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Title: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik |
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Review of Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
- Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick (1928-82) is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem's words, "wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him." Posing the questions "What is human?" and "What is real?" in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works-fantastic and weird yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation-that are startlingly prescient imaginative responses to 21st-century quandaries.
This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life," pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions. As with most of Dick's novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.
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Comments for Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
- Posted on 2008-07-10
Welcome to the dark, thrilling, paranoid world of PKD
Plaudits to the Library of America for adding the unique and radical genre fiction of Philip K. Dick to their canon of American masterworks. Science fiction fans have long espoused the genius of Dick's revelatory vision of a future world gone wildly out of control. His prose is never wordy, pretentious, or convoluted - the plots are already confusing enough. The typical Dick story is hyper-fast-paced, dropping the reader right into the action with little preparatory exposition, and no sooner do you think you've got a handle on what's going on than he starts throwing major league curves at you. In the dangerous and unfriendly future, Dick's characters are always frantically caught up in the struggle to survive, only to find out that their situation isn't nearly as cut and dried as they'd believed. In contrast to Proust, who tried to show us that life was only what we thought it was, Philip K. Dick, amidst the turbulence of the 1960's, deals with the discovery that your life is NOT what you thought it was. What's often missed is how skillfully Dick fits this revelation into the context of his novels; we aren't so much suddenly in a different world than we were at the beginning of the story than simply more aware of the reality (or non-reality) of our situation than we had been. This sometimes causes some major plot malfunctions, since after all, once you realize that you're dead (for example) priorities can change dramatically, and that's why the conclusions usually don't tie things up in a neat little package. Dick tends to disdain predictable plots and pat endings. Often there's no real resolution at all, but merely a recognition of the true state of affairs, and yes, some readers will find this off-putting, but isn't this more realistic than having the hero beat the villain and then living happily ever after? Like all of Dick's work, these novels are dark, crazy, explosive, and suspenseful and often very funny as well. But if you're self-assured enough to face a world gone totally mad, Dick has some thrilling tales to tell.
Score: 5
- Posted on 2008-06-25
FINALLY: RECOGNITION AND RESPECT FOR PKD
Finally: Philip K. Dick gets the recognition and respect he deserves with his addition into the Library of America canon. This volume collects four of Dick's most compelling and visionary novels of the 1960s and serves as a great introduction to PKD's world of panic and paranoia. (The recently published and comprehensive "Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick" makes an excellent companion piece to this edition, but those stories also tend to be gimmicky and hokey where Dick's novels are lean and mean.) For initiates, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" -- collected here along with "The Man in the High Castle," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and "Ubik" -- is as good a place as any to start. Deftly combining elements of traditional science fiction with the hardboiled detective novel, Dick explores all of his signature obsessions in this story of a bounty hunter who sets out to exterminate androids in our midst. First and foremost, the novel succeeds as a page-turner -- but it also works on a deeper level, exploring the nature of reality, what it means to be human and the way materialism, or what Dick calls "the tyranny of an object," controls our lives and deepest desires.
Score: 5 - Posted on 2008-04-02
WHETHER FAN OR NEWBIE, THIS IS A MUST-HAVE
The Library of America (LoA) has issued a volume of Philip K. Dick's novels from the 1960, and in so doing has legitimized PKD as a "classic" American author -- in this case an author of science fiction. You can get this volume by subscribing to the LoA, or by getting it thru Amazon, which at this time is far the cheaper method. (The main difference between the two vols. is that the LoA version comes in blue cloth with a slipcase, while the release to bookstores -- Amazon included -- is a regular hardback with a dust jacket.)
THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE does not take place in the future, as conventional sci-fi does. It is set in the time and place Dick wrote it -- San Francisco in the early 1960s. It is the past that has changed. FDR was assassinated in 1936; his successor, President John N. Garner, remained too isolationlist to re-arm America in the face of growing Nazi and Japanese threats. As a result, the USA lost World War Two; the eastern and midwestern parts of American going to the Nazis, California and the Pacific Northwest to the Japanese. In between lies a Rocky Mountain redoubt called the "CSA," chief city Denver, which is where the novel's multiple, shocking climaxes take place.
