Philip K. Dick - the novels

Havent read it, it sounds like a minor PKD. But if you have it already there is no reason not to read. PKD is always interesting read imo.
 
I've read them all over the years, most more than once. Galactic Pot-Healer is good PKD, though not the best. It's lighter than some of his books, though it does touch on some recurring themes (theology, entropy, music - la cathédrale engloutie). Well worthwhile. For me, The Man in the High Castle is the best of them all, as it's a bit more polished than some of the others, but most of the "middle period" Dick (say 1961-1970) books are very good. Flow, My Tears, for example, is pretty weird but fascinating - and who else would have uses a title taken from a Dowland lute song? Things started to go downhill a little with A Scanner Darkly but then he goes right off the deep end: I find VALIS, etc., very disappointing.

The Pocket Essential Philip K. Dick by Andrew Butler is a handy reference, if, like me you tend to get confused as to which is which.
 
Connavar said:
Dont recommend The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch to a newbie thats cruel ;)

Yeah i felt The Man In the High Castle was written more bland than his other 60s
books.
Abyssimal:

I recommend ,Now Wait For Last Year,Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? as good place to start PKD.
Click to expand...

LOL! My son handed me Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? last night and insisted I read it. This is my first PKD novel, and so far (I'm only up to Chapter 3) I really like it. The title made me laugh as well. I logged on a few minutes ago and decided to look this guy up, and of course, as I expected, he's here. :D
 
Well i'm about a third of the way thru Flow My Tears and its flowing nicely. Compared to other novels of his i've read its easy going and quite straight if you know what I mean. Enjoying it so far.
 
Hey, this is my first post, and as my name suggests, I am a PKD fanatic. I have read two biographies of him, as so far, only six novels, because of school reading clogging up my schedule, but I loved them all. My first PKD was Man in the High Castle, at age fourteen, and I'm sixteen now. I got into PKD because of my love of SF, which was started by my first reading of Dune by Frank Herbert when I was twelve. I think my love of PKD books as a whole has probably eclipsed Dune by now. It's nice to see a fellow PKD fan D Davis!!

I've read:

UBIK
VALIS
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Man in the High Castle
Now Wait For Last Year

Mainly the classic PKD canon. In the next year of so, I'm looking to read and review all thirteen PKD titles in the excellent SF Masterworks series.

Here's a review for VALIS, my most recent PKD:

VALIS


VALIS is Philip K. Dick's semi-autobiographical work, and probably his last great one. It is obvious, reading VALIS, that PKD is not even close to sane. Earlier in his career, around The Man in the High Castle, PKD seemed fairly level headed and a master author. The many drugs he took eventually started taking their toll on his sanity however. VALIS is the most intimate view of an insane man I've ever read. Dick takes you inside the mind of a schizophrenic named Horselover Fat ( Horselover=Philip, Fat= Dick in German) who has apparently had information about the secrets of the universe fired into his head via pink laser by an entity known as God, VALIS (Vast active living intelligence system), or Zebra. Many different philosophies are discussed throughout this novel, which isn't much science fictional, besides perhaps the strange experiences of Horselover. Elements of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, Atheism, and Taoism are all addressed throughout this novel. As one review suggest this novel is about madness, death, and delusions, yet it is a joy to read. The scene in which Horselover goes to see a strange movie with some friends in a prime example of the reader feeling insane and confused, not knowing what's going on. You start to feel crazy yourself as you read certain sections of the book. I'm not going to give away that much more of this excellent, insane, strange novel. This book will really get you thinking, and I think that it is the book in which Dick really poured all of himself into. You can tell the author's genuine problems in his mind, and its a pleasure to behold. Don't start off reading PKD with this book, though, make it your fourth or fifth at least, just so you can get a feeling for him. PKD's most insane, crazy, thought-provoking work: I must say this even as crazy and unexpected as alot of his others are plotwise, like UBIK and Now Wait For Last Year. The plot isn't actually that insane in VALIS, it is the profile of a thoroughly screwed up man going about what is, to him, everyday life. However, the novel just reverberates with the insanity Horselover feels. It is about how a crazy man can regain his sanity, but will probably just slip back into madness again...And that the whole world is like that. I also saw some parallels between this novel and Silverberg's excellent Dying Inside. Read VALIS, and I guarantee that you will have a very strong opinion about it, and that it will stick in your mind long after you've closed the back cover.
 
