Solaris is such a masterpiece that resisted any accusation, fortunately.
Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
81–90 of 215 posts
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
>... terrible at titles... I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future: Time Out of Joint The Man in the High Castle Martian Time-Slip The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Clans of the Alphane Moon The Simulacra Now Wait for Last Year Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982) Ubik We Can Build You Flow My Tears, The…
Thanks for the reminder that I still have more PKD to read.
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#83Wow this reads like the plot of a bad romcom! I can totally imagine Dick sitting angry in his study getting all worked up over how badly Lem hated US SF and how mean that is, not realizing Lem actually loved his work. All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.
Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
Wonderful writer? let's face it: he was a mediocre writer, but had such powerful ideas/visions/themes (you name them) that you, as a reader, are hooked to his stuff.
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#84> This plot [about an intelligent beam of light] wouldn’t be out of place in one of Dick’s mind-bending novels. This experience was, in fact, the basis of a novel he wrote called _Valis_.
Not sure he meant is as a novel. Cfr his lecture at Metz.
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
>... terrible at titles... I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future: Time Out of Joint The Man in the High Castle Martian Time-Slip The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Clans of the Alphane Moon The Simulacra Now Wait for Last Year Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982) Ubik We Can Build You Flow My Tears, The…
Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) might not be PKD's best title, but it's arguably his best book.
Arguably according to whom?
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious why you like these so much as titles. Tastes differ, but in my opinion, "A Scanner Darkly" is the only standout winner here. Without knowing anything of what the story was about, would "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" convey anything important to the reader? Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep! There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's…
A title doesn’t have to do anything other than draw the reader’s attention to the work. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is, IMO a great title — and it does relate to the humanity of the androids. It’s a far superior title compared to “Blade Runner,” which is actually better than the book. Anyway, I’d say that the fact we’re still talking about his work nearly 50 years after his death suggests he might not have…
I agree that the book title is great, but I've never understood the fawning over the movie. The art design is great, but the movie script turned a contemplative story into a generic thriller with a unique aesthetic.
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
Wonderful writer? let's face it: he was a mediocre writer, but had such powerful ideas/visions/themes (you name them) that you, as a reader, are hooked to his stuff.
This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it’s often not entirely appreciated that he wrote to produce a deliberately comic and ironic effect. (Read Lem on PKD’s “transmutation of kitsch into art.”) This is what nearly all of the overly-serious film adaptations of his work miss: he was quite funny, and intended to be.
You can argue that some of his books were written too quickly, or deploy his usual tricks less successfully, but that doesn’t qualify as mediocrity. For that, look to most “hard” sci-fi, Reddit fan-fiction, and LLM-generated slop.
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#88Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today. What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible. On a l…
What blew me away from the Cyberiad was how funny it was.
I know the title is meant to be a play on The Iliad but the stories remind me more of Don Quixote.
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
>... terrible at titles... I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future: Time Out of Joint The Man in the High Castle Martian Time-Slip The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Clans of the Alphane Moon The Simulacra Now Wait for Last Year Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982) Ubik We Can Build You Flow My Tears, The…
I'm curious why you like these so much as titles. Tastes differ, but in my opinion, "A Scanner Darkly" is the only standout winner here. Without knowing anything of what the story was about, would "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" convey anything important to the reader? Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep! There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's…
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Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> can't remember the details of that scene Deckard gets arrested by a different police agency - they think they're the only ones, just like Deckard's agency. He gets accused of being an android with implanted memories. They administer Voigt-Kampf tests to each other and while everyone ends up as human, the scene serves to make who's human and who isn't even more of a question. What really ticks me off about all movie…
I'd love them to get around to attempting Ubik - it's a shame that Gondry abandoned his attempt. In terms of ambiguity, surely Blade Runner is a prime example of ambiguity and the dichotomies between real/fake, light/dark, salvation/damnation, hunter/hunter etc. There's also the very significant portrayal of Roy Batty as both the villain and a Christ-like figure (e.g. nail in his hand, confronting his maker and both…
Yeah, I wonder if whoever wrote the script confused Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? with Divine Invasion and added Christian motives from there :)