If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others
August 28, 2017 4:32 AM   Subscribe

Ahead of a new UK C4 anthology series Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, three novelists - Nicola Barker, Michael Moorcock and Adam Roberts - pick their favourite works
posted by fearfulsymmetry (39 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
How sad that they've been filming Electric Dreams on and off in my neighborhood in Chicago and yet this trailer, and every other one I've found, can't be viewed here.
posted by lagomorphius at 5:04 AM on August 28, 2017


If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others

Title like that and no one even mentions Eye In The Sky.

Oh right. It wasn't made into a movie in the 1980s.
 
posted by Herodios at 5:57 AM on August 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Every time I read about PKD I become a little bit more enthralled. It is so hard to know where the man stops and the my begins. Was it all man? Is that even possible? Either way, when you get someone like Michael Moorcock to comment on how quickly you managed to churn novels out, that is quite a feat.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:26 AM on August 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


The MYTH begins! Argh, missed the edit window by seconds.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:31 AM on August 28, 2017


It's hard to know where the man stops and the meth begins
posted by thelonius at 6:45 AM on August 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


The MYTH begins! Argh, missed the edit window by seconds.

Dickian slip
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:46 AM on August 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I was mentioning PKD to a friend of mine, an original 'SF flower child' when she said, "Oh yes, I knew him when I was very young, he was a friend of my father. He used to babysit me sometimes."

At which point everything in my head stopped.
posted by quarsan at 6:53 AM on August 28, 2017 [18 favorites]


If pushed I'd admit that The Man in the High Castle or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are the best of Dick's novels I've read, but The World Jones Made is a sentimental favorite. It was one of the first ones I read and I've never stopped thinking about the issues it foregrounds, namely that even the best available knowledge can lead to terrible decision-making. I don't know if it was Dick's intended lesson, but what I took away from it is that it's always best to assume that what you don't know is always endlessly bigger than what you do know. Either way, it was a good lesson for a 12-year-old know-it-all to learn. Apart from that, the philosophical issue of whether a statement about the future can be true in the same way that a statement about the past (known as the problem of future contingents), is endlessly fascinating.
posted by Kattullus at 7:11 AM on August 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


The first 2 I read were "Radio Free Albemuth" and "The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer"; the latter, for sentimental reasons, is perhaps my favorite.
posted by thelonius at 7:17 AM on August 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


My favorite adaptation is Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, which is the only one that get's the tone and dialogue and weirdness right. My other favorite Dick movie is Cronenberg's eXistenZ, which while not an actual adaptation is so PKDian as to make no difference, and much closer to Dick than any of the actual adaptations of Dick's work that for some baffling reason end up as action movies.
Blade Runner and Minority Report are fun movies, but as far from their source material as to have the 'based on PKD' brand rendered as mere weak marketing ploy.
posted by signal at 7:19 AM on August 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


After you've lived for a while, thought for a while and taken the right drugs for a while, you realise that while the places Dick documented are wild and strange, they're actually out there at the edges of our own sense of self, identity and being. Not only can you go there yourself and recognise what he wrote about, you end up being unable to ignore them. They stand revealed, and they won't go away.

The world I inhabit every day was in some significant sense formed by some books I read forty years ago, just as surely as some builders made the house I live in. All fiction worth its salt changes your world, to be sure, but I don't know any other that so fundamentally rewired my mechanisms of perception.

Which is some feat indeed.
posted by Devonian at 7:28 AM on August 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Much as I still love the sheer cussed weirdness of VALIS, I think my favorite PKD novel remains the terrifying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Possibly his peak merger of drugginess, fluid and blurred identity, paranoia, and gonzo theology, with heavy notes of cybernetic body horror.
posted by informavore at 7:40 AM on August 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


VALIS, Eldritch or Scanner darkly for me.

Or Androids, even though it was made into a movie in the 80s, because it is fantastic in its own distinct way.
posted by Artw at 7:49 AM on August 28, 2017


For some reason, I think my favorites are still Ubik and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.

Ubik I think is generally agreed to be one of his masterpieces, but for some reason I never hear anybody talk about Flow My Tears. I guess the central conceit -- a hallucinogen that actually changes the reality around you -- is a bit convoluted for most readers. But there's an emotional truth in there. The final lines of the novel still stick with me :

"The blue vase, made by Mary Anne … wound up in a private collection of modern pottery. It remains there to this day, and is much treasured. And, in fact, by a number of people who know ceramics, openly and genuinely cherished. And loved."

Pottery tends to be an odd and potent metaphor in a number of his works.
posted by panama joe at 7:54 AM on August 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Ubik is fantastic - I think I forgot it because VALIS and Stigmata share some space with it but it would absolutely be in the running.

Pottery tends to be an odd and potent metaphor in a number of his works.

I should probably actually read Galactic Pot Healer.

Oh, and shout out to his several volumes worth of short stories - damn he was prolific.
posted by Artw at 7:59 AM on August 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Galactic Pot Healer

that really sounds like a Kilgore Trout title
posted by thelonius at 8:01 AM on August 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Very nice reviews.

