POX Phillip K Dick

so I read "The Adjustment Team" a few days ago cuz it's online (public domain) and I have to review the new, no doubt hugely inflated and freely adapted Matt Damon movie made from it tonight. I take it it's not considered a major work, and Hollywood just liked the price?

The best Dick-based film I've seen (tho I like Blade Runner) might be Barjo, a French adap of Confessions of a Crap Artist.

"I take it it's not considered a major work, and Hollywood just liked the price?"

You are correct.

I dig the B-movie vibe of Screamers actually.

william mayne, earthfasts (not the sequels)
joan aiken, the wolves of willoughby chase (and the sequels, maybe)

You've taken a wrong turn methinks.

Do Andoids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Martian Time Slip
Galactic Pot-Healer
A Scanner Darkly
Confessions of a Crap Artist
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

I really need to read VALIS.

Is Barjo available anywhere? I was looking and it's not on Netflix, but that's no surprise.

"I take it it's not considered a major work, and Hollywood just liked the price?"

You are correct.

yeah Hollywood is not equipped to deal with his major works, they pretty much stick to his early, more easily adaptable short stories

It appears that Barjo was only released on VHS eons ago.

I get a little excited by those promos for Adjustment Bureau because, with the exception of the melodrama and chase scenes in the trailer, the John Slattery/Terence Stamp scenes really scream that it's a PKD work.

I read the Hugo award winning The Man in the High Castle last year. My only complaint is that it is unfinished - the ending was anticlimatic. Dick was too disturbed by WWII that he could never gather the strength to write the sequel (and he tried several times - often resulting in other books). The BBC One is supposedly making a 4 part miniseries of The Man in the High Castle to be directed by Ridley Scott but I haven't heard any new news since October 2010.

The Man in the High Castle is overrated

I mean it's good, but it isn't anywhere close to his best

Does anyone actually think it's his best though? Just because people thought it was the best sci-fi novel the year it was published doesn't mean they think it was his best novel.

Was gonna say that in 1998 Thomas M. Disch thought it was, but now I see that, though he liked it a lot, he said "Dick blossomed as a writer after finishing The Man In The High Castle"

I thought it was the only major award he ever won but now I see he got some memorial award for Flow My Tears and some Brit award for A Scanner Darkly

Flow My Tears won the Campbell and was nominated for Hugo/Nebula.

Losing to the Dispossessed for both btw (334, which is better, was also nom'd for the Nebula.)

1963 was a weak year for sci-fi novels judging by his Hugo competition.

Not a lot of love for H. Beam Piper around here.

kinda agree that 334 > Dispossessed > Flow My Tears. Flow My Tears is pretty good, but it's basically an extended Twilight Zone episode. Linklater's OTM in that the best/most striking thing about it is the weird biblical allegory towards the end

As I said on another thread I love Dick, but its not like he's some unassailable giant of sci-fi. There are dozens of sci-fi authors from the 50s-60s-70s who were equally great writers and just as prolific.

PKD has never clicked with me, despite 2-3 extended good-faith attempts to get into his work. Dunno why.

Reminds me that skot just said something about sci-fi writers and graphomania.
(xp)

I love his mid-to-late 60's stuff the most, I think. Sure there's lots of other good writers but I don't know of anyone who wrote more deliciously paranoid, dystopian short stories.

all 5 collected stories
Dr. Bloodmoney
Radio Free Albemuth
We Can Build You
Clans Of The Alphane Moon
The Simulacra

Lots of writers are nuts, lots of writers are coherent, but I do think it's a rare commodity to be coherently nuts like PKD, which trumps a lot of other things, like say writing good endings.

Man in the High Castle is the only PKD published as a Penguin Modern Classic in the UK, which I think partly accounts for its high reputation here.

Barjo was pretty good, but it annoyed me that they cut out the whole last act of Confessions of a Crap Artist, which I thought was the best part.

Man in the High Castle is great and worth its reputation. It's not my favourite PKD, and it's probably more highly regarded amongst non-SF readers because of its relative lack of hard SF elements, but you're very wrong about it being "unfinished", Captain L.

The anti-ending (in general) is my favourite device in 20th century fiction I think.

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.

Not read the story but I thought Impossible Planet was a snooze and the ending a let down.

Brooker not having anything to do with it is a plus.

Other script writers thinking they can improve on Dick's stories is a minus.

decent enough I thought, despite Channel 4's annoyingly aggressive advert schedule

don't know most of the short stories but most of what I love about PKD is unfilmable so

it's generally a good thing to have a series of self-contained 1 hour SF dramas without a fecking story arc or a fecking canon tbh

I don't care about canon but 99% sure Dick had more interesting ideas than anyone working in TV today. But ok I'll wait until I've seen this episode and discovered how far it differs from the original story before imparting my negative opinion.

as I say, he's too good to be dramatized imo and that's largely because of the ideas he deals with, but his name is surely attached to this mainly for advertising purposes

they advertised an eighties synth-pop compilation called 'Electric Dreams' during Electric Dreams lol

it's generally a good thing to have a series of self-contained 1 hour SF dramas without a fecking story arc or a fecking canon tbh

― be the cringe you want to see in the world (Noodle Vague), Monday, 25 September 2017 08:05 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

V much the spirit in which I watched

Looked like some kind of first draft script where they hadn't quite figured out the characters' motivations yet. Interesting premises left hanging, out-of-character behaviour at the climax, the whole thing salvaged by Geraldine Chaplin's performance. The feel of it was more like a Ray Bradbury story than PKD I thought.

Better than the first one I thought, at least it didn't jettison a perfectly good story in favour of some flimsy rubbish. "Out-of-character behaviour" was I presume due to oxygen deprivation.