Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)

A good starting point is Stanislaw Lem, “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.” [1] For more recent analysis, read Jonathan Lethem: “My initial responsiveness to Dick’s work was to delight in his mordant surrealist onslaught against the drab prison of consensual reality… It took me a while to grasp how Dick’s novels, those of the early sixties especially, function as a superb lens for critiquing the collective psychological binds of the postwar embrace of consumer capitalism.” [2] You can also read PKD himself; he gave a few lectures that give some insight into his thinking and intentional process. [3]

I’d also suggest that when talking about PKD, it’s especially important to distinguish between “cliché” and “trope,” since these two concepts are often improperly equated in popular TV-Trope-ified discourse. A cliché, e.g. “True love conquers all,” tends to lull the reader; it terminates further thought. But a trope is merely a familiar anchor point, an allusion to a literary tradition, and (potentially) an invitation to a dialogue between the current text and some previous work. (“The hero prepares by putting on his armor,” for example, is a trope that dates back to the Iliad.)

Dick often begins with a character or situation anchored in a familiar setting (possibly for more mercenary than aesthetic reasons—he was after all scraping together a living in the context of pulp paperback novels) but step by step strips away the anchors, leaving the reader untethered to settled meaning or “consensual reality.” The undercover narcotics cop turns out to be a schismatic, unaware that he’s surveilling himself. The noir-like investigator gets arrested by another investigator who seems to be his double, pulled into another precinct identical to his own… etc.

If the lack-of-respectability of his materials bothers you (as it seemed to bother Gopnik), it may be helpful to see PKD in the tradition of Kafka, and as a precursor to the post-modernists like Robert Coover, who gleefully and intentionally play games within familiar texts to comic and profound effect. But PKD really isn’t so far away from the most interesting of his much-maligned SF pulp colleagues. See A.E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shops of Isher,” where the author plays games with doubles, shifting narrators, and familiar pulp characters to intentionally strange and dislocating effect—although in his case, the kitsch never quite makes the transmuting leap into art.

[1] https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

[2] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/11/14/multiple-worl...

[3] https://californiarevealed.org/do/7622580c-be04-46d6-831c-fc...

If you have any links or book recommendations to share on that history, I for one would love to know them.

I find the history of the interactions of SF authors strangely compelling -- e.g. the book "Hell's Cartographers" is a personal favourite, and it's just a set of autobiographical essays from NY 40s-70s SF authors talking about their time in the scene.

maybe because English is my third language, but i always loathed the scanner darkly title. so empty and try-hard.

  > Dick’s evidence for this denouncement was that ‘[Lem] writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not’.

Man reads some translations, suspects it might have been written by multiple people? But that's what translation is...

It's often misunderstood that translation is done by surgically deconstructing original texts and selecting accurate meanings of words to fit into grammatical structures of the new language text is to be written. That's simply not true.

Rather. You just read the original text and try and say close-enough thing in the target language. Translators are like half ghostwriters. "Accurate" translations are sometimes not even understood by audiences. And then after all the changes, translations will still containe distinct signatures for each original languages.

For entertainment contents like a novel, there will also be marketing elements involved. Some choices may have to be made. Not necessary to interfere with the author's intent - like choosing first person pronouns and ending for each sentences.

Lem's novels being written in a language spoken in a communist country means most competent translators woild be technically a "communist", whether it's just unfortunate categorical labeling or they actually had been.

So, I think, the notion that translated works of Stanisław Lem only occasionally having distinctive foreign language components, and also being not always consistent in styles with one another as if it had been written by a Communist committee with a figurehead, would be just a description of independently rediscovered process of book translation cast in unnecessarily dark light.

I wouldn't find it so weird if PKD was that kind of uninformed crazy person stuck with such preconceptions, though. Sounds like just how it works.

Compared to Sue Grafton he was a genius at titles. Her Kinsey Millhone murder mystery series starts with "A" is for Alibi, followed by "B" Is for Burglar, and continuing to the final installment, "Y" is for Yesterday