9 ms·

Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975)

144 points by pmoriarty 5y ago

pavlov 5y ago
I recently bought P. K. Dick’s “Complete Short Stories” published by Folio Society as a big box set. The stories are in chronological order, which is surprisingly interesting because you get to trace Dick’s evolution as a writer. The first published stories are not very good by any standard, but he keeps gradually honing in on the concepts and atmospheres that eventually mark his work. As someone who has dabbled in SF writing, it feels like a consolation to see PKD’s humble beginnings laid bare. He never gave up on evolving his craft.
- fallat 5y ago
  I would have to say of all the writings, that compilation is the best. You get a taste of everything he had to offer. All his other books are based off of these stories IIRC.
  - mypalmike 5y ago
    Where can you find it though? It's a sold out special edition with only 750 copies in print.
    - fallat 5y ago
      Ah, I thought the original comment was talking about this https://www.amazon.ca/Remember-Wholesale-Other-Classic-Stories/dp/0806537981/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=philip+k+dick+we+can+remember&qid=1622329764&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.ca/Remember-Wholesale-Other-Classic-Stori... but I was not aware there are many more!
      - csdvrx 5y ago
        Sorry to contact you there but I do not see an email in your profile. I just read your comment on derasterize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997236 > Based on your project I inferred that adding more matches seems to add more resolution and yeah, outputs are looking even nicer now. I updated the repo! This is the right approach, but there's a combinatory explosion when computing the matches: you want to select a subset of shapes that in practice are more often right, to save on the matching computation time. Also, when you are operating with time constraints (ex: video to text), keeping the FPS rate is often more important that the accuracy, as the human eye does a lot of interpolation. Having different subsets of different sizes and a command-line toggle between them seems like the simpler approach to support multiple uses. > I also used shapes which are less sharp rather than "perfect match". Selecting some "less sharp" glyphs is a very daring and unique idea: in retrospect, it should help the bad cases by adding some "blur". I really like you idea! Would you be interested in a collaboration to inspect fonts and select glyphs based on 1) their availability (ascii>ansi>unicode) 2) their usefulness (by defining some subsets)
        fallat 5y ago
        I saw your message but was hesitant to respond with disappointment. I'm sorry my interest in this is not as large as yours! I think the end result could be cool, but overall not very practical. I wrote my program to include "images" in my text-only articles (http://len.falken.ink/philosophy/is-privacy-in-all-our-interests.txt http://len.falken.ink/philosophy/is-privacy-in-all-our-inter...), but really I can't imagine a real useful application. We (the world) is much better off to adopt a real "images with text" format which works nicely with terminals (for now this appears to be sixel and the proposal by kiTTY). My email is inbox at lee <this username> dot ca :)
        csdvrx 5y ago
        > My email is inbox at lee <this username> dot ca :) Thanks, I will get in touch! I want to release a new version of tmux-sixel first. > really I can't imagine a real useful application Plots of datasets are extremely helpful! It is much faster to use gnuplot over ssh than to download a subset of data
- V-2 5y ago
  As far as I remember, Dick's writing was of mixed quality and it wasn't just linearly improving with experience. There were ups and downs. He wrote really a lot, often repeated concepts, and his weaker stuff was often a result of rushing and simply needing a quick buck.
  - kevinmchugh 5y ago
    He had a rough life, and it's not hard to see that impact in his work. I read many of his novels, back to back, in the Library of America collections, and by Ubik (my favorite of the bunch) I had the sense that he was barely holding together something moving downhill very quickly. That energy suits his work in a lot of ways, though not universally, and can be monotonous sometimes.
    - pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
      I grew up in and around San Rafael where he did some of his most important writing and went through possibly the darkest chapters of his life. I always thought there should be a statue of him there... Also I just felt I should weigh in because of my username.
      - pmoriarty 5y ago
        I just found the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project entry for PKD: [1] Perhaps there could be something similar in San Rafel. [1] - https://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/philip-k-dick/ https://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/philip-k-dick/
        pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
        Thats an excellent find, and an excellent idea! Id donate money to that gofundme. Also could have text from his scanner darkly afterword, gets me literally every time. Kindred... https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/1hbexo/text_phillip_k_dicks_afterword_for_a_scanner/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/1hbexo/text_philli...
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "The first published stories are not very good by any standard" I loved PKD's Beyond Lies the Wub, which was his first published story (published in 1952). I also really liked the story he wrote the year before (but which didn't get published until the year after) called Roog.
