I recently bought P. K. Dick’s “Complete Short Stories” published by Folio Society as a big box set.
The stories are in chronological order, which is surprisingly interesting because you get to trace Dick’s evolution as a writer. The first published stories are not very good by any standard, but he keeps gradually honing in on the concepts and atmospheres that eventually mark his work.
As someone who has dabbled in SF writing, it feels like a consolation to see PKD’s humble beginnings laid bare. He never gave up on evolving his craft.
As far as I remember, Dick's writing was of mixed quality and it wasn't just linearly improving with experience. There were ups and downs. He wrote really a lot, often repeated concepts, and his weaker stuff was often a result of rushing and simply needing a quick buck.
He had a rough life, and it's not hard to see that impact in his work. I read many of his novels, back to back, in the Library of America collections, and by Ubik (my favorite of the bunch) I had the sense that he was barely holding together something moving downhill very quickly.
That energy suits his work in a lot of ways, though not universally, and can be monotonous sometimes.
I grew up in and around San Rafael where he did some of his most important writing and went through possibly the darkest chapters of his life. I always thought there should be a statue of him there...
Also I just felt I should weigh in because of my username.
Thats an excellent find, and an excellent idea! Id donate money to that gofundme. Also could have text from his scanner darkly afterword, gets me literally every time. Kindred...
I used to think this but having reread some of the novels recently I tend to disagree. The command of the material and plotting in the likes of ‘... electric sheep’ and ‘ubik’ is streets ahead of his early work and the coherence of the various ideas at play improves massively — the early novels feel like either distended short stories or fixups of multiple different plots. he’s not a fabulous prose stylists but neither is he as bad as his reputation suggests, he’s not a hack and there are some luminous passages in there if you’re looking out for them.
I think he also suffers from being a funny writer, funny writers from PG Wodhouse to Terry Pratchett are often underrated and for me that’s where Dick’s later work really falls down.
Post his breakdown his novels take a much darker edge (i found Valis in particular unbearably bleak), the humour is largely gone and more fundamentally the layered realities now have a single source of truth which in my opinion weakens them considerably compared to the open ended questioning of the mid period.
not a linear improvement perhaps but there’s growth and change in his output over time
Dick certainly refined his skill throughout his career. But at the same time, we can't deny that he wrote a lot of garbage in between his masterpieces.
For example, in the same 4-year time period as masterpieces like Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we got forgettable (and in some cases quite terrible) books like The Ganymede Takeover, The Game-Players of Titan, The Penultimate Truth, The Simulacra, and of course the universally maligned The Crack in Space.
The sad truth is that Dick was fueling his writing habit with drugs (particularly amphetamines) during this time period. He wrote six novels in one 12-month period during 1963-1964. It's a marvel that even the clunkers are fairly readable things, though they're often throwbacks to his earlier pre-1960s work. Another sad truth is that Dick's output was also drive by the need for money (by 1964 he had three ex-wives).
The odd one out from this period is Galactic Pot-Healer, which Dick claimed to have no memory of having written (too many amphetamines), and which he practically disowned. But it's one of his best, a colourful Vonnegutian mix of tragedy and comedy.
yeah, he’s a product of a publishing system that at the time was voraciously hungry for content and the fact that he was good at churning it out. for what it’s worth i think that this kind of set up where quantity is prioritised over quality has lead to some of the most vital cultural flourishings of post ww2 years: electronic dance music in the late 80s early 90s, comic books in the 60 & 70s, video games in the 80s
While I partially agree, I'm not sure your assessment is helpful. There's a treasure trove hidden beyond the words, I'm not sure you're assessing the depth of his writings appropriately.
