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The Essential Philip K. Dick
- Jtsummers 4y agoArchive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20221029011427/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/books/best-philip-k-dick-novels.html https://web.archive.org/web/20221029011427/https://www.nytim...
- x86x87 4y agoThe empire never ended
- Trasmatta 4y agoPerhaps one day we'll all escape the Black Iron Prison...
- stevenwoo 4y agoThe writer talks about Ubik but does not mention the pervasiveness of corporate power/role in the daily life described (at least from my interpretation), this is well portrayed in Total Recall, also based on a Philip K. Dick story which varies enough from the movie to be read as separate work. Short story not mentioned but is worth reading if one has not, Second Variety.
- prpl 4y agoThree Stigmata… is also very corporate. Like if Comcast and Space-X merged to form a venture to mars
- x86x87 4y agoThe 3 Stigmata is my favourite PKD book. Apart from some of his obscure stuff I've read everything he wrote
- pmoriarty 4y ago"Short story not mentioned but is worth reading if one has not, Second Variety." The movie The Terminator has some similarities to Second Variety, and I wouldn't be surprised if the movie was somewhat influenced by the story.
- anigbrowl 4y agoPKD has a much stronger claim on that than Harlan Ellison ever did. A writer of great talent who inexplicably chose to drown it in a barrel of pomposity.
- fsckboy 4y agoaccording to this, Cameron said he ripped off Ellison https://www.cbr.com/terminator-harlan-ellison-credit/ https://www.cbr.com/terminator-harlan-ellison-credit/ the article describes it as the opening time travel part, though it's not clear that's what Cameron said.
- anigbrowl 4y agoYeah, I've never really bought that. HE made such a thing out of it I think they put it on there to placate him. It seemed to me that his claims of plagiarism rested on very narrow conceptual elements that were too abstract to count as a real rip-off. See below for another example of this. I really admired him as a writer when I first encountered on him but the more I got to know him the less I enjoyed it :-/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time In contrast, PKD stories like Second Variety feel astonishingly like the post-apocalyptic environment ruled by Skynet and the plan of hunting down the remaining humans with terminators. I would be very surprised if Cameron or someone on the creative team weren't inspired by it.
- stevenwoo 4y agoWhen I was reading the story I confidently thought - I know how this goes, for sure Terminator was based on Second Variety. I was very surprised that Screamers was the movie licensed from the story because the Screamers part of the story is just the introduction/setup for the main plot, and the movie simply used the setup technology for the entire plot which kind of misses a point of the story in a way.
- robocat 4y agoSecond Variety: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32032/32032-h/32032-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32032/32032-h/32032-h.htm
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agoI read all of them, at least the ones published in French... "A Scanner Darkly" is by far the most polished, and also the most twisted.
- Jtsummers 4y agoIt was also one of his last novels and most personal, both factors probably influencing its quality. The Linklater adaptation is particularly good and faithful, nearly every scene is close to verbatim from the book. And most of its omissions and changes are reasonable ones for an adaptation into a movie.
- dllthomas 4y agoI keep saying it's the only Phillip K. Dick adaptation that feels like Phillip K. Dick.
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agoIt's on Apple TV on location. I will watch it some day. Thank for the recommandation.
- alex_suzuki 4y agoI also enjoyed the movie adaption of it, especially the weird psychedelic visuals, but I’m glad I read the book first.
- wiredfool 4y agoThe afterward of a Scanner Darkly is a gut punch. My recollection is that it's a list of friends who had lost their lives to drugs of one form or another.
- keiferski 4y agoPKD is one of my favorite sci-fi writers and I recommend Ubik if you're a new reader, although like the article mentions, you definitely need to be in a certain mindset to "get it." The Man in the High Castle has an interesting concept but I don't think it's particularly well-written. One thing that I think goes unnoticed about PKD is how some of his earlier short stories are undeniably, unquestionably bad. Fair Game, for instance. He wrote it in 1953, a decade+ before his work started to get really good: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was written in 1964, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and Ubik in 1969. I personally find this a bit reassuring. It's nice to know that even someone as influential as PKD took a long time to develop.