  - atombender 5y ago
    Make sure you also read "Not by Its Cover", a sort of sequel to "Beyond Lies the Wub".
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation. I found a copy here: [1] I enjoyed the story, though the ending was a little weak. [1] - http://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd035-0.html http://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd035-0.html
- azemetre 5y ago
  I just looked up what the folio society is and that book set. Wow! It looks absolutely gorgeous. I really wish I found out about it, guessing they never do reprints?
  - Finnucane 5y ago
    No, but this is like the third edition of the collected stories anyway. You should be able to find copies of the Citadel paperback at reasonable prices. I have the Underwood-Miller edition, but that is now fairly scarce.
    - azemetre 5y ago
      I don't think we are talking about the same thing at all. You are referring to a story I am referring to this: https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-complete-short-stories.html https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-complete-short-stories....
      - merlyn 5y ago
        Underwood-Miller put out a "The Collected Stories of Phillip K. Dick" 5 book collection in 1987. I have a first-edition set on my bookshelves back when I bought it back then. I assume the Folio Society collection is the same material, redone into 4 books and fancy covers and illustrations.
        bsenftner 5y ago
        I have two copies of the '87 set, and have compared them to the Folio set and they are the same.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mherdeg 5y ago
  Dick is one of my go-to SF authors when I'm using the public library's book lending app (Hoopla) and want to type in a novelist name and read some completely random piece of their work. He was so incredibly prolific that there is always more to explore. It's … not always great, huh. One quiet theme I've seen in sampling his work at different stages is the evolution of San Francisco the city -- Dick has a bunch of stories which paint a particular picture of the mid 20th century Bay Area that of course feels very different from what the place is like today. It reminds me of the place we see in "The Crying of Lot 49". A few years back while visiting the city I tried to get something fixed at a repair shop in a small office suite in a very old building (I think probably https://www.yelp.com/biz/setraks-watch-repair-san-francisco https://www.yelp.com/biz/setraks-watch-repair-san-francisco ) and it looked and felt exactly like the older time SF of Dick's stories.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  I have this set, had to buy a 2nd because my first set became too dog-eared from re-reading. To say I read a lot is an understatement. PKD is the first author I "finished", as in having read everything published, and then some more. To me, he is one of the few, in the company of Huxley, Orwell, Burroughs and Joyce, to see the future not being some grand shiny existence, but a chaos of sophisticated manipulations the human race and God in all it's manifestations is lost and consumed by consumerism and commercialized branded religion. I found a Church of PKD in San Francisco once, a tiny space with whacked out meth addicts reading passages of PKD novels to one another. That was an interesting find, and gone when I tried to show some friends.
Finnucane 5y ago
The charlatans were pretty miffed.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  By charlatans, you mean the members of the Science Fiction Writers Association who kicked him out for writing that essay! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem#Relationship_with_American_science_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem#Relationshi...
  - User23 5y ago
    People who have been ejected from the SFWA are almost always good reads. Vox Day is another great example.
ngold 5y ago
Valis is a very brave book, horselover fats biography if not Philip k. Dicks.
- bellazeus 5y ago
  The entire Valis trilogy is essential to understanding PKD.
  - rantwasp 5y ago
    1) The Empire Never Ended 2) What about Kevin’s Cat?
    - User23 5y ago
      How do we escape the Black Iron Prison?
zabzonk 5y ago
Back in the 1970s I owned all of Dick's novels, and all short stories available in collections (which is quite a lot of stuff!) I'm not a book collector - I bought them because at the time he was my favourite writer. Just recently, I've started re-reading them on my Kindle. I've just finished "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", and while I enjoyed it, I have to say it wasn't as good as I remember. Next up is "A Scanner Darkly", so we shall see how things go.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  Back then I used to read a lot of SF and didn't think much of P.K. Dick's writing. His stories had a tinge of paranoid fantasy about them, and felt implausible, rushed and disjointed, compared with more standard SF fare. I think this wasn't an uncommon perception. The movie guys, in spite of all the derision they get for bumbling and fumbling, were on the mark spotting a powerful source of mana, and made hay from PKD's chaff. Lem, being a genius in his own right and honed sharp by life in Soviet-watched Eastern Europe, was able to disregard the "shoddiness of the props" and get to the potency of the spell.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "His stories had a tinge of paranoid fantasy about them, and felt implausible, rushed and disjointed, compared with more standard SF fare." They're a lot more comprehensible and relatable if you've ever had a bad trip on psychedelics.