For me, oh, a mix: Ubik, VALIS, Three Stigmata, Man in the High Castle, Scanner, Androids. I've always enjoyed teaching his novels, too.
posted by doctornemo at 8:02 AM on August 28, 2017 [1 favorite]




My favorite adaptation is Linklater's A Scanner Darkly

I remember going to see that in the cinema... and instead of the usual mix, everyone in the audience basically looked like a weirdo. 'This is def my crowd,' I thought.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:12 AM on August 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


A Scanner Darkly gave me a rotoscope headache; I didn't know such a thing existed. Thoroughly enjoyed the movie - would not see again.

One of my favourite books when I had the obligatory two thousand book SF library (lost, together with my vintage tech collection including a working PDP8/A, a Jupiter Ace and much else besides, in a matrimonial incident. I also lost the house and all the money, but hey. Miss that PDP.) was a collection of short stories called The Golden Man. At his best, PKD wrote some shorts that are infinitely re-readable. because they're very simple and straightforward and outstandingly weird at the same time.
posted by Devonian at 8:32 AM on August 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


The first PKD story I can remember reading was "The Preserving Machine" (man creates a machine that turns music into animals), the title story in a collection of his work (re)published by Pan Books in 1977. I was 10. That story fucked me up in many many ways, which I think is probably everyone's standard reaction to their first PKD story.

Also in that collection: "War Game", which I loved but which I did not ultimately understand until much later; "Oh, To Be A Blobel!", which mostly went over my head; "Roog" and "Upon the Dull Earth", both of which were fascinating to me at the time.
posted by hanov3r at 8:44 AM on August 28, 2017



A Scanner, Darkly

My favourite thing about this novel is the title. It is that rara avis, a title which does not consist of a syntactic constituent. Specifically, it's a noun phrase joined to a manner adverb -- as outlined in this lovely Language Log post* by Geoffrey Pullum.

/Darkly/ doesn't modify /a scanner/; it modifies some missing verb. The verb can be found in 1 Corinthians 13:12 where is says, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." [KJV]

One other SF novel proposed but ultimately rejected as an insufficiently pure case, is the Alfred Lord Bestertester novel, The Stars My Destination. Pullum declared it a 'gapped clause' for "the stars are my destination" because the phrase is excerpted from a line of childhood doggerel carried around in the main character's head:
Gully Foyle's my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
------------------------------------------
* I'm surprised to see this post dated 2008; I could swear we'd talked about this at least fifteen years earlier. Perhaps it took him that long to assemble and vett the paltry few examples to be found.
posted by Herodios at 8:44 AM on August 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said was my first Dick (at the age of about 12) and so it remains one of my favourites. I clearly recall the confusion and awe I felt while reading it, culminating in complete disorientation upon finishing, shortly followed by an intense need for more Dick.

I've read probably around two thirds of his books since and the ones that stick out to me as the best are A Scanner, Darkly and Confessions of a Crap Artist, but Flow My Tears always maintains a seat up on that podium. What a great title, too.

Oh, and I keep a copy of The Exegesis on my desk, along with a Bible, the Tao Te Ching, and Leaves of Grass. I use these four books for purposes, crudely, of divination. When lost, I can usually find a path forward by opening one of the four to a random page.
posted by 256 at 9:34 AM on August 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's still weird to me that Dick has become so mainstream in the last thirty years. I started reading his stuff in the late seventies when most of his books were out of print and I had to prowl used book stores to find ratty paperbacks from the '60s to read.
posted by octothorpe at 9:39 AM on August 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Kind of hoping that Ted Chiang becomes the next go-to guy for blockbustering up a short story with unpredictable results.
posted by Artw at 9:40 AM on August 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


A Scanner Darkly is my favorite. The movie was close to the book, but in many ways, I didn't really want a movie close to a PKD book; rotoscopic A Scanner Darkly was memorable, but I'd never see it again. Meanwhile, I repeatedly enjoy watching Total Recall, Bladerunner, and the rest because they are adapted stories. I don't think pure PKD works outside of print; but then again I don't think a lot of books work outside of print, but it is especially true for PKD's stories.

It'll be interesting to see how this anthology turns out.
posted by linux at 10:18 AM on August 28, 2017


Kind of hoping that Ted Chiang becomes the next go-to guy for blockbustering up a short story with unpredictable results.

Ted Chiang's Exhalation: Is there a way out? Can Michael Fassbender find it?
posted by straight at 10:46 AM on August 28, 2017


Long time SF reader (not in "fandom" but note SF not scifi :-) but just have struggled to get into PKD, started several of his novels and just don't get past the second or third chapter. I'll also note that I tried to read The autobiography of Vaslav Nijinsky a few times and just... can't, perhaps it's all too close, or, perhaps I just deeply know that I do not wish to awaken?
posted by sammyo at 10:51 AM on August 28, 2017


Kind of hoping that Ted Chiang becomes the next go-to guy for blockbustering up a short story with unpredictable results.