- x86x87 4y agoPKD is my favorite writer of all times. I believe that even for his greatest works the writing could have been more polished, way better. The thing is PKD does not get you with the form of the writing but with the ideas that he captures. Truly visionary.
- moris_borris 4y agoThat last bit could be said of any of my favorite sci fi thinkers. I love Asimov and Frank Herbert but not because I think they were great writers.
- Barrin92 4y agoit's funny because for me the prose of a lot of science fiction writers was always what turned me away from the genre. I could barely make it through Dune and gave the Foundation up. A lot of science fiction authors which I came to love a lot like Gibson or Le Guin I think I mostly got into because of their sense of style. Stephenson for me is probably the worst offender for this. I've met so many people both online and offline, particularly other programmers who always told me to read his stuff but he's straight up pasting pages of Wikipedia into his books, I felt like I was being trolled.
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- olivermarks 4y agoI'm a big PKD fan - I also recommend reading the 1909 short story 'the machine stops' by em Forster which was incredibly prescient and I suspect informed some of PKD's thinking. People have often pointed out this piece 'predicted the internet age' while ignoring the dystopian collapse at the end of Forsters pice, which is alarmingly similar to the current collapse of some aspects of western civilization IMO... https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/... I have PKD's 'the Defenders' mapped to 'the machine stops' in my mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defenders_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defenders_(short_story)
- wiredfool 4y agoI find his short stories to be quite good -- if not a bit repetitive if read in bulk. His paranoia and the bleakness of post nuclear war are overwhelming after a while. Quite a lot of his stories have been made into movies, for better or worse. They seem to be enough of a chunk to hang a story on, without getting too much in the way of telling a good story. Minority Report -- much better in the story. We Can Remember it for You Wholesale -- both worked.
- olivermarks 4y agoAmazing the standard of pulp fiction in that era - we need a big dose of dystopian 'nuclear war will be an apocalypse that will end our lives' right now given how amazingly unaware people appear to be to the grave danger of nuclear war threat we are facing right now
- btbuildem 4y agoPaywalled article
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Jtsummers 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20221029011427/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/books/best-philip-k-dick-novels.html https://web.archive.org/web/20221029011427/https://www.nytim... - I also posted this here in the discussion over an hour ago. Problem solved.
- utopcell 4y agoThank you posting the archive link, but the problem is that if the article is not accessible, this becomes an ad posting for the site.
- Jtsummers 4y agoCheck the HN FAQ. Paywalled sites are fine for submissions as long as there's a workaround (and there is here), and whining about it (as the person I responded to did) is considered off-topic. It takes about 10 seconds to pull up an archive link and maybe 5-10 seconds more to submit it, only slightly longer than it takes to write and submit a useless comment about how it is paywalled.
- qull 4y ago1. There was no workaround published when he commented. 2. Why not just use the working workaround link in the first place?
- Jtsummers 4y ago> There was no workaround published when he commented. There was, I'd posted it an hour earlier than their comment. > Why not just use the working workaround link in the first place? Who knows, who cares. It takes < 20 seconds to get an archive.org copy and post it yourself. Only a few seconds more than it takes to whine, and a lot more productive.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoThere's a bit in Ubik that stays in my mind. Joe Chip gets into an argument with his apartment door that refuses to open for him because he owes it money. I kinda got that the door was an autonomous money-making agent that held him hostage - a conversation reminiscent of that between Doolittle and the Bomb in Dark Star. It made me see the ridiculous side and ultimate absurdity of micropayments leading to world where a dollar value is put on everything so that every silly little thing becomes a coin operated nuisance whose actual function is replaced by squeezing a few more micro-credits out of you.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoYears ago I read about cloud computing as getting a free vacation but being charged for each sand particle you touch, small on its own but it gets too ridiculous after some time
- Wistar 4y agoThat expresses things quite evocatively.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoThere was an episode of Rocko's Modern Life where they go to a ski resort where everything is $5. What a deal! It turns out it applies to literally everything.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoHe tries to bypass the thing by unscrewing the fixture and it says, "I'll sue you."
