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

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.

Ha, this was how I took it. Not in my name, not on my shelf!

I'm currently in the middle of In Milton Lumky Territory, one of his "mainstream" novels. For some reason I seem to get slightly impatient with his non-SF work (I've read a couple of others). It's okay though - the twist of a guy moving back to his old home town and marrying one of his grade school teachers is interesting.

Has anybody heard anything about new editions that would bring back to print some of his other mainstrean novels, like Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, The Broken Bubble or The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (which I'm assuming was mainstream novel, but I'm not sure)?

i'll get back to it, sigh.

i have ordered both lies inc and the unteleported man, as i think reading both might be an interesting experience. thx jeff.

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