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Philip K. Dick

rynner2

rynner2

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This long article is a mini-biography of Philip K. Dick. It's too long to quote, but at one period he started having visions. In one of these he correctly diagnosed an illness in his young son.

He was a great and influential writer. This thread could also serve for comments on his work. I especially remember "The Man in the High Castle", an alternative history set in America after Germany and Japan won the war...
 
'Valis' deals with this. I've only just started it, so I can't comment further. I seem to recall that VALIS was the name of his 'contact', standing for Vast Active Living Intelligence System.

There's a famous story, to the effect that visitors to Dick's house were warned that evil entities communicated through the radio. Said visitors later confirmed that the radio did indeed turn itself on in the small hours of the morning.

Ubik remains my favourite though.
 
I haven't read a huge amount of his work but Ubik has been my favourite so far . There was a good documentary about him a few years ago , possibly just after his death . I love the way you never know where you are in his stories - this was translated really well into film in Total Recall .
 
BTW, anyone else see a resemblance between PKD and Charles Fort? (See the photo on the editorial page of FT - something about the eyes, I think.)
 
http://www.id-online.de/ufo/pkdhowto.htm
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Thanks for printing that one Unicycle. I'd read about some of it in a biography of PKD., but, I hadn't read that piece. It fills in a lot of detail.

No doubt about it, definitely one of the best SF writer's ever. I've learned so much from his perception of the nature of things. I heartily recommend his warm, crazy, brand of humanism to others who may not have read him yet.
 
VALIS is his most autobiographical work, with charming titbits about his fondness for dog food during his speed binges. :blah:
Any collection of his short stories is always worth a buy.
His characters are unconvinving, he couldn't write plot or dialouge, but he is unquestionably a genius.
One of the most important writers of the 20th century - while Derrida and Baudrillard were outling post-modern theories of idenity, Dick was going much further in the pages of pulp magazines.

My fave short story is the anti-Monopoly board game, used as a propaganda device to overthrow Terran capitalism.

I'd like to see a film bio, but knowing Hollywood, they probably cast Robin (big hairy over-acting) Williams.
 
So, any thoughts on Minority Report? I caught it last Sunday, and think it might've been the best movie of 2002 (at least until The Two Towers comes out).
 
us poor Brits have to wait until this Friday.
I have high hopes for it. A.I. was flawed, but it was still a very interesting film.
There seems to be a lot of snobbery about Spielberg, but with the exceptions of some real stinkers (1941, Always) his films are always entertaining and thought provoking.
 
Flippin' 'eck. Synchronicity or what? I found this thread while in the middle of trying to write an article about PKD. And damn useful the link to the "How to Build a Universe..." was too. There's a good Erik Davis thing on him here:

http://www.techgnosis.com/pkdnet.html

Clearly Dick was great and very influential. I can never escape the feeling that he might have been still better if he'd written less - too many short stories churned out for dodgy SF magazines in a constant effort to keep the wolf from the door? Hard to say.

Probably my favourite is 'The Mold of Yancy', a brilliant short story about social control through a vapid and ultimately illusory figurehead, dispensing banal folk wisdom. Kind of reminds you of a few world leaders knocking about the place at the moment, eh?
 
Just finished 'VALIS'. I wonderKING FELIXhow autobiographical that is? 'Horselover Fat', indeed.

If anyone else has read them both, do you see odd similarities with the 'Mothman Prophecies'? Remote messages, people being 're-programmed' by lights etc. Worth a thought or two.
 
chatsubo said:
His characters are unconvinving, he couldn't write plot or dialouge,
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Don't know whether I'd agree with that. His early books (non SF) are beautifully written IMO. (The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, and In Milton Lumky Territory) But maybe I'm just a fanatic. He spent a lot of his later career, as Tomsk says, trying to keep the wolf from the door, and struggling with mental health difficulties.
 
Attention all Dick fans... (Er, you know what I mean.)

The new FT (161) has a main feature article on PKD!

Synchronicity, or what? That article must have been on its way to the printers when I started this thread - perhaps I'm psychic! Or has FT been nicking stuff off the MB again...?
 
Watched Minority Report yesterday. Very impressed, though the ending is a tad disappointing. When you find out that its...nah, only joking.
Thought it was one of only a few films to really catch the cyberpunk ethos - not just the Blade Runner cityscape, but the concept that technology is all pervasive and far from glamourous.
I'm not sure if you could say that it is a definitive 'Dick' film, but it is outstanding in its own right, and one of the best SF films I've seen since the Matrix.
 
I've only just found this thread (thanks, ryn :) ) and just want to say that I love PKD's short stories - some of them are far better than his novels, IMHO.

I like short stories anyway as they often give the bare bones of an idea without getting too bogged down with trivialities. They allow you to imagine and think.

Two of PKD's stories particually stick in my mind - "Second Variety" (adaptive robots take over, and destroy, the world) and "Jon's World" (the robots were never invented - for good or ill).

Oh, and "To be a Blobel" (sp?). Great stuff.

Jane.
 
PKD's short stories don't suffer from the problems inherent of being written while on speed. (Not to say that all of his novels did, either, but many do. There was a good reason for not including the last 30,000 words of The Unteleported Man.)

I've often felt that one could make a long-running anthology series based exclusively on his short story output, as many of them seem well suited to the Twilight Zone or Outer Limits style of programme. It's a shame that none of his novels were filmed (officially at least) until he was almost dead.

On Second Variety, I've always felt that James Cameron owes an awful lot to Dick. The ideas behind the Terminator films, particularly the future history, are basically ripped off from SV and other stories. So is the idea of travelling back to stop it from happening (not quite the plot of Jon's World but close, unless it's a different one to the one I'm thinking of). And I think The 6th Day is either ripped off from him or Fredrick Brown (they each wrote a story with a similar idea).