- anothermoron 4y agoI love that line: “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
- black_13 4y ago
- Schiphol 4y agoHas any of you read/skimmed the Exegesis? Is it any good?
- Trasmatta 4y agoI don't know if it's the type of thing that can be classified as "good" or "bad". It's a stream of consciousness from a brilliant man suffering from immense personal pain and some form of undiagnosed mental illness, that I'm sure he never intended anyone to read. It's bizarre and fascinating, especially if you've read VALIS. It shows how his internal world was becoming molded with his own books, his life becoming one of his own stories, struggling with the flimsy nature of reality. It's so long that it feels kind of futile to read it end to end, but I jump to a random page sometimes and read for awhile. There's a lot of repetition, but is fascinating.
- pmoriarty 4y agoNo. It's awful... unless you like disconnected ramblings.
- jimmygrapes 4y agoIt took me several years and as many attempts to get into it and commit, but once I committed and got past the (awful) forward, I went front to back over the course of a month or two. As sibling comment says, it's very repetitive, but it's also iterative; PKD is trying to make sense of a lot of things at once, over and over again with slight tweaks. Each time he gets closer and closer to essentially rewriting Christian Gnosticism (imo) from the ground up. It honestly changed my life. There were times when I would have dreams and thoughts along similar lines and then end up reading them in the pages that night. It is worth a read if you're in a dark place, because it might give you the same sense of "I'm not alone" that it did to me. Certainly ain't for everyone, but the reward is great.
- armitron 4y agoIf you've had mystical experiences and trying to make sense of them, PKD's Exegesis is required reading. If you haven't had any experiences of this sort, then it'll probably come across as disconnected ramblings indicative of serious mental illness. After spending decades reading everything I could on the subject of mystical experiences, from Crowley (the English libertine) to Timothy Leary and Mckenna, the only other writers I'd put on the same "absolutely essential reading" list as PKD, worthy of intense study, are Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner. That a pulp scifi author made this list is, to me, supremely fascinating.
- Trasmatta 4y agoVALIS is the most bizarre but fascinating book I've ever read. I recommend going into it only after reading a number of his other books, and then reading a synopsis of his own life. It's fiction but also psuedo-autobiographical, and a deeply personal story to PKD.
- ericmcer 4y agoThat book made me aware of how your brains internal dialogue can be influenced by the media you are consuming. I read it in a day or so and really felt it altered my “internal voice”, which was a bit unnerving.
- alanbernstein 4y agoI have a goal to read enough of PKD's work and life story that I can at least appreciate VALIS, if not enjoy it (So far: The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik). An unreligious friend read it and, evidently, became born-again christian immediately afterward. Ever since I have been painfully curious about what in this book could possibly have precipitated such a thing.
- Trasmatta 4y agoI'd recommend The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly. Those on top of the 3 you've read should prepare you for VALIS. > An unreligious friend read it and, evidently, became born-again christian immediately afterward Super interesting. I could see the book having that effect on somebody. Not my experience, but it doesn't surprise me that it's happened.
- alanbernstein 4y agoI appreciate the recommendations!
- theptip 4y agoFor anyone that liked “Blade Runner”, it’s fascinating to go back and read PKD’s “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep”, which Blade Runner was based on. You can see the threads of similarity but it’s a way more surreal paranoid bad-acid-trip vibe. Can’t remember another adaptation with such a striking difference from the original.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago> Can’t remember another adaptation with such a striking difference from the original. How about 'Total Recall' as an adaption of 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale'?
- dllthomas 4y ago'Minority Report', in addition to throwing in a whole bunch of filler, flips the whole point of the thing into something deeply Hollywood.
- Jtsummers 4y agoPart of the problem with that adaptation is that We can Remember It for You Wholesale would be best adapted into an almost comedic Outer Limits episode, as written. Total Recall at least manages to keep a lot of PKD's general themes intact despite seriously diverging from the story, and brings in ideas from his other stories to an extent.
