wrote this year, then yeah, you have to re-read stuff. otherwise, your thread title should read: this year i am going to read the entire works of philip k dick (except for the stuff i have already read).

I think I will read more PKD this year too! I've only read, um, High Castle, Scanner Darkly, Electric Sheep, and part of Valis.

x-xpost

I thought the biog from the late '80s was Sutin's Divine Invasions? It was biographically comprehensive, but maybe not that literary.

That Sutin biography is okay. If you read the books, some of the interviews, and listen to the Hour 25 interview, you'd probably be just as well served. There was a halfway decent BBC doc floating around at one point too...

update: read time out of joint on the 3rd, halfway through the simulacra.

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.

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.

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