  - elbasti 5y ago
    One of my favourite anecdotes about Lem+Dick is that while Lem held PKD in high regard, PKD thought Lem didn't exist.[0]. He was convinced, in paranoid-Dickian-realityisweird fashion that Lem was actually a committee of people, and a Soviet hoax, not an individual. 0: https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-a-communist-committee https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
    - robocat 5y ago
throwawayboise 5y ago
Sorry I had to bail out. Seven paragraphs of mentally exhausting prose before Philip Dick's name is mentioned. It was like a William F. Buckley monologue. I've read a few of Dick's stories when I was in high school. I'm not much for scifi anymore but they were decent, as I recall.
anyfoo 5y ago
Ubik spoilers ahead. I read Ubik, it was a wild ride. I was not sure what to make of it. The story, especially the end, is logically inconsistent even if you take its wild premises into account (though what the premises are is itself a bit of a guess); but that's part of the charm of course. The whole thing is so bizarre overall that it was also impossible for me to relate to any characters, and it was more like reading a dream diary than a story. Anyway, one thing that I often think about is something not directly intended by the author. In the book, the perceived world around the protagonist regresses more and more into the past, taking the form of the 50s, 40s, 30s... one example that stuck with me (and I think the moment where this regression became apparent) was when a modern elevator suddenly took the appearance of a 50s style lift. With visible cage, cables, maybe even an attendant controlling the lift using a lever... This old elevator struck me as a beautiful way to describe the distant past when I read it about 10 years ago. But the book was written in 1969. So for the author, that was maybe 15 years ago. Even the 30s were about 35 years ago from when the book was written, from today that would merely be the 80s! And yet the world was being described as so massively transforming (including for example a scene of an old pharmacy with intricate wood and brass decors[1]), and technology regressing at a rapid rate... it made me feel that from some point of view, the world was changing much faster back then. [1] Like this one: https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/19/fa/fb/99/the-old-pharmacy-store.jpg https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/19/fa/fb/99/...
- rantwasp 5y ago
  if you liked Ubik, give VALIS and The Three Stigmata a try. Ubik is a good “introduction” into the PKD universe. But it’s almost like there are two PKDs: one trying his hand at SF and another one that has transcended space and time. You want the 2nd flavor :)
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Having read virtually every scifi book that PKD wrote, and some straight fiction by him as well, I'd have to say that for my taste he was at his best when he was writing straight scifi, and the more scifi there is in what he wrote the better it's likely to be. While I'd agree that Ubik is a great introduction to the PKD universe, I would also classify it as his best book. I also love many of his other books, but to me none of them are as strong or consistently good as Ubik. Some of them have great parts, though, so I definitely wouldn't stop at Ubik, but I've yet to read a better book by him, or even one that was just as good.
jimmygrapes 5y ago
For anybody interested in philosophy, religion, science fiction, or mental struggles, I highly recommend the 900+ page slog that is The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Mild warning: I read the introduction close to a decade ago and got bored before I even started the book itself. I picked it up again a few years ago and skipped to the actual content and was simultaneously hooked and blown away. Maybe it was just coincidence with my personal journey, but it felt a lot like the thoughts I had one day were found on the pages I read the next day. It is a little repetitive, because PKD is essentially iterating over possible explanations with slight changes each iteration, but if you've read any of his fiction you already know that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exegesis_of_Philip_K._Dick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exegesis_of_Philip_K._Dick
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  I'm a big PKD fan, having read pretty much every one of his scifi book (of which there are many), but even I wouldn't recommend The Exegesis to any but the most die-hard fan.. and even then I doubt most of them could make it through much of that book before shelving it and reading something else. It's basically a really, really, reaaaaaaly looong, barely coherent book of random ramblings. It's fine to dip in to now and then to see what PKD was thinking about on any random day, but really hard to stomach reading very much of, as unlike a fiction work it has no structure, no characters, no plot, and was not intended for anything but a private sounding-ground for the author to spitball ideas, many of them having to do with one event that PKD probably dearly wanted to be a mystical experience and that he just couldn't seem to drop and move past. To truly die-hard PKD fans this might be endlessly fascinating, but to me it's only worth peeking in for maybe a few pages every few years or so. I can't imagine reading the whole thing, even if it was the only book I had on a desert island.
