Favorite Philip K. Dick novel?

[7/4]

[jazzbo]

Too bad that McGrath seems to not reallize that the "mainstream" novels exist. Those may be his best works. I highly recommend "Voices from the Street" to PKD nuts.

The Crumb comic always makes me so. . .sad. (I posted a link to this on the second page of this thread).

Edited May 20, 2007 by jazzbo

[7/4]

The Crumb comic always makes me so. . .sad.

Why sad?

[porcy62]

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Much better than the Harrison Ford movie. Eldritch, Flow My Tears, Martian Time Slip, and Ubik are all up there though.

Just stumbled in this thread.

After reading the whole Dick's works in my last fifteen years, I couldn't remember a perfect single novel. All of them are whorthing of interest: great ideas, sophisticated psychological issues inside them, but...

BTW The Ridley Scott movie is great. And I found it more interesting that the paranoid novel. Maybe the problem is that Dick was overwhelmed by his personal psych to achieve a detached 'perfect novel'. The very same problem I have.

[porcy62]

The books aren’t just trippy, though. The best of them are visionary or surreal in a way that American literature, so rooted in reality and observation, seldom is. Critics have often compared Mr. Dick to Borges, Kafka, Calvino.

That's the problem, I don't think Dick reached Borges, Calvino and Kafka.

BTW Borges, Calvino and Kafka wrote together less pages then Dick. I mean I don't blame Dick for it, on the other hand Dostojevskji wrote thousands pages pushed by debts, but...a perfect page is a hard, long and underpayed job.

Borges hated long novels, he couldn't wrote long books. Kafka wrote three unfinished novels, because he wasn't satisfied about them, and a lot of perfect short stories.

One thing I have to say in favour of Dick: he deserves a higher rank in american literature history, for sure a couple of steps above Hemingway. Fuck the Nobel Prize.

[jazzbo]

Well, I feel differently bout Dick. . . I like the novel better than the movie, I like the entire work a lot, and I think I like the non sf work best of all . . . my most recent assessment. I like him better than Kafka, who I really do like, and what I've read of Borges and Calvino. But then I've been reading Dick since 1967, and he warped that 12 year old mind and kept warping it. He's very relevant to my experience. I started reading him in Africa. . . I think that being American and my re-entry into the American culture as a teenager made an impact that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

I find the comic sad because. . . that "revelation" brought Dick so much turmoil and pain and isolation and unsettlement. I think he finally found some calm near the end, but that was so close to the end, and it probably didn't or wouldn't last.

Edited May 7, 2007 by jazzbo

[Stefan Wood]

Apparently the Library of America is coming out with a Phillip Dick volume, containing 4 of his novels.

[7/4]

Apparently the Library of America is coming out with a Phillip Dick volume, containing 4 of his novels.

Earlier in this thread, I posted the NY Times article about it.

[jazzbo]

Apparently the Library of America is coming out with a Phillip Dick volume, containing 4 of his novels.

Earlier in this thread, I posted the NY Times article about it.

Ah, you just were programed to believe you did. -_-

[RDK]

Agree with much of what Clem says above, but at the same time I've never understood much of the idolatry of PKD - and it's not just among sci-fi fans and the trying-to-be-hip lit critics but among movie studio execs as well, many of whom have likely never read anything he's done. Yeah, the ideas are there - and some brilliant ideas among them - but PKD was often a shitty writer of prose - in the that's-what-a-penny-a-word-will-get-you fashion. And I've found that even many of his good ideas were done better - if perhaps less trippily - by other sci-fi fantasists, though one might perhaps have to dig a bit deeper. I'd take Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, Silverberg's Dying Inside, or various stories by Gene Wolfe over just about anything by PKD. And even some of the stuffy "old schoolers" like Henry Cutner and Fritz Lieber could be just as trippy when they really tried.

[B. Clugston]

These are classics:

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The Man in the High Castle

Martin Time-Slip

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

followed closely by:

Ubik

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Also enjoyed Confessions of a Crap Artist, Clans of the Alphane Moon, A Maze of Death, etc. but they aren’t quite at the level with the ones mentioned above.

