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PKD 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
by keiferski 4y ago
PKD 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.
- x86x87 4y agoStephenson is a bit more polished than PKD but your point still stands.
- pmoriarty 4y agoI had high expectations from a bunch of friends recommending Snowcrash, but when I read it I found it to be so awful I couldn't even finish it. It was just so childish and stupid. I don't get why people like it.
- Jtsummers 4y agoSnow Crash is either an accidental or deliberate parody of cyberpunk. The main character is Hiro Protagonist. When he goes into a VR world and is "fighting" with a sword he's swinging a sword around wildly in the real world too, while around other people. And then in Diamond Age Stephenson [rot13]xvyyf gur zbfg plorechax punenpgre va gur svefg be frpbaq puncgre[/rot13]. When I read Snow Crash the first time it was back when cyberpunk was still a pretty hot style, and I was also reading a lot of Gibson and others. It fit well within that context. Then later I reread it and realized what I wrote above, it was parodying elements of the genre while creating almost a quintessentially action-adventure cyberpunk story with a programmer/pizza delivery driver hero. And then it had the typical Stephenson ending, which is to say
- FPGAhacker 4y ago> And then it had the typical Stephenson ending, which is to say that made me laugh out loud
- flybrand 4y agoThank you for commenting on Stephenson’s plot resolutions. I love his writing and his stories, but the end of his books are just so unfulfilling. Especially Anathem!
- pmoriarty 4y ago
- skyechurch 4y agoDick can be really rewarding, although he's definitely not to everyone's taste, or a particularly good stylist. This is true of other great writers who deal in extreme psychological states - Dostoyevsky for example. The extreme state for PKD was a metaphysical paranoia (probably augmented by amphetamine abuse), which many people can relate to, although it's usually not as intense or as intricate as in his novels. Dick was often writing autobiographical science fiction, which is an absolutely unique vision, though not one I'd like to experience first hand.
- x86x87 4y agoYup. Sort of upset as I think with better form/style more people would have been exposed to his idea.
- xhevahir 4y agoI'm no authority on Russian literature but I've never agreed with this criticism of Dostoevsky. His writing is of a different kind, one that has its own logic. This article does a good job of explaining it I think: https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-master-of-petersburg-and-the-martyr-of-style/ https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-master-of-peter...
- alex_suzuki 4y agoDid you give the TV adaption of The Man in the High Castle a try? It’s on Prime, I found it quite enjoyable.
- leephillips 4y agoI found Ubik somewhat intriguing. I’m about 60 pages unto Valis, and so far it’s mostly bad philosophy and theology, thankfully saved by occasional flashes of humor, and the almost-interesting fracturing of the main character into at least two people. Does it get any better?
- abruzzi 4y agoI don't reccomend Valis for anyone but the most diehard Dick fans. Its an attempt to fictionalize an experience Dick had and spent the rest of his life trying to understand. It has some great moments, but it doesn't hold together terribly well as a story. I much prefer more focused stories like Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, or even Divine Invasion. Supposedly Dick's experience conceived three published novels--Valis, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Divine invasion. There is a fourth, unpublished novel--Radio Free Albemuth that came from it as well. Valis seem to be the most personal since it someone named Philip Dick (or Horselover Fat) having the exact same experience then trying to make sense of it. Divine Invasion has more of the feel of a traditional Dick novel with someone forced to live in a hovel on an alien planet. Timothy Archer is borderline non-SciFi, with only a tiny influence of SciFi, IIRC. And Radio Free Albemuth felt a bit like a cross between Scanner Darkly and Valis--i.e. the Valis story in a dystopian future surveilance state.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y agoThere's a film version of Radio Free Albemuth https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1129396/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1129396/ It's watchable, but my experience is soured by the terrible experience of contributing to the KickStarter and then not being able to get my reward for years due to living in the UK rather than the US (licensing issues).
- cturner 4y agoI have read a fair bit of pkd and found Valis an unsatisfying struggle. Radio Free Albemuth is an earlier attempt at similar ideas and is accessible.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
- ndsipa_pomu 4y agoI haven't read The Man in the High Castle for a long time, but I thought that it was a rarity amongst PKD's output in that he edited it rather than just writing and selling it. It's also notable for winning a Hugo.
- trash3 4y ago
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago>The Man in the High Castle has an interesting concept but I don't think it's particularly well-written. It should be noted that Ursula K. Le Guin disagreed with your assessment in her famous essay Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown, in which she felt that The Man in the High Castle was one of the only science fiction novels that had a human character - a Mrs Brown.
- thundergolfer 4y agoI read The Man in the High Castle about one month ago, and contra OP think it's one of the better written sci-fi books. Its problem is that it is hard to extract meaning from, and the plot kind of goes nowhere. I found it unsatisfying, but not uninteresting.
- yarg 4y agoHe also had a problem with women (to be fair, he was a professional writer - and apparently his wife wouldn't let him use the house). I don't think I've read a single well-meaning intelligent woman in a PKD story. I remember being surprised at the start of one of his books, that the female character introduced at the beginning was clearly competent - turned out she was evil.
- atombender 4y agoI would argue that Juliana Frink in The Man in the High Castle is certainly a "well-meaning intelligent woman". His strongest female character is probably Angel Archer, who narrates The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, his last novel.
- yarg 4y agoYou've got me there.
- skmurphy 4y agoOff the top of my head: Juliana Frink, a central character in "Man in the High Castle," is well-meaning and intelligent.
- ggorlen 4y agoPKD was largely a product of his time in terms of gender roles, but his short story "The Impossible Planet" may be a counterexample.
- DontchaKnowit 4y agoReally? I can think of 2 competent and well meaning women in Ubik alone.
- xhevahir 4y agoUbik is the only PKD novel I've read and man did I struggle to finish it. Once in a while a passage caught my interest and then I would realize that I was reading was basically a summary of some myth from Gnostic scripture. A real slog, on the whole.
- anigbrowl 4y agoUbik is hard, I'm rather surprised this writer recommended it as she did. I always suggest people just start out with short story collections to get used to his weirdness and the various sci-fi tropes he reuses a lot (eg 'homeopapes' that printed newspapers on demand). Pick a collection that includes Second Variety. Flow my Tears is probably his most accessible novel. Do Androids Dream is very disorienting if you were expecting a novelization of Blade Runner and that probably puts a lot of people off him.
- DontchaKnowit 4y agoReally? I did not get any gnostic vibes from Ubik at all. Now Valis on the other hand is like a schizophrenic reckoning with gnostic ideas
- diydsp 4y ago> PKD took a long time to develop. His personal life has some interesting events. But largely he was trying to feed his family by cranking out popular stuff. It's tragic how little he was recognized in his lifetime :(
- gmuslera 4y agoReading most of his short stories in order is a great experience. Yes, you hit some not so great stories, but from time to time you hit gold. Beyond Lies the Wub, Meddler and Paycheck are some of his early works that worth a read. Regarding Ubik, there is a Russian movie, Koma, that looks like it had Ubik as inspiration, and in that probably is more faithful than most Hollywood adaptations of his work.