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

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