Don’t overlook his short stories, many of which are excellent, such as “Paycheck.”

[jazzbo]

damn 7/4... nice posting. the Crumb is pretty much the summa of all anyone except PKD's next biographer needs to know about all that & Phil's "gnosis" blathering is waaaaay too high % of bullshit for any even apparently sane person to bother. The streets, the churches, the mental wards are FULL of "visionaries" w/no less credence.

re: Phil's mainstream novels, NO WAY. i haven't read the expensive one J. posts before have tried almost all the rest & their only unique value is in context of his sci-fi work. almost all the same themes get worked over better (less tediously) there w/a lot of other advantages to boot... a year-by-year timelime of American Literature, both poetry & prose (see PKD's interesting SF "renaissance" connections) decimates Phil, both for "genre" lit and the uncategorizable kind. Malcome Lowry Under The Volcano is 1947, Gaddis' Recognitions comes out in '55... what the fuck are you gonna do between those two, + previous fifty years of Am/Brit/Irish lit + goddamn Herman Melville The Confidence Man (birth of modernism & further out philosophically than PKD ever went except in delusion).

all that said, PKD's best stuff is terrific but it's because of-- not in spite of-- the various limitations he had to work within.

verdict: if Phil's mainstream shit was more easily available, it's reputation would plummet (again.) ('tho Crap Artist has glimmers of dark hope for something better.)

edc fucked Mary and The Giant*

* there are only about a jillion women who write about... women, better, inc. Thomas Hardy (bitch) & Barbara Pym. context, fanboys, context.

Well figures I'd disagree but I often do, and strongly as here.

[jazzbo]

Agree with much of what Clem says above, but at the same time I've never understood much of the idolatry of PKD - and it's not just among sci-fi fans and the trying-to-be-hip lit critics but among movie studio execs as well, many of whom have likely never read anything he's done. Yeah, the ideas are there - and some brilliant ideas among them - but PKD was often a shitty writer of prose - in the that's-what-a-penny-a-word-will-get-you fashion. And I've found that even many of his good ideas were done better - if perhaps less trippily - by other sci-fi fantasists, though one might perhaps have to dig a bit deeper. I'd take Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, Silverberg's Dying Inside, or various stories by Gene Wolfe over just about anything by PKD. And even some of the stuffy "old schoolers" like Henry Cutner and Fritz Lieber could be just as trippy when they really tried.

I guess I'm just different because I've read the Spinrad and the Silverberg you cite, and I've read tons of Kutner and Leiber and I just don't think they do it better. I agree that PKD didn't always write with the greatest prose, but I find his characters and his insight into the American Nightmare to be so much better than those of those. (And I find his writing in the nonSF to be better prosewise by a wide margin).

Personal opinions and viewpoints I guess.

Edited May 7, 2007 by jazzbo

[RDK]

(And I find his writing in the nonSF to be better prosewise by a wide margin).

I definitely agree with you there.

[RDK]

Yeah, Clem, I'm in the trenches of the biz, but sad to say and cliche as it sounds, I don't think I've read a seriously "good" book since college. I'm superficial all the way...

[jazzbo]

Clem, I just don't agree, sorry. It's all just your opinion, and my opinion.

[7/4]

Apparently the Library of America is coming out with a Phillip Dick volume, containing 4 of his novels.

Earlier in this thread, I posted the NY Times article about it.

Ah, you just were programed to believe you did. -_-

Give this a thought, eh? Wow.

[J Larsen]

Never mind - don't want to be a party pooper...

Edited May 20, 2007 by J Larsen

[BruceH]

By the way, it's "Henry Kuttner"---two T's and a K.

Just FYI.

Edited May 20, 2007 by BruceH

[7/4]

Never mind - don't want to be a party pooper...

ah...the patch to the program takes over.

[Jazzmoose]

A speech by Dick...

[ghost of miles]

The New Yorker on Dick's Library of America volume. (LOA is also doing Kerouac next month--can Burroughs be far behind? Not to mention Iceberg Slim...)