I have this set, had to buy a 2nd because my first set became too dog-eared from re-reading. To say I read a lot is an understatement. PKD is the first author I "finished", as in having read everything published, and then some more. To me, he is one of the few, in the company of Huxley, Orwell, Burroughs and Joyce, to see the future not being some grand shiny existence, but a chaos of sophisticated manipulations the human race and God in all it's manifestations is lost and consumed by consumerism and commercialized branded religion. I found a Church of PKD in San Francisco once, a tiny space with whacked out meth addicts reading passages of PKD novels to one another. That was an interesting find, and gone when I tried to show some friends.
I would have to say of all the writings, that compilation is the best. You get a taste of everything he had to offer. All his other books are based off of these stories IIRC.
> Based on your project I inferred that adding more matches seems to add more resolution and yeah, outputs are looking even nicer now. I updated the repo!
This is the right approach, but there's a combinatory explosion when computing the matches: you want to select a subset of shapes that in practice are more often right, to save on the matching computation time.
Also, when you are operating with time constraints (ex: video to text), keeping the FPS rate is often more important that the accuracy, as the human eye does a lot of interpolation.
Having different subsets of different sizes and a command-line toggle between them seems like the simpler approach to support multiple uses.
> I also used shapes which are less sharp rather than "perfect match".
Selecting some "less sharp" glyphs is a very daring and unique idea: in retrospect, it should help the bad cases by adding some "blur".
I really like you idea!
Would you be interested in a collaboration to inspect fonts and select glyphs based on 1) their availability (ascii>ansi>unicode) 2) their usefulness (by defining some subsets)
I saw your message but was hesitant to respond with disappointment.
I'm sorry my interest in this is not as large as yours!
I think the end result could be cool, but overall not very practical. I wrote my program to include "images" in my text-only articles (http://len.falken.ink/philosophy/is-privacy-in-all-our-inter...), but really I can't imagine a real useful application. We (the world) is much better off to adopt a real "images with text" format which works nicely with terminals (for now this appears to be sixel and the proposal by kiTTY).
My email is inbox at lee <this username> dot ca :)
"The first published stories are not very good by any standard"
I loved PKD's Beyond Lies the Wub, which was his first published story (published in 1952). I also really liked the story he wrote the year before (but which didn't get published until the year after) called Roog.
Dick is one of my go-to SF authors when I'm using the public library's book lending app (Hoopla) and want to type in a novelist name and read some completely random piece of their work.
He was so incredibly prolific that there is always more to explore. It's … not always great, huh.
One quiet theme I've seen in sampling his work at different stages is the evolution of San Francisco the city -- Dick has a bunch of stories which paint a particular picture of the mid 20th century Bay Area that of course feels very different from what the place is like today. It reminds me of the place we see in "The Crying of Lot 49".
A few years back while visiting the city I tried to get something fixed at a repair shop in a small office suite in a very old building (I think probably https://www.yelp.com/biz/setraks-watch-repair-san-francisco ) and it looked and felt exactly like the older time SF of Dick's stories.
I just looked up what the folio society is and that book set. Wow! It looks absolutely gorgeous. I really wish I found out about it, guessing they never do reprints?
No, but this is like the third edition of the collected stories anyway. You should be able to find copies of the Citadel paperback at reasonable prices. I have the Underwood-Miller edition, but that is now fairly scarce.
For anybody interested in philosophy, religion, science fiction, or mental struggles, I highly recommend the 900+ page slog that is The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Mild warning: I read the introduction close to a decade ago and got bored before I even started the book itself. I picked it up again a few years ago and skipped to the actual content and was simultaneously hooked and blown away. Maybe it was just coincidence with my personal journey, but it felt a lot like the thoughts I had one day were found on the pages I read the next day. It is a little repetitive, because PKD is essentially iterating over possible explanations with slight changes each iteration, but if you've read any of his fiction you already know that!
I'm a big PKD fan, having read pretty much every one of his scifi book (of which there are many), but even I wouldn't recommend The Exegesis to any but the most die-hard fan.. and even then I doubt most of them could make it through much of that book before shelving it and reading something else.