- cmsefton 4y agoRidley Scott famously claimed that he “found the novel too difficult to read”. Dick was infuriated with the first draft of the film, and absolutely hated it, writing very sarcastic comments about it. However, after the script was reworked, and Dick read it, he said "you read the screenplay and then you go to the novel, and it’s like they’re two halves to one meta-artwork, one meta-artifact." This makes for some great reading delving into what Dick thought of the film. https://soothfairy.com/2022/09/16/what-did-philip-k-dick-think-of-blade-runner/ https://soothfairy.com/2022/09/16/what-did-philip-k-dick-thi... I especially like Special Effects Chief David Dryer's recollection of what Dick said after watching the first reels: > Dick looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘How is this possible? How can this be? Those are not the exact images, but the texture and tone of the images I saw in my head when I was writing the original book! The environment is exactly as how I’d imagined it! How’d you guys do that? How did you know what I was feeling and thinking?’ > “Let me tell you, that was one of the most successful moments of my career,” Dryer concludes. “Dick went away dazed.” I also particularly liked Dick's comments about what the film meant to him: > I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runer. Thank you … It will prove invincible.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoSo for everyone here who has declared that Phil Dick wasn't a very polished writer - who is your example of a polished writer that you are comparing him to his detriment with?
- atombender 4y agoI wouldn't call it unpolished at all. I would characterise PKD's prose as workmanlike. It's very effective, just not what anyone would ever call lyrical or stylish. Stephen King once described his own writing as "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries", and there's some of that in PKD, at least on the surface level. I do think PKD improved as a writer in the 1970s, once he kicked his drug habit and slowed down his hyperactive output; from this era, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, and the VALIS trilogy all has some beautiful writing and show Dick as a deeper and more mature writer. As for the rest of the sci-fi genre, there's a lot of talent among his contemporaries. I would especially suggest: * John Crowley. Widely recognized as actual an Author of real Literature, though only his earliest works could be called science fiction. Start with The Deep and Engine Summer. * Harlan Ellison. Some of his stories ("I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", "Jeffty Is Five", etc.) are simply masterfully written. * Samuel Delaney. He's an acquired taste and certainly gets a bit self-indulgent, but novels like Babel 17 are often beautifully written. * Ursula LeGuin, e.g. The Left Hand of Darkness. * Gene Wolfe. Increasingly also recognized as a genius, I also particularly like his short stories. Start with The Fifth Head of Cerberus; graduate with the monumental The Book of the New Sun, which has no equal in or out of the genre. * J. G. Ballard. A consummate stylist, he eventually drifted away from SF, but his earlic works are fantastic. My favourite is The Crystal World, as well as his numerious short stories, including one of my favourite stories ever [1]). Of later writers, William Gibson, China Mieville and Iain M. Banks come to mind. [1] "Report on an Unidentified Space Station": http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/roauss.htm http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/roauss.htm
- e12e 4y agoPerhaps Bruce Sterling and Frank Herbert (in particular "Dune"). Absolutely Samuel Delaney IMO. For something similar to pkd, but perhaps more refined(?) Alfred Beater, "The Stars my Destination".
- atombender 4y agoFor those who have read Dick's "standards", I recommend one of his novels that never appears in these lists, and probably never will: Galactic Pot-Healer (1968). PKD later said he couldn't call writing it, this being the period where he consumed copious amounts of amphetamines, and produced a ridiculous number of novels and short stories. I still think it's one of his most enjoyable books. The plot is a ramshackle Vonnegutian comic fantasy featuring a totalitarian dystopia, an alien demigod, a man who "heals" broken ceramic pottery, and an early version of the old Internet pasttime where you use machine translation tools to translate English into other languages and then back again in order to produce humorously mangled sentences. It's a weird, fun, sad book. Also worth mentioning is A Maze of Death (1970), which is a creepy alien planet exploration story that becomes something else and unexpected, and probably the closest Dick came to writing a Harlan Ellison story.