I have to admit I have a fetish for LOAs & have a bunch here at the house--but also have a stubborn undergrad romanticist streak that wants to keep Kerouac/Dick/Burroughs etc. in beatup paperback editions. Obviously they're long, long past their sell-by date as "subversive" literature, or what have you... I think I would've voted Pynchon into this blackbound hall of fame first, but he's still alive & perhaps not ready for canonical entombment yet.

[ghost of miles]

p/s: David Goodis sorta sucks in bulk even if you share his fatso fetish .

Probably the best one-sentence summary of Goodis that I've come across yet. I went on a big Goodis kick about 7-8 years back, but good lord, it gets a bit tedious... Storytelling invention & plausibility was not a strength of his, to put it mildly, and the haunted/poetic quality of his vision & prose was ultimately too slim to make up for his weaknesses--at least that was my reaction after reading more than half a dozen of his books. I pretty much quit seeking them out. Anybody else here ever read John Evans/Howard Browne's HALO Paul Pine novels? Set in late-1940s Chicago... also a big fan of Paul Cain's FAST ONE, which almost out-Hammetts Hammett.

[7/4]

The New Yorker on Dick's Library of America volume.

Nice article.

[7/4]

February 7, 2008, 9:54 am

Philip K. Dick’s YA Novel

By Dave Itzkoff, NY Times

In my Book Review column last weekend, I looked at some issues that arise when genre authors best known for their adult fiction try their hand at writing for younger readers. Of course, science-fiction, fantasy and horror writers have been publishing YA fiction for decades: everyone from Robert A. Heinlein to Ursula K. Le Guin has done it; even Clive Barker has his own YA franchise; and there are those who argue that Orson Scott Card shouldn't be writing it.

To my mind, perhaps the most unusual example of a well-known genre author crossing over into YA turf is a long out-of-print relic called "Nick and the Glimmung," written by none other than Philip K. Dick. Published in 1988, six years after his death, and never released in the United States, "Nick and the Glimmung" has the gentle pacing and simplified vocabulary of a young-adult novel, but its sensibility and subject matter are unmistakably Dickian.

From the opening paragraphs of "Nick and the Glimmung" (a sequel of sorts to Dick's 1969 novel "Galactic Pot Healer"), you can tell we're in a vaguely sinister future dystopia:

Nick knew exactly why his family intended to leave Earth and go to another planet, a colony world, and settle there. It had to do with him and his cat, Horace. Owning animals of any kind had, since the year 1992, become illegal. Horace, in fact, was illegal, whether anyone owned him or not.

For two months now, Nick had owned Horace, but he had managed to keep Horace inside the apartment, out of sight. One morning, however, Horace climbed through an open window; he scampered and played out in the back yard which all the apartment-owners in the building shared. Someone, a neighbor perhaps, noticed Horace and called the anti-pet man.

"I told you what would happen if Horace ever got out," Nick's dad said…

A few pages later, Dick touches on another of his favorite themes: the idea of an authority figure - in this case, a schoolteacher - who propagates their power through the magic of television:

"Good morning, Class," Miss Juth said - or rather her image on the big television screen at the front of the classroom said. Miss Juth, like all teachers, had too many classes to teach. She could not appear in person in any of them. Instead, she spoke to all her students, in all her classes, by means of a TV screen. In Nick's class there were sixty-five pupils, and Mis Juth (as she had told them) taught nine other classes, too. So in all, Miss Juth had about six hundred pupils. Nevertheless, she seemed to recognize each pupil. At least, Nick had that impression. When she spoke to him from the big TV screen she seemed to look directly at him, to see him as well as hear him. He usually felt as if Miss Juth were actually in the classroom.

And here's an introductory lesson in ontology, made palatable for the kiddies, when the protagonist discovers a book that seems to have the ability to predict the future:

Yes, there it was. Right in the book. A short but accurate account of Mr. Frankis' death. Had this passage been here yesterday? Nick wondered. Suppose he had looked this up, on the car trip to the house? Suppose Mr. Frankis had looked for his own name in the index? Would he have found this - and known what was going to happen to him? …

What is there in the book about me? Nick wondered. The text which we read before, on the way here, after Glimmung accidentally gave the book to me? Or by now has it changed?