It's basically a really, really, reaaaaaaly looong, barely coherent book of random ramblings. It's fine to dip in to now and then to see what PKD was thinking about on any random day, but really hard to stomach reading very much of, as unlike a fiction work it has no structure, no characters, no plot, and was not intended for anything but a private sounding-ground for the author to spitball ideas, many of them having to do with one event that PKD probably dearly wanted to be a mystical experience and that he just couldn't seem to drop and move past.
To truly die-hard PKD fans this might be endlessly fascinating, but to me it's only worth peeking in for maybe a few pages every few years or so. I can't imagine reading the whole thing, even if it was the only book I had on a desert island.
I really do feel like the only reason I was able to get through it all is because I was in a mentally/emotionally/spiritually compatible state when I read it proper. I am quite positive that if I had tried to read it when I was sure of anything that I would reject it exactly as you describe.
The only way I can see it being rewarding for someone (who isn't in the midst of the same affliction PKD suffered at the time of writing) is to treat it almost like archeology alongside his published works: read the fiction, then read his mindset about it, and abstractly note things like "ok this week he thinks it was because his spirit was memetically reincarnated"
I read Ubik, it was a wild ride. I was not sure what to make of it. The story, especially the end, is logically inconsistent even if you take its wild premises into account (though what the premises are is itself a bit of a guess); but that's part of the charm of course. The whole thing is so bizarre overall that it was also impossible for me to relate to any characters, and it was more like reading a dream diary than a story.
Anyway, one thing that I often think about is something not directly intended by the author. In the book, the perceived world around the protagonist regresses more and more into the past, taking the form of the 50s, 40s, 30s... one example that stuck with me (and I think the moment where this regression became apparent) was when a modern elevator suddenly took the appearance of a 50s style lift. With visible cage, cables, maybe even an attendant controlling the lift using a lever...
This old elevator struck me as a beautiful way to describe the distant past when I read it about 10 years ago. But the book was written in 1969. So for the author, that was maybe 15 years ago. Even the 30s were about 35 years ago from when the book was written, from today that would merely be the 80s! And yet the world was being described as so massively transforming (including for example a scene of an old pharmacy with intricate wood and brass decors[1]), and technology regressing at a rapid rate... it made me feel that from some point of view, the world was changing much faster back then.
if you liked Ubik, give VALIS and The Three Stigmata a try. Ubik is a good “introduction” into the PKD universe. But it’s almost like there are two PKDs: one trying his hand at SF and another one that has transcended space and time. You want the 2nd flavor :)
Having read virtually every scifi book that PKD wrote, and some straight fiction by him as well, I'd have to say that for my taste he was at his best when he was writing straight scifi, and the more scifi there is in what he wrote the better it's likely to be.
While I'd agree that Ubik is a great introduction to the PKD universe, I would also classify it as his best book. I also love many of his other books, but to me none of them are as strong or consistently good as Ubik. Some of them have great parts, though, so I definitely wouldn't stop at Ubik, but I've yet to read a better book by him, or even one that was just as good.
I want to add, while my first paragraph may have made it sound that I didn't particularly care about the book, I am very glad that I read it. It was a weird experience, but one of the most interesting ones reading a book. It made me continue to think about it, obviously.
I was disappointed with Ubik. (Some spoilers ahead.)
I was excited to read it after seeing a humorous excerpt of the protagonist arguing with his front door, trying to convince it to open.
As you said, the book is bizarre. The central premise is more fantasy than sci-fi (meaning, an adventure involving magic and monsters instead of starting from a premise and exploring it somewhat realistically using logic and science). Most of the book is written (deliberately) like a dream diary, with bits of reality shifting and changing.
I found the characters bizarre, and as you said, impossible to relate to. I'd describe them even worse than that: they're badly written characters that lack personality and consistency. Characters behave in seemingly random ways that leave you scratching your head. For example, Pat (a character) decides to strip naked and move in with the messy and penniless protagonist just minutes after meeting him for the first time for a job interview. This happens over a couple pages with little explanation.
