February 21, 2006

• Am I the only person here who finds PKD's prose unreadably ugly? It all reeks of amphetamines and paranoia to me.
• Stanislaw Lem has a great essay about Dick's style in a book I unfortunately lost in Austria. He runs a line that Dick (at his best) builds new structures out of piling up endless cliche, i.e. he makes a golden palace out of bricks of shit; which is an interesting idea even if completely untrue (Lem also argues in the same volume that Borges is our most unoriginal author!) I would put forward the Man in the High Castle as an example of Dick's somewhat turgid style working entirely with his story, especially when he completely changes tone in one particular chapter for brilliant effect. Furthermore, to say that prose reeks of amphetamines and paranoia is surely entirely justifiable for a book like Ubik.
• They are going to send out special police squads to find it. With Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln!
• Don't believe I ever finished reading one of Dick's novels. His short stories were far more approachable. I can't imagine anyone reading Dick for his style.
• I guess you just prefer short Dick, bees.
• YEAH YEAH YOU WERE ALL THINKING IT
• I enjoy PKD (although admittedly, I too have to side with the "shorter Dick is better Dick" crowd), but I think his mad-prophet thing tends to eclipse more approachable authors like Norman Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, JG Ballard, etc.
• sounding a lot like a normal, albeit slightly senile, author who likes to quote his own books when he gets confused. Sooo.... like MOST authors. He probably missed his connection in Philly like the rest of us.
• Yeah Fes, I think the "crazy prophet of a mad mad mad mad mad world" PR-spin is entirely ignorable bullshit; furthermore most of his short stories are (IMHO) basically rubbish (and I think he agreed). A few of his novels stand out (again IMHO): I like my Dick big and with a point at the end. That being said, if you think there's one or two short stories that would re-educmacate me - please get your Dick out on the table.
• Yeah, A Scanner Darkly, is my favorite big dick. His small Dicks are a little to pulpy for my taste.
• MonkeyFilter: As your attorney I urge you to start drinking heavily. *hic*
• Valis and Ubik still give me the heebie jeebies. The worst was the first time my ex and I finished reading Valis, and that day we happened to chance on a Felix cartoon on TV, where Felix was made King by a bunch of weird dream creatures. The entire cartoon already started out surreal, but when we saw the words "King Felix" on an arch, my ex reached out and turned off the TV. We were freaked out seriously. I finished Valis at least three more times since.
• Ditto on The Man in the High Castle. It's very readable, doesn't have the tweaking paranoia of the others. His most readable (and, IMO, brilliant) novel. And I have to say that this comment from the previous MoFi thread about the Dickbot: I wrote an I Ching throwing Java class for it. Is arguably one of the coolest comments I've ever read on this site.
• The whole Valis trilogy just got way too far the fuck out there for me. There comes a point when Dick starts to read like a really stoned child of the sixties -- not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily -- and I find myself shrugging and thinking "Oh, come on, we've ALL had that acid trip. It's not divine revelation. It's the drugs."
• *hates Hollywood for screwing up Minority Report*
• I wrote an I Ching throwing Java class for it. Which writes all of my comments here.
• *hates Hollywood for screwing up Minority Report* But does she hate them enough to steal a certain android replicant to draw attention to that fact? Hmmmm...
• "Am I the only person here who finds PKD's prose unreadably ugly?" Someone I read in some thread somewhere said "PKD was a great writer." No he wasn't. He was no master of prose, he was also for the early part of his career churning out stuff by the bucketload to make some cash, and nobody writes much good stuff like that. What he is appreciated for these days is not his prose or his characters, because none of them are particularly memorable. It may be his foresight in many things, and some enjoy his kitchiness. But I think the big thing is, even stuck in the generic scenarios of paperback sci-fi, he often turned them into something weird and compelling. It was the concepts he had, nobody came up with stuff like that back then. There are two novels which are I think touchestones of really canny sci-fi ideas that the mainstream has only just cottoned-on to, and they are Ubik by PKD and Mindswap by Robert Sheckley (who sadly died recently). These books are two very pivotal bits of work in the evolution of modern, shall we say, revisitionist SF, imho. Modern SF often deals with an individual trapped in an illusory or shifting state of reality, up to the point where identity is in crisis. This can be a computer reality, or something more metaphysical, or whathaveyou. All the later popular 'neuromancer' style stories, lawnmower-man scenarios, had their genesis in PKD's works, I believe. Arguably, *all* sci-fi since 1966 has origins in this work, including things like, memorably, tv show The Prisoner in which the unseen antagonist is shown to be the protagonist himself, and the nature of the final resolution is itself suggested to be part of some other greater reality. There was another short story I forget the name of that I thought very well done by PKD maybe back in the sixties or later perhaps, in which a bunch of colonists on a planet get killed off one by one in a murder-mystery type situation, until at the end it is revealed they are all astronauts stuck on a doomed spaceship on a slow death-spiral into a sun with no hope of escape, whiling away their time with interactive 'holodeck' style stories, in which they assume new identities for the duration of the tale and cannot remember who they really are. Then they wake up in the booth with the snoopy cap, and choose another story to play.
