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Did you give the TV adaption of The Man in the High Castle a try? It’s on Prime, I found it quite enjoyable.
No, it seemed a bit generic to me, but maybe I'll take a second look.
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.
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…
Ubik 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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I 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 dow…
Perhaps 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".
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Check 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.
1. There was no workaround published when he commented. 2. Why not just use the working workaround link in the first place?
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…
Not all stories there are great, but I think he did better in the short stories arena. Most of the movies based on his work were based on short stories, after all.
There'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…
So 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?