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch


This is your typical PKD novel- filled with reality bending, psychedelic experiences, crazy drugs, visions, and corporations violently battling with each other for control of the human mind. The Earth is used up in the near future, and the average temperature in New York City is 180 degrees Fahrenheit. People carry around portable AC units to cool themselves off, as well as portable robot psychiatrists in suitcases. Telepaths are available for hire, and large companies often offer their services for large fees. The Solar System has been colonized, although the colonies are not very productive, essentially hell-holes in which colonists are confined to their living quarters all the time because of the blistering harsh conditions. These colonists get by through a drug called "Can-D", manufactured by a large corporation, which "translates" their bodies into young attractive, sexy people...Meaning that they have hallucinations that they are inside the heads of either a young woman or a young man in a tropical paradise, having ecstatic sexual experiences and just an all around fantastic time. To make the experiences even better, the people can buy extra small dolls and furniture for them, which will also appear in the hallucinations. Sound like PKD predicted reality TV a bit? Yeah. The people whose experiences these drug-users are feeling don't really exist... the drug users lie in trance while it all happens in their heads. Yep, this book is typical PKD darkly genius mayhem. The plot of the story revolves around a conman named Palmer Eldritch, who has mysteriously traveled out of the Solar System, and returned, possibly human, possibly alien masquerading as such , with a new drug he has discovered called Chew-Z. This drug promises immortality, although with a hitch he doesn't mention. While under Chew-Z's influence, time holds still, while the user experiences bizarre visions. Oh yeah, and Palmer Eldritch is the god is all of these private Chew-Z universes. This is an excellent, insanity laced mad-man's novel. It's not to be missed and its got all your typical Dick mayhem. Excellent, mind-bending read. You'll hurt your brain wondering what's real and what's not. Of course that phrase applies to almost all of PKD's novels.
 
Ubik is known as one of author Philip K. Dick's greatest novels. It seems to be up there with, say, The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and maybe A Scanner Darkly in the first-class Dick novels. For a short book, this novel is INSANE. This is the only word to describe Ubik, insane. It is set in the near future, in which telepaths run their own businesses and can be hired for snooping into other people's affairs. This and a few other inventions make Ubik Sci-Fi; Man has colonized the moon, but has not gone outside the solar system in the world of Ubik. Snottily intelligent furniture such as couches and doors charge people small amounts of pocket change to open them or sit on them, and refuse people into their own apartments with attitudes usually only associated with humans. Another vital technology on Earth that has immerged is "half-death", when a relative of someone is near death, that person can choose to put the dying person into a stasis tank where they will be held in suspended animation for as long as that person can keep up the large flow of money required to rent a stasis tank out. The "half-dead" person can be communicated with, but they cannot physically do anything. The main characters of Ubik: Joe Chip, Glen Runciter, and Pat Conley, are anti-telepaths, people of a corporation that is hired out to block regular telepaths from snooping. If you've read Dick before, you know that story-line, mixing supernatural and practical shallow consumerism and greed is puuure PKD. Basically, on a trip to the moon, Runciter, the boss of the anti-telepath company, is seemingly killed by his competitors in the telepath business. Joe Chip, his second-in-command takes over, and returns to Earth, but soon extremely strange things start happening. Chip is pulled over for a traffic ticket, and when he reads the ticket, it is a note from Runciter, the dead man, not the cop. He is alarmed and shows it to the cop, who does not see anything out of the ordinary. Chip and the rest of the anti-telepaths come across messages scrawled in extremely unlikely places, and that's when the sinister stuff starts happening. Soon you start questioning, "Is Runciter really alive, and they're all dead...or what?" And just when you think you've figured things out, at around the end of the book, PKD drops a bombshell in the last chapter that is, no other way to describe it, ******* insane. Dick plays with the reader's head so much in this book, and I can't recommend it enough. Read it quickly, or in one sitting, and be prepared for a helluva lot of insanity, mystery, craziness, dark humor and mayhem. It's a great intro to PKD, and only the second PKD book I'd ever read. It's a masterwork of science fiction and plays with your head like no other book I know. You gotta read this and you'll be hooked on Philip K Dick.