- 8bitsrule 4y agoWhat Phil did before writing (capsule bio) & decent works list. [http://www.filmreference.com/film/42/Philip-Dick.html http://www.filmreference.com/film/42/Philip-Dick.html] 1958 Exploring Tomorrow (Campbell's Mutual show) episode (#11 Made in Avack) [https://archive.org/details/ExploringTomorrow/ https://archive.org/details/ExploringTomorrow/]
- sbf501 4y agoI've read 45 of all 49 PKD novels on the Wikipedia page. It was a goal I set about 7 years ago. I tried to read the books in order, but had trouble finding some. His style goes from Twilight Zone / Amazing Stories, do thought-provoking alternate reality, to alternate people, to alternate "reality" which is different than what I said earlier. There is "alternate reality" where we are in a different timeline, or aliens, or different technology, and then there is reality that is just bent and distorted psychologically (VALIS, Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time Slip, ...). There's a big blob of boring books in the middle, in my opinion, like "We Can Build You", "The Crack in Space", and "Now Wait for Last Year". But what I've found most fascinating is watching his progression (descent) into darker and darker work. It was also a weird experience reading so much from one author, because after 5 books you start to see significant similarity and I wonder if that is why the middle part got so boring to me.
- js2 4y agoAny favorites you'd like to call out and why those were your favorite? Did you also read his short story collections?
- sbf501 4y agoSee my reply to a similar peer Q.
- Eisenstein 4y agoWhich are your favorites? Do you have one that you would consider to be the magnum opus? If I had to pick one of them I would pick Ubik.
- sbf501 4y agoThe "standards" are my favorites. There were a few outliers that I didn't expect. I'm predisposed to like anything "time travel": "Martian Time Slip" and it's analysis of autism (sci-fi autism) was a subtle body horror; so Dr. Futurity (reminds me of interactive fiction time-travel puzzles), The World Jones Made (more precog trying to change the future and having "prescience" aka Dune), Time Out of Joint (kinda like The Truman Show or "Time Enough for Love" by Albert Finney), and Counter Clock World about time moving backwards and the religious cults it spawns (just plain nutty, not perfect, but a fun concept to toy with). He has a recurring theme in some books where the idea of the first Martian settlers from Earth being abandoned-working class drug-addicts is pops up several times, and I think that is one hell of a way to look at it compared to all the other stories about Mars. The idea that they are all failed farmers and sit around taking government-issued mind-altering drugs and playing board games where they become the characters to deal with suburban boredom is just bonkers (Three Stigmata of Palmer E., Martian Time Slip [poverty on mars] and a few others). "Ubik" is really top-tier though. There's a reason that the standards are called "standards". :)
- fluxinflex 4y agoIs SciFi a genre that reflects societal health? I have the feeling that SciFi is a phenomenon that appears and disappears in waves depending on how well a society is function. There was SciFi coming out of the communist block (Lem, Strugatsky brothers, Zamyatin) which was a comment on the system, there was SciFi from England in early 1900s (Wells) - comment on industrial revolution - and later Orwell - post war, societal controls - and Adams - the world should be more worried about external forces. In the US the genre appears to be a constant starting with Poe[1] followed by Huxley, Dick, Clarke, Asimov, Gibson, Bradbury, Heinlein commenting on all sorts of societal issues. And recently China with The Three Body Problem by Liu. France had Jules Verne but that was more for profit than comment on societal issues. Coming back to the question, is the popularity of SciFi an indicator for potential fears within society? I know that my favourite bookstore recently had a run on PKD, the bookstore happens to be in mainland Europe. And what is the relationship between SciFi and philosophy? Philosophy being one of those sciences whose purpose is to question societal forms, constructs and norms. [1]=https://psyche.co/ideas/are-successful-authors-creative-geniuses-or-literary-labourers https://psyche.co/ideas/are-successful-authors-creative-geni...
- pr337h4m 4y agoJust read my first PKD work today (Paycheck), loved it. https://archive.org/details/paycheck0000dick https://archive.org/details/paycheck0000dick
- cocacola1 4y agoFor anyone interested, Library of America has a wonderful 3-volume collection of some of PKD's books: https://www.loa.org/books/311-the-philip-k-dick-collection-3-volume-boxed-set https://www.loa.org/books/311-the-philip-k-dick-collection-3...
- danbmil99 4y agoMy pop turned me on to PKD years before he was all that jazz. He gave me a copy of "Man In The High Castle". That was also my introduction to the I-Ching.