• *golf clap*
• If you think there's something wrong with PKD's prose, I suggest you read " Confessions of a Crap Artist ". Don't get PKD confused with unreadable J G Ballard.
• Why would I argue with any of you? You're all just holograms covering up the real reality. Dick jumped the shark when his writing became all about Christian gnosis. EVERYBODY HIT THE DECK! PINK-BEAM-OF-LIGHT ALERT!
• Of course, it's just that that makes him more interesting than other usually mediocre hack SF writers. Conundrum.
• I really struggled with Valis and Scanner Darkly. Yes, his word craft lacks in shine, and his convoluted plots are baffling, but the overall feeling of an alternate universe, of shifting realities and personalities, is what left me a good, if weird, taste in my mouth. Ah, Felix The Cat, Alnedra? I was always spooked by those cartoons. The menacing professor, the oniric adventures and scenarios. Weird.
• Monkeyfilter:I guess you just prefer short Dick. Monkeyfilter:Shorter Dick is better Dick. Monkeyfilter:I like my Dick big and with a point at the end. Ag, God! the innuendo! -tears eyes out-
• New A Scanner Darkly trailer (30 MB .mov).
• J. G. Ballard is unreadable? Crikey.
• Never read Ballard. Always mean to. That trailer looks pretty interesting, Keanu notwithstanding.
• I've only read one PKD novel (Time-slip something or other, on recommondation from here, actually), and it had to be the worst scifi novel I had ever read. Not only was it not inventive, he found new ways to lack inventiveness. His vision of the future was technological behind present day 1960's. And the concept behind the novel was poorly done. I've read one short story by PKD (Golden Man), and I did like that one. Felt a little like a novelization of an X-men title, but still was enjoyable.
• You want hard to read? Pynchon's Gravity's Raibow has defended itself against my attempts at reading it for years. Ouch.
• You guys are missing the point. Where is the f%&#ing robot?!?!
• Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow You might have better luck with V. It's the only one of his novels I've gotten all the way through, and I quite enjoyed it, though I have no doubt that roughly sixty percent of it went straight over my head.
• But what about the flippin' robot?!?!
• I am not making outrageous comments regarding the robot to draw attention from the fact that I in reality am in posession of it right now and am feeding it onion rings.
• Philip K. Dick predicted that his robot would be stolen.
• But what about the flippin' robot?!?! I have the robot. If you want your Dick back, I want money. If I don't get money, your Dick will be gone forever.
• *breaks out the lawn clippers, starts sharpening*
• hedge clippers! hedge clippers! D'oh!
• Monkeyfilter: new ways to lack inventiveness
• There is no robot. There never was a robot. There's no such thing as robots. If there were such a thing as robots, this particular robot would still not exist. You have imagined the robot. You have imagined the news story about the robot, which is probably missing because of the fact that robots don't exist. There are no audioanimatronic automatons either; you hallucinated that whole trip to Disney World. There are no singing tiki gods. Oh, and no Philip K. Dick robots. The robot world is, was, and always will be completely Dickless. (That is, if there was a robot world, which there isn't.) OK, GIMME BACK MY ROBOT!!!
• See all that stuff in there, Homer? That's why your robot never worked!
• That was awesome, Chy. Now I have to watch The Prisoner again.
• The robot world is, was, and always will be completely Dickless. *heavy sigh of relief*
• "Philip K. Dick predicted that his robot would be stolen." posted by middleclasstool at 02:04AM UTC on February 22, 2006 /applauds