Many people enjoyed the book, so you can take my opinion with a grain of salt.
> Pat (a character) decides to strip naked and move in with the messy and penniless protagonist just minutes after meeting him for the first time for a job interview. This happens over a couple pages with little explanation.
You find out a bit later in the book that Pat has the ability to change the past, and that she can remember the unaltered past but nobody else can. It's also strongly implied that there is some kind of deep, unstated connection between the protagonist and Wendy. The unspoken implication here is that the protagonist and Wendy were married in the "original reality" (or at least an earlier one); Pat wanted the protagonist so she changed history to take them out of each others' lives.
Ubik is a real trip, and a lot of it makes sense only in retrospect.
The book shows Joe having a crush on Wendy and Wendy likes Joe. We can theorize they were married and Pat undid their marriage. That just makes Pat's behaviour even weirder.
Either way, Pat (described as "obviously no more than seventeen") strips naked and announces she's moving in with the very messy and penniless Joe just minutes after meeting him for a job interview. That much happens in the present. All this theory adds is that Joe was also married and Pat just decided to undo his marriage. It's one extra obstacle. It doesn't explain why she's interested in Joe. There's no character development. And Pat gets blown up a few chapters later.
I'm not saying it's impossible for someone to do that. It's just one example of a character acting weird for seemingly no reason. But the characters remain weird throughout the book.
I talked about in another comment how Pat's power seems way too powerful to use in a logical plot.
I actually share a lot of your experience, even going so far that I would say that I was also disappointed in the same sense. But I don’t regret reading it, quite the opposite, because it certainly left a lasting memory.
The book is bizarre, illogical, confusing, and I was often trying to get a grasp of what I am supposed to make of what’s happening, if that makes sense. With that, I don’t think I seriously contemplated the scene that you describe as much as you did, since if I recall correctly, by the time it happened the book already had lost its grip on rationality. (Or was it when I still thought the story could make perfect sense, and only retroactively realized it was already going off the rails much earlier?)
Wasn’t there a “human bomb” that was essentially a weird caricature of a balloonish clown person floating into the air or something?
But I agree, it would be hard for me to say that I “liked” the book, I think it was one of the books where I was happy when it was over. Even though I’d have missed a rather complex experience that I still think about, had I not read it.
The scene with Pat is early in the book, when she is first introduced, before they're in a dream world (half-life). Of course, Pat's power lets her change reality (in the real world). Still, I think creating (imo) poorly written characters and falling back on the explanation, "we don't know what's real; everything might have been manipulated" is a crutch. Throughout the novel, I couldn't see any of the characters as real people.
I certainly won't fault you for being glad to have read the book. It's definitely an unusual book.
Oh, but that's what I meant with "even if you take [the book's] wild premises into account". It would be less weird if the world only started to turn bizarre once we think the characters are in half-life, but retrospectively the book was bizarre from the beginning.
Like take the exchange with the front door that you mentioned, where the protagonist basically had a human argument with it to be let out (and with his fridge). It indeed seems humorous at first, but once you realize that the book isn't a Douglas Adams'esque comedy, it seems downright bonkers!
The Douglas Adams comparison isn't half wrong, though I like to think of Ubik (as with several of PKD's other novels) as being spiritually closer to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Like Vonnegut, PKD's stories are often an incongruous combination of tragedy and deadpan comedy, though his style is of course quite different.
Ubik is meant to be a colourful and out there. Take the descriptions of characters' outfits, for example. One is wearing "a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts", and that's a female character. Ubik was beloved by French critics who compared him to Alfred Jarry, the surrealist. The argument with the door is meant to be ridiculous, but also predicts hostile technology. Today, I just had to argue with a chat bot in order to cancel my NY Times subscription (they also allow you to do it over the phone; but you can't just cancel), which is the kind of "banal dystopia" that PKD loved to conjure up.