  - bsedlm 5y ago
    Here's a summary of sorts https://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM https://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM
  - jimmygrapes 5y ago
    I don't disagree! I really do feel like the only reason I was able to get through it all is because I was in a mentally/emotionally/spiritually compatible state when I read it proper. I am quite positive that if I had tried to read it when I was sure of anything that I would reject it exactly as you describe. The only way I can see it being rewarding for someone (who isn't in the midst of the same affliction PKD suffered at the time of writing) is to treat it almost like archeology alongside his published works: read the fiction, then read his mindset about it, and abstractly note things like "ok this week he thinks it was because his spirit was memetically reincarnated"
DonHopkins 5y ago
Holy Plate of Shrimp! I was just recommending a movie to a friend by comparing PKD and Lem: Hey have you seen The Congress???!?!?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE I like it almost as much as Blade Runner, which it parallels, by being a movie based on a (Stanislaw Lem / Philip K Dick) book that it's inspired by but a lot different from, but the movie stands on its own and has something unique and interesting to say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress Both the book and the movie are excellent but different! There's a riveting dramatic scene on a Light Stage, where Harvey Keitel provokes emotional responses from Robin Wright for capture by the Light Stage. Lots of cool techno blinking lights. And it's actually technologically and anatomically correct! It accurately shows how a real Lightstage actually works. The Congress (2013) Scan Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 Light Stage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage Paul Debevec: https://ict.usc.edu/profile/paul-debevec/ https://ict.usc.edu/profile/paul-debevec/ The plot and story touch on deep issues! About how the movie industry is being turned upside-down! But much bigger than that. What happens to actors? And how do consumers "consume" characters and celebrities? They literally consume them not just like but AS drugs! It's visually delicious -- you can see some consumption here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGhw4nACfk&ab_channel=AlexGAlexG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGhw4nACfk&ab_channel=AlexG...
- FpUser 5y ago
  I read almost all Lem and PKD. Love them. Also watched Blade Runner and The Congress. Either is a masterpiece.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  I have a mental debate over "The Congress" being the best film I've seen in the last 10 years. There is so much there, I find new incredible mental gum with every re-watch that occupies my mind for days.
- filoeleven 5y ago
dang 5y ago
Some past threads: Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026 - June 2018 (50 comments) Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8801011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8801011 - Dec 2014 (22 comments) Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909741 - Aug 2011 (25 comments)
- jessaustin 5y ago
  We thank 'pmoriarty for such dedication!
zabzonk 5y ago
Anyone that wants a "happy ending" and less paranoid PKD-like book should take a look at "The Lathe Of Heaven", which I have always thought of as Ursula Le Guin does PKD (of whom she was a huge fan).
- GlennS 5y ago
  Also the corresponding Philip K Dick book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. (They each wrote those books after meeting each other.)
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  Le Guin's essay "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown" https://books.google.dk/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&lpg=PA7&pg=PA101&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.dk/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&lpg=PA7&pg=PA1... is pretty appreciative of The Man In The High Castle.
jcun4128 5y ago
He was in some documentary about life being a simulation. I enjoyed his Blade Runner stuff anyway. [d]
rkk3 5y ago
Surprised no one recommended "the Man in the High Castle" it's how he won the Hugo Award! The alternate recent-history setting is unique & the character arcs were determined by random I Ching passages (It somehow works). Like most of his writing, it is significantly better than the Hollywood adaption which took the setting and completely re-imagined the characters & plot.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Such a shame that such a great book had to have such a lousy ending.
  - rkk3 5y ago
    Yeah unfortunately endings were never a strong point in PKD's works but that doesn't stop them from being great!
gego 5y ago
Stanislaw Lem ftw ;)
danbmil99 5y ago
I think it's a bit like financial narket predictions. imagine a thousand traders making bets on the market, at least half of them are wrong and only a small percentage do way better than average. Writing science fiction is also an act of prediction. There must have been a thousand authors who started out around the same level of success as PKD. Over time though, his prognostications were just so on point, so uncannily correct, that now we see him as the Warren Buffett of Science Fiction, someone with predictive skills that seem impossible to rack up to pure chance.
coldtea 5y ago
Ironic how many of the criticisms of the plot of Ubiq (by SF pulp standards) precisely justify Lem's critique of the facile SF audience in TFA.