HIGH CASTLE has compelling plotworks along two story lines, but what the initial reader will notice is how the Japanese influence postwar San Francisco and how, eventually, they stop being the dictators as much as gentle giants atop of the government and business elite. The story with the Germans in the East is far more gruesome, and fortunately for us is related by one character, a Jew "in the closet," because the Japanese-held CSA would probably have extradited him to the Nazi East Coast for, apparently, what we all fear from Nazis.
THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH takes place in the "not-too-distant future," on an Earth that has almost globally-warmed itself to death. The main character lives in a co-op block in "Marilyn Monroe," a suburb of New York City. On a normal day, the temperature hits 180 degrees F. and ordinary people go and come only after dark, or with the help of intermediaries like pre-chilled taxis.
PKD was good friends with sci-fi author Robert Heinlein, and the Heinlein touch is apparent not only in the satiric tone of the novel but in the neologisms Dick invented. He saw the rise of blogs, although he called them "homeo-papes" (short for papers). Even though many of the terms took different names, the prescient point is that Dick foresaw and foretold them. And the new monikers are easy to figure out though a bit startling -- part of the fun IMHO. The hero, who is Palmer Eldritch's enemy, finds himself drafted and sent to a chilly moon of Jupiter by the resettlement-happy United Nations. Desparate refugees clinging to these moons are truly happy only when ingesting hallucinogens by chewing a specialty lichen!
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? was the origin for the movie BLADE RUNNER. As usual, Dick did not warn of a post-atomic world; neither did he foretell a slick, high-tech and comfortable future. Insted, the grungy L.A. of near history was well presented by director Ridley Scott in BLADE RUNNER. The plot is driven by a Raymond Chandler-esque detective story, but as often happens in PDK literature, a philosophical question emerges: what is human, anyway? Is a machine (android) tuned to be a human and act human of the same stature as a human?
UBIK, first published in 1969, was Dick's most far-out novel to date. It is an imagining of spiritual realities distracting from and then supplanting the ordinary humdrum of unpleasant reality. In essence it takes themes he raised in PALMER ELDRITCH and rode them far into speculation. But the novel is amazingly fun and easy to read for all that.
If, after reading this product, you find yourself interested in this compelling man and his struggles with poverty and schizophrenia (and of course how he hatched many of his ideas!), take a look at the Afterword of this LoA volume, because it really is a nice tight biography of Philip K. Dick.
Want to read more? The LoA has a companion volume with five of PKD's novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Ready for short stories? THE PHILIP K. DICK READER is new, fresh, and packs in lots of stories, including "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," the inspiration for the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie TOTAL RECALL. Also "The Minority Report," which title Hollywood did not change for the movie. Do not look for biographical or critical comment in THE PHILIP K. DICK READER, though; the cost of the book's efficiency is the fact that it has no commentary or biography, just the stories themselves.
Score: 5 - Posted on 2008-03-29
Wonderful Product
This is a great book! The stories are a good selection of Dick's work and arranged in a logical order, ranging from the odd in the beginning to down-right bizarre by the end. I recommend it, whether you're an old fan or new to his writing.
My only qualm, thus four out of five stars, are the tissue-thin pages. They are delicate and easy to tear, and I repeatedly had to go back because I turned two or three pages not one. But the binding, spine, and covers are all topnotch, so I guess that makes up for it.
peace
bwc
Score: 4
- Posted on 2008-01-27
A window into the 60's, as well as the future
I rarely read science fiction, but that was before I was introduced to the work of Philip K. Dick. His prose is clean and precise. His vision of the future from a 1960's standpoint can in one paragraph be eerily right-on and in the next, quaint. It's a future where typewriters and moon colonies, cigarettes and time travel, can all co-mingle seamlessly and believably.
Score: 5