I read his SF corpus as a pre-teen and teen, too - but really didn’t “get” his non SF stuff until a lot later in life. Confessions, Mary and the giant, Milton

I read his SF corpus as a pre-teen and teen, too - but really didn’t “get” his non SF stuff until a lot later in life. Confessions, Mary and the giant, Milton Lumkey, all the rest - I don’t know if anyone captured the texture of the American mind quite so perfectly. He may have been a philosopher and a prophet, but the thing that he seemed to really understand was people. Their frailty, their avarice, their comfortable delusions, their prejudices, that love and hate are one and the same. As with his SF work, he poked at this consensus driven thing we call “reality”, and brought it crashing down. He profoundly shaped my thinking, too - you see a cat, I see a thing that is labelled “cat”. Shit, Jean Baudrillard developed an entire philosophy after reading his stuff.