144 points by pmoriarty 5y ago

I recently bought P. K. Dick’s “Complete Short Stories” published by Folio Society as a big box set. The stories are in chronological order, which is surprisingly interesting because you get to trace Dick’s evolution as a writer. The first published stories are not very good by any standard, but he keeps gradually honing in on the concepts and atmospheres that eventually mark his work. As someone who has dabbled in SF writing, it feels like a consolation to see PKD’s humble beginnings laid bare. He never gave up on evolving his craft.

fallat 5y ago
I would have to say of all the writings, that compilation is the best. You get a taste of everything he had to offer. All his other books are based off of these stories IIRC.
- mypalmike 5y ago
  Where can you find it though? It's a sold out special edition with only 750 copies in print.
  - fallat 5y ago
    Ah, I thought the original comment was talking about this https://www.amazon.ca/Remember-Wholesale-Other-Classic-Stories/dp/0806537981/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=philip+k+dick+we+can+remember&qid=1622329764&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.ca/Remember-Wholesale-Other-Classic-Stori... but I was not aware there are many more!
    - csdvrx 5y ago
      Sorry to contact you there but I do not see an email in your profile. I just read your comment on derasterize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997236 > Based on your project I inferred that adding more matches seems to add more resolution and yeah, outputs are looking even nicer now. I updated the repo! This is the right approach, but there's a combinatory explosion when computing the matches: you want to select a subset of shapes that in practice are more often right, to save on the matching computation time. Also, when you are operating with time constraints (ex: video to text), keeping the FPS rate is often more important that the accuracy, as the human eye does a lot of interpolation. Having different subsets of different sizes and a command-line toggle between them seems like the simpler approach to support multiple uses. > I also used shapes which are less sharp rather than "perfect match". Selecting some "less sharp" glyphs is a very daring and unique idea: in retrospect, it should help the bad cases by adding some "blur". I really like you idea! Would you be interested in a collaboration to inspect fonts and select glyphs based on 1) their availability (ascii>ansi>unicode) 2) their usefulness (by defining some subsets)
      - fallat 5y ago
        I saw your message but was hesitant to respond with disappointment. I'm sorry my interest in this is not as large as yours! I think the end result could be cool, but overall not very practical. I wrote my program to include "images" in my text-only articles (http://len.falken.ink/philosophy/is-privacy-in-all-our-interests.txt http://len.falken.ink/philosophy/is-privacy-in-all-our-inter...), but really I can't imagine a real useful application. We (the world) is much better off to adopt a real "images with text" format which works nicely with terminals (for now this appears to be sixel and the proposal by kiTTY). My email is inbox at lee <this username> dot ca :)
        csdvrx 5y ago
        > My email is inbox at lee <this username> dot ca :) Thanks, I will get in touch! I want to release a new version of tmux-sixel first. > really I can't imagine a real useful application Plots of datasets are extremely helpful! It is much faster to use gnuplot over ssh than to download a subset of data
V-2 5y ago
As far as I remember, Dick's writing was of mixed quality and it wasn't just linearly improving with experience. There were ups and downs. He wrote really a lot, often repeated concepts, and his weaker stuff was often a result of rushing and simply needing a quick buck.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  He had a rough life, and it's not hard to see that impact in his work. I read many of his novels, back to back, in the Library of America collections, and by Ubik (my favorite of the bunch) I had the sense that he was barely holding together something moving downhill very quickly. That energy suits his work in a lot of ways, though not universally, and can be monotonous sometimes.
  - pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
    I grew up in and around San Rafael where he did some of his most important writing and went through possibly the darkest chapters of his life. I always thought there should be a statue of him there... Also I just felt I should weigh in because of my username.
