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The 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.
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PKD 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.
Dick 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. Dic…
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I consider Ubik to be Dick's best work... so if you found it only "somewhat intriguing", I doubt you'll be any more pleased with anything else he wrote. That said, if you are interested in reading more by him, of his books I can recommend: - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Martian Time-Slip - Galactic Pot Healer - Eye in the Sky - the middle part of Lies, Inc Some of his short stories: - Beyond Lies the Wub -…
It's funny, I'm a big PKD fan and I didn't care for Ubik . I enjoyed the first half or so of VALIS immensely but my favorite of his is A Scanner Darkly . I think, in 2022, people will understand Scanner better than they used to or maybe it is on the verge of being outdated?
I'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…
My preference is SF though, but it's because it's the ideas that are the draw for me; if the ideas start repeating themselves, or even themes, it becomes a lot harder to read a lot faster.
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…
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 :(
I 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.
The 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.
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That 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.
it'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…
Stanislaw Lem, on the other hand. The substance is usually fantastic, but the reality of the characters tends to get obscured by long, intricate sentences that lack the precise objective descriptions of Frank's writing and lose a sense of where everything is in relation to one another. Lem tends to be extremely light on description in many instances. Perhaps that can be partly attributed to translation difficulties, as I've never read the Polish source.
On the other hand I'd disagree about Neal Stephenson, I'm reading Snow Crash for the first time (halfway through it right now) and I loved the opening chapters. There's a real kineticism with Hiro and YT speeding through traffic that I find very evocative and leaves me pining for my days of doing irresponsible shit in traffic. He really has a way of writing action that feels exciting and focused.
Neal has some hilarious descriptions that really paint a picture. There's a great description of the "rat thing" robotic sentry disarming a lawn full of aggressors with blinding speed and he describes one of the aggressors as having "had his trousers torn from the waistband all the way down to the ankle, and a strip of fabric is trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something that was in too much of a hurry to let go of the actual pocket before it left."
That said, if do have one gripe so far it's the five uninterrupted chapters with Hiro expositing hard with the Librarian daemon about Sumerian mythology. The concepts being discussed are really interesting but it becomes tiring after a while, even when broken up by a few interstitial chapters following YT.
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…
>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.
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.
I'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…
Which 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.
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". :)
I'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…
Any favorites you'd like to call out and why those were your favorite? Did you also read his short story collections?