Adams was also influenced by Vonnegut. In The Sirens of Titan, the entire plot — involving time travel and an attack on Earth by Mars — is orchestrated by an extraterrestial being simply because he needs a spare part for his spaceship. You find that kind of cosmic irony in Adams a lot.
"Like take the exchange with the front door that you mentioned, where the protagonist basically had a human argument with it to be let out (and with his fridge). It indeed seems humorous at first, but once you realize that the book isn't a Douglas Adams'esque comedy, it seems downright bonkers!"
To enjoy soft scifi and fantasy, you have to be able to be able to suspend disbelief.
Your complaint about the protagonist arguing with his door reminds me of people who read Tolkien and then complain that elves and balrogs don't exist. No, they don't, and you have to be able to get past that to enjoy the books.
Also, it's uncanny how many of Dick's "bonkers" ideas have wound up being close to where we are now or soon will be.
Even with something as outrageous as arguing with a door, we're pretty close to arguing with our phones. Voice recognition and voice synthesis has already allowed us to talk to our phones, and while phones aren't arguing back yet (afaik), it's not inconceivable that they will if corporate dominance proceeds apace. With the development of the Internet of Things, more and more appliances are likely to have that capability. I'm not sure about doors, but fridges are already part of the IOT. So Dick's world, even in this respect, may not be that far off.
Much harder for me to swallow are things like Ubik itself (whatever it is) and the various entities that seem to rule that world. But their improbability does not detract from my enjoyment of the book in the least, because I am able to suspend disbelief.
Also, as I said in another reply in this thread, I think PKD's books are much more comprehensible and relatable if you've had some bad trips on psychedelics. It's quite common for people in such states to experience inanimate objects as menacing and/or alive, for the world to seem inhabited by powerful spirits, to experience one's death, afterlife, and rebirth, etc..
So to someone experienced with psychedelics, reading PKD might not necessarily elicit a reaction of just "that's weird," but "I know what that's like. I've been there."
The confusion and unreality are the point. It's not supposed to be a linear, coherent narrative.
Whether by drug-induced accident or design, PKD was modelling how the 50s corporate world feels. People are subject to powerful forces far beyond their control, and they can be rewarded or punished for reasons that seem to have no relationship to their actions.
It's a kind of Capitalist Dreamtime, a 50s suburban corporate reworking of Kafka. With more drugs and mysticism and miraculous but also threatening technology.
I'm going to piggyback off of this to rant. I felt like the "psyonics and corporate subterfuge" gets axed midway for the "keeping people in cryogenic stasis" shtick. Like Pat is set up to be all that with incredible reality shaping abilities and then that just gets shunted.
Yeah, Pat's powers were incredible. Just as a casual demonstration, she altered the past so that she had been married to the protagonist for a year, and made it so Runciter's Associates had lost a major contract. Then, at Runciter's request, she again casually alters the past so that the company now has the contract (as they did in the original timeline), while still keeping her marriage to the protagonist.
She was too powerful for a good plot, in my opinion. The novel doesn't elaborate on the exact extents and limits of her power, but it leaves me wondering why she's working in corporate espionage and not, I don't know, ruling the world or something. Why does she have an interest in lowly Joe? Why is she killed off (or half-killed) so quickly and easily?
I agree with you. I'd rather the plot have seen one plotline through instead of abruptly shifting tracks and rendering the earlier plotline irrelevant.
Right, Pat's powers are a very good point. She is so incredibly powerful, that it's hard for me to imagine how you can spin any serious long story around this, much less a story where she's not even really one of the main characters. It's one of the things that make the book bizarre before the event that we are supposed to think that makes it bizarre (and then the end plays some games with whether that half-life plot twist is really what's happening anyway).
On the spot, I can only come up with a rather stupid analogy, but if stories are carefully mixed and balanced cocktails, then a character that can arbitrarily turn back time for themselves and change things, is like taking that cocktail and pouring in a full bottle of everclear.