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      I just found the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project entry for PKD: [1] Perhaps there could be something similar in San Rafel. [1] - https://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/philip-k-dick/ https://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/philip-k-dick/
      - pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
        Thats an excellent find, and an excellent idea! Id donate money to that gofundme. Also could have text from his scanner darkly afterword, gets me literally every time. Kindred... https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/1hbexo/text_phillip_k_dicks_afterword_for_a_scanner/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/1hbexo/text_philli...
pmoriarty 5y ago
"The first published stories are not very good by any standard" I loved PKD's Beyond Lies the Wub, which was his first published story (published in 1952). I also really liked the story he wrote the year before (but which didn't get published until the year after) called Roog.
- atombender 5y ago
  Make sure you also read "Not by Its Cover", a sort of sequel to "Beyond Lies the Wub".
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation. I found a copy here: [1] I enjoyed the story, though the ending was a little weak. [1] - http://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd035-0.html http://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd035-0.html
azemetre 5y ago
I just looked up what the folio society is and that book set. Wow! It looks absolutely gorgeous. I really wish I found out about it, guessing they never do reprints?
- Finnucane 5y ago
  No, but this is like the third edition of the collected stories anyway. You should be able to find copies of the Citadel paperback at reasonable prices. I have the Underwood-Miller edition, but that is now fairly scarce.
  - azemetre 5y ago
    I don't think we are talking about the same thing at all. You are referring to a story I am referring to this: https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-complete-short-stories.html https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-complete-short-stories....
    - merlyn 5y ago
      Underwood-Miller put out a "The Collected Stories of Phillip K. Dick" 5 book collection in 1987. I have a first-edition set on my bookshelves back when I bought it back then. I assume the Folio Society collection is the same material, redone into 4 books and fancy covers and illustrations.
      - bsenftner 5y ago
        I have two copies of the '87 set, and have compared them to the Folio set and they are the same.
deleted 5y ago
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mherdeg 5y ago
Dick is one of my go-to SF authors when I'm using the public library's book lending app (Hoopla) and want to type in a novelist name and read some completely random piece of their work. He was so incredibly prolific that there is always more to explore. It's … not always great, huh. One quiet theme I've seen in sampling his work at different stages is the evolution of San Francisco the city -- Dick has a bunch of stories which paint a particular picture of the mid 20th century Bay Area that of course feels very different from what the place is like today. It reminds me of the place we see in "The Crying of Lot 49". A few years back while visiting the city I tried to get something fixed at a repair shop in a small office suite in a very old building (I think probably https://www.yelp.com/biz/setraks-watch-repair-san-francisco https://www.yelp.com/biz/setraks-watch-repair-san-francisco ) and it looked and felt exactly like the older time SF of Dick's stories.
bsenftner 5y ago
I have this set, had to buy a 2nd because my first set became too dog-eared from re-reading. To say I read a lot is an understatement. PKD is the first author I "finished", as in having read everything published, and then some more. To me, he is one of the few, in the company of Huxley, Orwell, Burroughs and Joyce, to see the future not being some grand shiny existence, but a chaos of sophisticated manipulations the human race and God in all it's manifestations is lost and consumed by consumerism and commercialized branded religion. I found a Church of PKD in San Francisco once, a tiny space with whacked out meth addicts reading passages of PKD novels to one another. That was an interesting find, and gone when I tried to show some friends.

