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

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

#141

Post by int_19h »

paganel wrote: post #97
p0w3n3d wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. Those were cancelled subjects, and cancel would be the least punishment there available. That's why everything that was written against the censorship bureau, would be covered by an allegory blanket, and writers were often asked to remove parts of they could be deciphered by the censor officials. Of course later on the i…

> What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes…

I can confirm that it was the same for the USSR. There was a "blessed" corpus of Western authors, and this actually did include a lot of sci-fi as well.

Asimov is one prominent case because the translators had to figure out how to deal with his obviously Jewish name at the time when that became a red flag. This is why it's traditionally transcribed phonetically as Айзек rather than the more straightforward Исаак.

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

#142

Post by int_19h »

ajuc wrote: post #103
p0w3n3d wrote: post #28

As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"

Lem wrote in his journal: "Na początku 48 roku wyjechałem na miesiąc do Pragi, gdzie zostałem zatrudniony w rządowej klinice im. Klimenta Woroszyłowa (wyobraźcie sobie u nas szpital imieniem Hermanna Goeringa). I ledwo wytrzymałem ten miesiąc. Codziennie jak nie masówka na stołówce, to agitka w szpitalnych garażach. W moim rodzimym krakowskim szpitalu na Montelupich byłoby to nie do pomyślenia. My byliśmy jednak najw…

The "happiest barrack" in the Soviet Bloc was traditionally considered to be Hungary, though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goulash_Communism

Although that was after the Hungarian Revolution.

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

#143

Post by mcv »

ahazred8ta wrote: post #67
0_____0 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do retain their power because of the notoriety of the stories they head. It's a matter of taste and thus hard to argue, but I do think his titles were kind of clunky. Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?

Irony: the original bladerunner novel was about a courier carrying surgical instruments so that the doctor would not be arrested for black market medical treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bladerunner FWIW I was a Galactic Pot-Healer fan.

I did not know that. And running scalpels makes a lot more sense for that title. Because as cool as the title sounds, it doesn't make any sense for the movie. Nobody is running blades there.

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

#144

Post by mcv »

verisimi wrote: post #114
lordfrito wrote: post #112

I have immense respect for PKDs writings, he was far far ahead of his time, sad that he was such a mess mentally. His themes about the malleability of reality are just so prescient about the problems of the digital era. Neighbors no longer share the same narrative about what is actually happening in the world. I often wonder what PKD would say if he were alive today. Heck, I wonder what he'd be doing today in the dig…

Even if it hadn't already been banned, it's highly unlikely you'd be watching it. Mr beast tho, not that's some content, huh?

Youtube is surprisingly good at recommending me really obscure channels that nobody else seems to be watching (often I see why, but there are some gems). And it's not recommending Mr Beast, so I must be doing something right I guess. I also get a lot of channels lately about philosophical analysis of science fiction stories, so that's pretty cool.

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

#145

Post by fragmede »

mcv wrote: post #144
verisimi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it hadn't already been banned, it's highly unlikely you'd be watching it. Mr beast tho, not that's some content, huh?

Youtube is surprisingly good at recommending me really obscure channels that nobody else seems to be watching (often I see why, but there are some gems). And it's not recommending Mr Beast, so I must be doing something right I guess. I also get a lot of channels lately about philosophical analysis of science fiction stories, so that's pretty cool.

That sounds awesome. Care to share some of those channels so I can seed my algorithm too?

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

#146

Post by buildsjets »

TeaBrain wrote: post #85
evbogue wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) might not be PKD's best title, but it's arguably his best book.

Arguably according to whom?

According to you, as you have chosen to argue about it.

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

#147

Post by atombender »

bookofjoe wrote: post #30
philistine wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

Minor point, but in most cases the title was made up by the editor, not Dick.

For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had several terrible tentative titles originally, including "The Electric Toad", "Do Androids Dream?", "The Electric Sheep", and, most improbably, "The Killers Are Among Us! Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man".

Dick's editor at Doubleday came up with the current title. Dick didn't like it and thought it was too long and unwieldy.

Some more:

* The Divine Invasion: "VALIS Regained"

* The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: "Bishop Timothy Archer

* Ubik: "Death of an Anti-Watcher"

* Martian Time-Slip: "Goodmember Arnie Kott of Mars" (also serialized as "All We Marsmen" before getting its current title)

* We Can Build You: "The First in Your Family"

* A Maze of Death: "The Hour of the TENCH"

* Counterclock World: "The Dead Grow Young"

My main source here is Lawrence Sutin's excellent "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick".

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

#148

Post by atombender »

shervinafshar wrote: post #73
csours wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those even his titles? Authors generally don't make up the title themselves. Sometimes they can help pick one from a list created by a title editor.

Most of the above are his titles. Some which were published in serialized form before being published in a single volume ( Martian Time-Slip and We Can Build You ) had different titles. Letters, manuscripts, and publication notes are helpful to shed some light on this matter; e.g. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was regularly referred to as the "Archer novel" or "Bishop Timothy Archer".

Most of them aren't. I gave some examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676737

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

#149

Post by abcd_f »

TeaBrain wrote: post #136
y1n0 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent. Look up the definition of arguably.

Sure, if you are reading the word "arguably" completely literally, but that's not the colloquially understood implication of the term when used to describe a work. Obviously the author of the parent comment is implying they they would possibly consider it the best PKD novel, but the colloquial meaning implied when someone uses the word arguably, generally isn't just to describe one's own opinion, but a significant po…

> Also, I asked because I wanted to get the above user's opinion on the matter

And you could've done just that without being passive-aggressively dismissive.

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

#150

Post by philistine »

atombender wrote: post #147
bookofjoe wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

Minor point, but in most cases the title was made up by the editor, not Dick. For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had several terrible tentative titles originally, including "The Electric Toad", "Do Androids Dream?", "The Electric Sheep", and, most improbably, "The Killers Are Among Us! Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man". Dick's editor at Doubleday came up with the current title. Dick didn't like it…

All those titles are unwieldy.
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