Of course, SV has been filmed (as Screamers - there's a copy over by the video, which I will get around to watching some day), and with Total Recall he's become a hot property. There's supposed to be a film of A Scanner Darkly in the works, but it's been in the works for some time so I suspect it may be, if not dead, in a coma.
 
On the subject of VALIS: i've always takenb it that both the narator and Horselover Fat (?) are Dick.

Not only does the novel deal with Dick's experences with VALIS (see the Ft article for more info0 but also with his mental health problems.

As such the book has an unexpected emotional punch to back up it's highly developed intelectal one.

a clasic in anyone's language.

And was he talking to god? I realy don't know but the diagnoses of his son's condition is not easly explained.
 
re: VALIS / et al

Let's not forget that at the same time PKD was having his experiences / breakdown, Uri Geller & Andrija Puharich were in 'contact' with an intellignce they thought to be a 'superintellgent comptuer abord an orbiting spaceship'.

I recall something about it appearing to them in the form of a hawkman. Of course, some of this could be disinformation from Robert Anton Wilson.

The fact that other people were interacting with similar 'intellegences' about the same time does kind of rule out the possibility of this just being a mental breakdown on PKD's part.

My bet is that some alphabet soup agencies were manipulating the belief systems of those with an interest in the paranormal. There are many other similar situations where the government spooks cross paths with paranormal stuff : look at the web of relationships around Ira Einhorn or Jack Parsons.

PKD wrote a lot of interesting, thought provoking stuff. Unfortunately, he often returned to the same themes over and over, so after a while, it's hard to keep his works straight in your mind. Of course, he'd probably want it that way! :confused:


Here's some interesting reading I turned up while googling for references on the Puharich / VALIS link.
 
What is Exegesis? Is it something suitably vast? I have talked to this bloke who is trying to put the whole thing up on the internet, at the cost of thousands of hours.
 
PKD was never certain as to what caused his "episodes" at one point he thought it was the Soviets using some kind of mind control device on him becuase he thought he saw some guys in lab coats speaking Russian during one of his visions.
 
Faggus said:
What is Exegesis? Is it something suitably vast? I have talked to this bloke who is trying to put the whole thing up on the internet, at the cost of thousands of hours.
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Tell me more! I'm dying to read PKD's exegesis. He only includes a small part of it in VALIS.
 
I cna't find the site ATM (not on search engines and i have lost the adress) but it's entirely incomplete, just kind of stating it's aim to type up from photocopies the whole of exegesis. I'll find it later.
 
ignore this if you're not into the whole literary criticism

Hate to be a cynic but i believe Dicks' strange belief in angels etc. was probably just the result of drugs on an already irregular worldview - death of his sister probably didn't help - (this is not really a criticism - like William Blake, for example, the great side-effect of his slightly unusual world-view is inspiring literature).

Digressing slightly I can heartedly endorse 'A Scanner Darkly' which i recently finished. The only other of his i have read is 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' and i'm growing endeared to his paranoid somewhat frantic characters. Speaking of 'Scanner...' i was at a lecture on (re)constructions of the oedipus myth last night (at the British museum) and the lecturer praised Sophocles' 'Oedipus Rex' for its literary gambit of writing a detective tale in which the protagonist is both detective and (unbeknowest to him) criminal. (cf. Freud, unconscious selfhood, & psychonanlysis).

Similarly, i thought Philip K. Dick's preoccupation with the 'split brain' in 'Scanner' sees his central character (uh, name escapes me) detecting/spying on himself in order to discover the two different aspects of his own mind. - Sort of a unsuccessful Freudian self-analysis - It follows Sophocles and not Freud, however, in as much as ultimately no cure/resolution/mediation/understanding is to be found - Oedipus can't handle the truth and ends a broken man whilst Dick has his character descend into dribbling madness...

Fair comparission?
Any Philip K. Dick Scholars out there?
 
Movies and Phylip K. Dick.

Everyone knows there are no good Steven King adaptations but noone ever coments on adaptations of Phylip K. Dick.

Blade Runner is about the best but it dosn't even scratch the surface of the book's complexities, Screamers is crap...and that's about it.

Cronenberg does well with eXistanCe but he only references Dick (the Perky Pat burgers and fries.)

Are there any good Dick adaptations out there and more inportently is it posible to adapt Dick?
 
Emperor Zombie said:
I have a funny feeling that if I say that Minority Report was good you'll disagree...call it a hunch.
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I forgot Minority Report: good movie, crap ending.

Total Recall: see my coment on Blade Runner.
 
Emperor Zombie said:
with regard to bladerunner...I don't know how audiences would have taken to electric sheep grazing on rooftops...and with that departure you can understand and see how the movie is more a marlowe pastiche with only a tip of the hat to dick.

without it and that amalgamation, no neuromancer (and that's either a good thing or a bad thing).
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that's the problem with Dick: I don't think he can be filmed.

You have to reduce his world view somewhat.
 
Yea, good book. Try The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

that would make a good movie. Faith movies are mostly crap, that would be a good one.

If you havn't read it it's about a bishop coming to terms with the death of his son. It's also about the paradox of faith: you can't make anyone else beleve.
 
The Virgin Queen said:
Yea, good book. Try The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

that would make a good movie. Faith movies are mostly crap, that would be a good one.

If you havn't read it it's about a bishop coming to terms with the death of his son. It's also about the paradox of faith: you can't make anyone else beleve.
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it's also his most subtle take on the gnostic idea that populate his books.

It would make a good intelegent weepie :)
 
Didn't John Lennon buy the film rights to UBIK? or was it VALIS?
 
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