I had to get medicine for my mom and the pharmacy was replaced by a vending machine. Scan a QR code and the robot does the rest. I felt like I was in Japan! The world is still changing.
I did a poor job describing it, but it was not just the technological side that struck me.
I'll try again (and might still fail): If I look at the 70s, e.g. watch a movie or a TV show that takes place in the 70s, or is even from the 70s, it feels like... the modern world for me. Yeah, fashion is whacky, technology was primitive, but overall it's actually "the modern world with whacky fashion and primitive technology".
When I read Ubik and the various decades before the 60s were described, it felt like different ages. The point about the pharmacy is not just the wood and brass and the medicine in jars, it's that the wood and the brass was made into intricate decor, including ornaments and statues, and that the pharmacist looked extraordinarily official.
I like it almost as much as Blade Runner, which it parallels, by being a movie based on a (Stanislaw Lem / Philip K Dick) book that it's inspired by but a lot different from, but the movie stands on its own and has something unique and interesting to say.
Both the book and the movie are excellent but different!
There's a riveting dramatic scene on a Light Stage, where Harvey Keitel provokes emotional responses from Robin Wright for capture by the Light Stage. Lots of cool techno blinking lights. And it's actually technologically and anatomically correct! It accurately shows how a real Lightstage actually works.
I stumbled across The Congress when it was on Netflix and took a chance on it out of curiosity. It was such a wild ride, and stuck with me enough to watch it again a month or two later. I highly recommend the film, and especially to watch it without reading anything about it first.
I have a mental debate over "The Congress" being the best film I've seen in the last 10 years. There is so much there, I find new incredible mental gum with every re-watch that occupies my mind for days.
Sorry I had to bail out. Seven paragraphs of mentally exhausting prose before Philip Dick's name is mentioned. It was like a William F. Buckley monologue.
I've read a few of Dick's stories when I was in high school. I'm not much for scifi anymore but they were decent, as I recall.
Back in the 1970s I owned all of Dick's novels, and all short stories available in collections (which is quite a lot of stuff!) I'm not a book collector - I bought them because at the time he was my favourite writer.
Just recently, I've started re-reading them on my Kindle. I've just finished "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", and while I enjoyed it, I have to say it wasn't as good as I remember. Next up is "A Scanner Darkly", so we shall see how things go.
I strongly recommend reading Ubik. To me it is his strongest and most consistently good book.
I used to love The Three Stigmata too, but when I tried to read it again recently I couldn't get in to it either. I do think you have to be in the right mood to savor a Dick book, so maybe I was in the wrong mood that time.
The other first-tier PKD book for me is Martian Time-Slip.
Second-tier PKD books for me are VALIS and Galactic Pot Healer.
Third-tier are Maze of Death, Eye in the Sky, and Divine Invasion (the 2nd in the VALIS trilogy.. didn't like the 3rd in the series, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer at all).
Many of his other books, like Lies, Inc, also have great parts in them, but are kind of inconsistent.
Some of his short stories are excellent. My favorites:
- Beyond Lies the Wub
- Roog
- The Father Thing
- Faith of Our Fathers
I didn't really like A Scanner Darkly, nor Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep and would consider them of minor import had not movies been made of them. Other books in this category are Now Wait for Last Year (made in to Total Recall) and Time Out of Joint (made in to The Truman Show.. though the book is much darker). The movie Minority Report was based on another minor short story of his, as The Terminator might have been partially based on his story Second Variety.
Virtually all of the movies made from his work only bear only a very slight resemblance to the originals, which tends to be a lot darker, a lot less action-filled, and much more thought-provoking than the Hollywood adaptations.
For me the most frightening PKD story was Faith of Our Fathers, but I haven't read Upon the Dull Earth. I wonder how they compare.