Exhalation should be made by into an animation short, it would be just stunning in the right hands.
posted by sammyo at 10:57 AM on August 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


For several years, I lost my taste for all other fiction and basically only read PKD. But that moment has passed for me and now I just don't really have time to get into novels anymore. With his stuff, I couldn't get enough and would just read each new book I picked up in one long session between chores. At a certain point, the magical perceptual/mind bending effects wore off for me, mostly, but it used to feel like he was somehow actively in my head anticipating my cognitive slips and playing these masterful psychological tricks, but I'm not sure I could experience his work that way again now.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:03 AM on August 28, 2017


The first PKD story I can remember reading was "The Preserving Machine" (man creates a machine that turns music into animals), the title story in a collection of his work (re)published by Pan Books in 1977. I was 10. That story fucked me up in many many ways, which I think is probably everyone's standard reaction to their first PKD story.

I read this story in some SF anthology in 6th grade. I have been trying to figure out what it was called for years, and had no idea it was PKD. Thanks!
posted by lagomorphius at 11:35 AM on August 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


My first PKD was Oh, to be a Blobel! in a Galaxy anthology, which was pretty tame both in terms of PKD's oeuvre and the anthology it was in .
posted by signal at 2:10 PM on August 28, 2017


These were delightful essays. First, that the non-SF work was mentioned (Confessions Of A Crap Artist is, among other things, an attempt at rendering the world as seen through an autistic personality, before that term became well-used); then, Time Out Of Joint, which was also the first Dick novel I read (note how the first time reverberates in each of these reviews) -- back in the day, those "Find the Green Man" type puzzles were common and everyone dreamed of being a Ragle Gumm winner; finally, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, my own favorite PKD novel: How delightful to have the book actually reviewed and not the movie. And the basic concept that humanity is defined by Love -- something that the loveless androids can never understand -- a subject tackled by many writers, is wonderfully presented here. (Moorcock's Cartesian wrinkle is an interesting take, as well.)
And, Artw, Galactic Pot-Healer is really kind of sad. One of Dick's artisan characters has the opportunity to invest himself in a Great Artwork, but cannot. It is hard to read without remembering that PKD always thought himself a sort of failure, unable to produce a truly great work.
posted by CCBC at 3:52 PM on August 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


In terms of movies, before A Scanner Darkly came out I insisted that the best PKD adaptation was John Carpenter's student flick Dark Star. Which wasn't based on it but included the depression and isolation on a starship, with a dead captain they get advice from and a bomb with artificial intelligence they can't convince to blow up anything.

I can't get behind Blade Runner because it's so different in tone from the book. I can't evaluate it on its own. And for whatever reason Man in the High Castle is probably my second-least favorite.

I have a soft spot for all the more-pulp-than-not PKD stuff, the stuff clearly written to pay the rent that just veers off in weird directions so often. Clans of the Alphane Moon, Maze of Death, Game Players of Titan, even The Zap Gun. The ones that feel maybe he started writing a traditional setup and just drifted off in his own unique direction despite his commercial intentions.
posted by mark k at 10:26 PM on August 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


I've read PKD's Dr. Futurity. I would advise you save your time on that one.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:49 PM on August 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


My favourite of the eight or so of his novels I've read is Flow My Tears..., but what struck me even more forcibly than that was the collection of his non-fiction published as The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick.

It's interesting that Janelle Monáe is cast in one of the Electric Dreams shows.
posted by misteraitch at 2:23 AM on August 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Man in the High Castle was my first Dick novel and various discussions on the internet had prepared me for his weirdness, but what really surprised me was how good his writing was. More than most science fiction writers, I enjoyed his prose as much as his ideas and plot.

It's not that it was particularly fancy writing, it was just satisfying. Part of it was that I found really effective his attempts to have some of his characters talking and thinking in English with grammar that seems influenced by Japanese. Even if it's not actually very authentic, that still works because of the whole theme of people trying with varying degrees of success to fit into this new dominant culture. And the overall point is just to give the reader a little bit of a sense of what it must be like to be on the receiving end of cultural imperialism. The overall effect seemed sort of poetic.
posted by straight at 1:18 PM on August 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


My first introduction to PKD (that I was aware of, I'd seen plenty of sci-fi movies where I didn't know they were his ideas) was the Selected Stories of PKD. Loved it! Unfortunately, my library searches have not been very successful in finding more. I hope this is because the books are always checked out.
posted by LizBoBiz at 12:26 PM on August 30, 2017


'A Scanner Darkly' is my personal favourite.

PKD was a genius because his imagination could interpret philosophical questions about identity in a vivid accessible style. He was also unique in the way that many of his characters were honestly depicted with complex mundane quirks and foibles, which stood out compared to most other generic sci-fi writing of the time. His imperfections were in story plotting. He threw together crazy ideas with interesting protagonists, and then tried to figure out where they would go...

It's hard to know where the man stops and the meth begins

In the middle of his career, in the midst of his pep-pill writing phase, his plots would just rush along, and then suddenly crash to an end when he ran out of steam. The interesting thing about 'A Scanner Darkly' is that I think he wrote it at a time when he was starting to recover from his drug addictions. The protagonist is pretty messed-up, but the entire plot comes together into a logical (but tragic) resolution.
posted by ovvl at 8:14 PM on August 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


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