These three reviews are what I've done so far on my SF review blog. Yeah, I use the word "insane" alot when describing PKD books!

Anybody got any recommendations from the SF Masterwork PKD collection that I haven't read yet, that I have to read as soon as possible?

The ones I haven't read, and my impressions:

A Scanner Darkly- I've heard its his best, and definitely in the top tier with Stigmata, Castle, Ubik, and Androids
Flow My Tears- I've heard nothing but great things about it, and that it is underrated
A Martian Time Slip- Early, accessible classic apparently
Penultimate Truth- mixed feelings, but the plot sounds intriguing
Maze of Death- once again mixed, but I've heard it compared to Hitchhikers Guide, which is excellent
Bloodmoney- post apocalyptic, sounds like my cup of tea
Simulacra- haven't heard much about it
Time out of Joint- I hear its his first novel masterpiece, but gets sloppy at the end. still, the summary on the SF masterwork review archive sounds like vintage PKD awesomeness.

I'm going to close with my feelings about Now Wait For Last Year, I think it is severely underrated, and, in my opinion, better than Three Stigmata, and POSSIBLY Ubik...
 
Welcome to the forums PKDFanatic (sorry had to break it down :) ). Good to see another PKD fan among the ranks here!

Without a doubt, you need to read Flow My Tears the Policeman Said. It is part of PKD's Magnum Opus. While not being a part of the SF Masterworks Series, I also HIGHLY recommend PKD's collected short stories.
 
I'd also recommend that you have a go at PKD's short story collections. (There are five in tota.) There are some superb stories in them including the original stories for Screamers (Second Variety), Total Recall (We can remember it doe you Wholesale) and Minority Report.

Welcome to the Chrons.
 
I've read the following novels (listed in the order I read them): "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", "UBIK", "The Penultimate Truth", "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", "A Scanner Darkly", "We Can Build You", "The Simulacra", "Dr. Futurity" and "Time Out of Joint".

I have the following on my shelf ready to read: "Dr. Bloodmoney" and "VALIS".
 
I just read VALIS. I rated it three stars out of five. Here is my review:

The book that profiles the author's descent into madness. He both narrates the story as himself and is also another character, "Horselover Fat", who whilst we are told he is the same person, interacts with the narrator as seperate person. Presumably indicative of PKD's own split personality disorder?

I don't know how much of this we are to take as real, or at least PKD's genuine belief as to what's real, but we can either take it as the whole world being insane with messages and signs of rationality that only a few are aware of, that are indicative of our impending release from our self imposed prison. Or this could be about what it's like when you suffer from mental illness, how you feel sane; it's just everyone else around you that seems crazy and how you will always be able see things around you in a way that re-inforces your paranoid fantasies.

I think PKD intended this ambiguity but I think he genuinely believed that it was in fact real, that he had had a genuine insight into the true nature of reality and, in laying down his tractus, was sharing his insights with the world. He just went into it in too much depth and was the intense focus of too much of the book to have been something that he didn't genuinely belive in.

The book started and ended well but too large a part in the middle just didn't make good story telling and was just him trying to get across his crack pot ideas. This was a real disappointment for me as I had really high hopes for this book. A Scanner Darkly is one of my all time favourite SF stories and I thought this one might be along similar lines. But I think PKD was just a bit too far gone over into madness when he came to writing this and unfortunately wasn't, for me at least, nearly as effective.
 
Ubik: The Screenplay

Interesting, if not entirely successful. Dick did not know how to write a screenplay, and so the entire thing is kind of a mess. However, his ideas are still there, and Ubik contains some of his most amazing constructs.

What is most interesting about the screenplay, though, is how Dick creates the cinematic version of Ubik. We get to read how Dick would have wanted the film to look and sound like - Dick even explains some of the f/x shots and techniques he wanted. So while the screenplay itself is flawed, what we have is, perhaps, the most authentic PKD film-experience around.
 
Took this picture a couple of weeks ago...

h60TA.jpg
 
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