Looks like Upon the Dull Earth can be read here: [1] and Faith of Our Fathers here: [2]
Well, I just read Upon the Dull Earth, and found it to be an interesting story. Like many PKD books I've read, it starts out pretty weak and a little boring, but gets a lot better and weirder as it goes along (except for the very beginning of this story, which is also weird and interesting).
I found the dialogue and writing to be pretty awkward and stilted, and the first half to be kind of predictable. The main interesting idea is the big twist towards the end, and of course the very ending of the story, where that idea is taken to its limit.
Overall, I liked Faith of Our Fathers much more. I think it's a deeper, more compellingly told story.
> I didn't really like A Scanner Darkly, nor Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep and would consider them of minor import had not movies been made of them.
Yeah, a different opinion: these are his best novels, along with Ubik and The Man in the High Castle.
The Man in the High Castle had probably the worst ending of any book I've ever read, it's really incredible how the book takes such a sharp nosedive in the last 2-3 dozen pages
I liked Dr Bloodmoney, but I don't remember how much.. so, no I wouldn't rank it in the first tier. But it was a book I enjoyed, so it wouldn't be in the bottom of my list of PKD books I read. Somewhere in the middle.
Back then I used to read a lot of SF and didn't think much of P.K. Dick's writing. His stories had a tinge of paranoid fantasy about them, and felt implausible, rushed and disjointed, compared with more standard SF fare. I think this wasn't an uncommon perception.
The movie guys, in spite of all the derision they get for bumbling and fumbling, were on the mark spotting a powerful source of mana, and made hay from PKD's chaff.
Lem, being a genius in his own right and honed sharp by life in Soviet-watched Eastern Europe, was able to disregard the "shoddiness of the props" and get to the potency of the spell.
At the bottom of that article: “[Dick wrote that he was] approached in 1972 by a representative of a neo-Nazi organisation who pressured Dick into placing coded messages involving ‘politics, illegal weapons, etc’ into his future novels. He linked this organisation to a series of robberies which happened at his home in California”. Wow.
A Scanner Darkly is my favorite book of his (that I've read so far). I think because it's a bit longer than most so there's more time to develop characters. It's got such a sad and interesting tone.
I loved the movie too. I was really pleased I read the book first because although the movie is a really good rendition, I feel it would be hard to comprehend certain parts of the movie without knowing the book.
The acknowledgements page after the ending of the book is brutally heart breaking: he mentions all the friends he lost to psychosis and death, due to the drugs they all took together.
I also find that the book remains a fantastic read a second or third time - which I only find worthwhile doing with a few books.
Yeah, I thing that movie is the best rendition of a PKD novel I have ever seen, partly because it is so weird, and partly because it captures some of the black humour of the novel.
Anyone that wants a "happy ending" and less paranoid PKD-like book should take a look at "The Lathe Of Heaven", which I have always thought of as Ursula Le Guin does PKD (of whom she was a huge fan).
Surprised no one recommended "the Man in the High Castle" it's how he won the Hugo Award! The alternate recent-history setting is unique & the character arcs were determined by random I Ching passages (It somehow works). Like most of his writing, it is significantly better than the Hollywood adaption which took the setting and completely re-imagined the characters & plot.
I think it's a bit like financial narket predictions. imagine a thousand traders making bets on the market, at least half of them are wrong and only a small percentage do way better than average.
Writing science fiction is also an act of prediction. There must have been a thousand authors who started out around the same level of success as PKD. Over time though, his prognostications were just so on point, so uncannily correct, that now we see him as the Warren Buffett of Science Fiction, someone with predictive skills that seem impossible to rack up to pure chance.
The stories are in chronological order, which is surprisingly interesting because you get to trace Dick’s evolution as a writer. The first published stories are not very good by any standard, but he keeps gradually honing in on the concepts and atmospheres that eventually mark his work.
As someone who has dabbled in SF writing, it feels like a consolation to see PKD’s humble beginnings laid bare. He never gave up on evolving his craft.