Finnucane 5y ago

The charlatans were pretty miffed.

DonHopkins 5y ago
By charlatans, you mean the members of the Science Fiction Writers Association who kicked him out for writing that essay! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem#Relationship_with_American_science_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem#Relationshi...
- User23 5y ago
  People who have been ejected from the SFWA are almost always good reads. Vox Day is another great example.

ngold 5y ago

Valis is a very brave book, horselover fats biography if not Philip k. Dicks.

bellazeus 5y ago
The entire Valis trilogy is essential to understanding PKD.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  1) The Empire Never Ended 2) What about Kevin’s Cat?
  - User23 5y ago
    How do we escape the Black Iron Prison?

zabzonk 5y ago

Back in the 1970s I owned all of Dick's novels, and all short stories available in collections (which is quite a lot of stuff!) I'm not a book collector - I bought them because at the time he was my favourite writer. Just recently, I've started re-reading them on my Kindle. I've just finished "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", and while I enjoyed it, I have to say it wasn't as good as I remember. Next up is "A Scanner Darkly", so we shall see how things go.

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
Back then I used to read a lot of SF and didn't think much of P.K. Dick's writing. His stories had a tinge of paranoid fantasy about them, and felt implausible, rushed and disjointed, compared with more standard SF fare. I think this wasn't an uncommon perception. The movie guys, in spite of all the derision they get for bumbling and fumbling, were on the mark spotting a powerful source of mana, and made hay from PKD's chaff. Lem, being a genius in his own right and honed sharp by life in Soviet-watched Eastern Europe, was able to disregard the "shoddiness of the props" and get to the potency of the spell.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "His stories had a tinge of paranoid fantasy about them, and felt implausible, rushed and disjointed, compared with more standard SF fare." They're a lot more comprehensible and relatable if you've ever had a bad trip on psychedelics.
- elbasti 5y ago
  One of my favourite anecdotes about Lem+Dick is that while Lem held PKD in high regard, PKD thought Lem didn't exist.[0]. He was convinced, in paranoid-Dickian-realityisweird fashion that Lem was actually a committee of people, and a Soviet hoax, not an individual. 0: https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-a-communist-committee https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
  - robocat 5y ago

throwawayboise 5y ago

Sorry I had to bail out. Seven paragraphs of mentally exhausting prose before Philip Dick's name is mentioned. It was like a William F. Buckley monologue. I've read a few of Dick's stories when I was in high school. I'm not much for scifi anymore but they were decent, as I recall.

anyfoo 5y ago

Ubik spoilers ahead. I read Ubik, it was a wild ride. I was not sure what to make of it. The story, especially the end, is logically inconsistent even if you take its wild premises into account (though what the premises are is itself a bit of a guess); but that's part of the charm of course. The whole thing is so bizarre overall that it was also impossible for me to relate to any characters, and it was more like reading a dream diary than a story. Anyway, one thing that I often think about is something not directly intended by the author. In the book, the perceived world around the protagonist regresses more and more into the past, taking the form of the 50s, 40s, 30s... one example that stuck with me (and I think the moment where this regression became apparent) was when a modern elevator suddenly took the appearance of a 50s style lift. With visible cage, cables, maybe even an attendant controlling the lift using a lever... This old elevator struck me as a beautiful way to describe the distant past when I read it about 10 years ago. But the book was written in 1969. So for the author, that was maybe 15 years ago. Even the 30s were about 35 years ago from when the book was written, from today that would merely be the 80s! And yet the world was being described as so massively transforming (including for example a scene of an old pharmacy with intricate wood and brass decors[1]), and technology regressing at a rapid rate... it made me feel that from some point of view, the world was changing much faster back then. [1] Like this one: https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/19/fa/fb/99/the-old-pharmacy-store.jpg https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/19/fa/fb/99/...

rantwasp 5y ago
if you liked Ubik, give VALIS and The Three Stigmata a try. Ubik is a good “introduction” into the PKD universe. But it’s almost like there are two PKDs: one trying his hand at SF and another one that has transcended space and time. You want the 2nd flavor :)
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Having read virtually every scifi book that PKD wrote, and some straight fiction by him as well, I'd have to say that for my taste he was at his best when he was writing straight scifi, and the more scifi there is in what he wrote the better it's likely to be. While I'd agree that Ubik is a great introduction to the PKD universe, I would also classify it as his best book. I also love many of his other books, but to me none of them are as strong or consistently good as Ubik. Some of them have great parts, though, so I definitely wouldn't stop at Ubik, but I've yet to read a better book by him, or even one that was just as good.

jimmygrapes 5y ago

For anybody interested in philosophy, religion, science fiction, or mental struggles, I highly recommend the 900+ page slog that is The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Mild warning: I read the introduction close to a decade ago and got bored before I even started the book itself. I picked it up again a few years ago and skipped to the actual content and was simultaneously hooked and blown away. Maybe it was just coincidence with my personal journey, but it felt a lot like the thoughts I had one day were found on the pages I read the next day. It is a little repetitive, because PKD is essentially iterating over possible explanations with slight changes each iteration, but if you've read any of his fiction you already know that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exegesis_of_Philip_K._Dick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exegesis_of_Philip_K._Dick

pmoriarty 5y ago
I'm a big PKD fan, having read pretty much every one of his scifi book (of which there are many), but even I wouldn't recommend The Exegesis to any but the most die-hard fan.. and even then I doubt most of them could make it through much of that book before shelving it and reading something else. It's basically a really, really, reaaaaaaly looong, barely coherent book of random ramblings. It's fine to dip in to now and then to see what PKD was thinking about on any random day, but really hard to stomach reading very much of, as unlike a fiction work it has no structure, no characters, no plot, and was not intended for anything but a private sounding-ground for the author to spitball ideas, many of them having to do with one event that PKD probably dearly wanted to be a mystical experience and that he just couldn't seem to drop and move past. To truly die-hard PKD fans this might be endlessly fascinating, but to me it's only worth peeking in for maybe a few pages every few years or so. I can't imagine reading the whole thing, even if it was the only book I had on a desert island.
- bsedlm 5y ago
  Here's a summary of sorts https://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM https://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  I don't disagree! I really do feel like the only reason I was able to get through it all is because I was in a mentally/emotionally/spiritually compatible state when I read it proper. I am quite positive that if I had tried to read it when I was sure of anything that I would reject it exactly as you describe. The only way I can see it being rewarding for someone (who isn't in the midst of the same affliction PKD suffered at the time of writing) is to treat it almost like archeology alongside his published works: read the fiction, then read his mindset about it, and abstractly note things like "ok this week he thinks it was because his spirit was memetically reincarnated"

DonHopkins 5y ago

Holy Plate of Shrimp! I was just recommending a movie to a friend by comparing PKD and Lem: Hey have you seen The Congress???!?!?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE I like it almost as much as Blade Runner, which it parallels, by being a movie based on a (Stanislaw Lem / Philip K Dick) book that it's inspired by but a lot different from, but the movie stands on its own and has something unique and interesting to say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress Both the book and the movie are excellent but different! There's a riveting dramatic scene on a Light Stage, where Harvey Keitel provokes emotional responses from Robin Wright for capture by the Light Stage. Lots of cool techno blinking lights. And it's actually technologically and anatomically correct! It accurately shows how a real Lightstage actually works. The Congress (2013) Scan Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 Light Stage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage Paul Debevec: https://ict.usc.edu/profile/paul-debevec/ https://ict.usc.edu/profile/paul-debevec/ The plot and story touch on deep issues! About how the movie industry is being turned upside-down! But much bigger than that. What happens to actors? And how do consumers "consume" characters and celebrities? They literally consume them not just like but AS drugs! It's visually delicious -- you can see some consumption here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGhw4nACfk&ab_channel=AlexGAlexG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGhw4nACfk&ab_channel=AlexG...

FpUser 5y ago
I read almost all Lem and PKD. Love them. Also watched Blade Runner and The Congress. Either is a masterpiece.
bsenftner 5y ago
I have a mental debate over "The Congress" being the best film I've seen in the last 10 years. There is so much there, I find new incredible mental gum with every re-watch that occupies my mind for days.
filoeleven 5y ago

dang 5y ago

Some past threads: Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026 - June 2018 (50 comments) Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8801011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8801011 - Dec 2014 (22 comments) Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909741 - Aug 2011 (25 comments)

jessaustin 5y ago
We thank 'pmoriarty for such dedication!

zabzonk 5y ago

Anyone that wants a "happy ending" and less paranoid PKD-like book should take a look at "The Lathe Of Heaven", which I have always thought of as Ursula Le Guin does PKD (of whom she was a huge fan).

GlennS 5y ago
Also the corresponding Philip K Dick book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. (They each wrote those books after meeting each other.)
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
Le Guin's essay "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown" https://books.google.dk/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&lpg=PA7&pg=PA101&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.dk/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&lpg=PA7&pg=PA1... is pretty appreciative of The Man In The High Castle.

jcun4128 5y ago

He was in some documentary about life being a simulation. I enjoyed his Blade Runner stuff anyway. [d]

rkk3 5y ago

Surprised no one recommended "the Man in the High Castle" it's how he won the Hugo Award! The alternate recent-history setting is unique & the character arcs were determined by random I Ching passages (It somehow works). Like most of his writing, it is significantly better than the Hollywood adaption which took the setting and completely re-imagined the characters & plot.

TchoBeer 5y ago
Such a shame that such a great book had to have such a lousy ending.
- rkk3 5y ago
  Yeah unfortunately endings were never a strong point in PKD's works but that doesn't stop them from being great!

gego 5y ago

Stanislaw Lem ftw ;)

danbmil99 5y ago

I think it's a bit like financial narket predictions. imagine a thousand traders making bets on the market, at least half of them are wrong and only a small percentage do way better than average. Writing science fiction is also an act of prediction. There must have been a thousand authors who started out around the same level of success as PKD. Over time though, his prognostications were just so on point, so uncannily correct, that now we see him as the Warren Buffett of Science Fiction, someone with predictive skills that seem impossible to rack up to pure chance.

coldtea 5y ago

Ironic how many of the criticisms of the plot of Ubiq (by SF pulp standards) precisely justify Lem's critique of the facile SF audience in TFA.