Following the recent Man In The High Castle mini-debate surely it’s time that we debated the merits of the man who is possibly the most influential writer in Hollywood, even if he’s been dead for thirty years. As a card-carrying Phil fan I’m keen to get the Massive’s thoughts on his literary output, and perhaps persuade a few of you to venture forth into the great man’s considerable oeuvre. His enormous influence on current sci-fi, especially in the movies, is perhaps not as borne out in mega book sales as you would expect.
Here’s my ten-point guide to the man’s formidable body of work – at almost fifty novels and hundreds of short stories he wrote a lot – as sci-fi writers had to in those days to live. Quality varies widely, and he dabbled in mainstream fiction and even children’s stories as well as science fiction.
1. Yes the short stories are better than the novels. He’s not the only sci-fi great for whom this is true. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and many others writing, let’s say, before 1970 also follow this rule. They were paid by the word and this led to novels being expansions of short stories and rushed off rather than being seen as the artistically superior expressions of literary talent that they are seen as today.
2. Religion. Late period Dick is absolutely not where to start. PKD had a kind of religious/mystic experience in the early seventies in which he became convinced cosmic truths were being revealed to him in a pink light. All of his novels from VALIS to Radio Free Albemuth deal with his attempts to understand gnosticism and are dominated by explorations of religious experience.
3. Drugs. He took a lot of drugs. He lived in Berkeley in the sixties for gods sake. As correctly divined in the Man In… discussion, this did not always make for well-structured novels. But just as Jimi Hendrix rewrote rock, so Dick rewrote sci-fi and drugs are a part of it. In many of the novels of his ‘peak period’ (I would say from Man In.. onwards) the protagonists take drugs, are fed drugs or otherwise fall into a state of altered consciousness that causes them to question the reality around them, and discover that what they thought is real is just a stage-set behind which something else entirely lurks.
4. He’s not really about spaceships. Or alien worlds. Or aliens. For those you need ‘hard’ sci-fi and space opera. Dick’s spaceships are really just updates of Ford Focuses, his worlds (for example Mars in Martian Time Slip) run-down versions of earth, and his aliens more persecuted and misunderstood minorities.
5. He is all about robots. Indeed only Asimov has explored the ideas behind artificial intelligence so acutely. From Deckard and the replicants of Do Androids to the knackered automata of We Can Build You there are surprising, unreliable and threatening robots at every turn.
6. The non-sci-fi. For the determined reader only. His evocations of joyless marriages, dreary suburbs and frustrated middle-aged men in mindless jobs ground his sci-fi but in the ‘non-sci-fi’ of Milton Lumky, Oakland etc they take over. And, as previously discussed, his prose is servicable at best.
7. The early novels are enjoyable but trashy. In books like Solar Lottery, Eye In The Sky and The World Jones Made you can see the man gearing up for the great leaps to come but they’re horribly dated.
8. The great novels to read I would say:
We Can build You – robots
Martian Time Slip – drugs
Dr Bloodmoney…. – post-atomic war America
The Man In the High Castle – alternate history
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – drugs, religion
Ubik – drugs
Do Androids Dream…. – robots
Flow My Tears, – police states
A Scanner Darkly – drugs
9. Don’t fancy the five volumes of the collected short stories? There are a plethora of best ofs and this may be the best place to start for any reader completely new to PKD.
10. Interested in the man? Laurence Sutin’s biography Divine Invasions is very readable and doubles as a great critical introduction to the work too. There is a lot of music involved, and record shops feature in several of his works, but it’s as much classical as rock.
11. Over to you…..
Ironically I’ve only read The Man In The High Castle cos I love alt history stuff
Agree that the ‘best ofs’ are probably the best place to start – some of his writing is great, other parts are, shall we say, challenging!
Lovely piece, sir.
I’m a big PKD fan and, for what it’s worth, I think ‘The Man in the High Castle’ is rather over-rated while ‘Valis’ is brilliantly bonkers.
For further reading, I would recommend ‘I am alive and you are dead: a journey inside the mind of Philip K. Dick’ by Emmanuel Carrere. I also enjoyed ‘Philip K. Dick is dead, alas’, a novel by Michael Bishop in which the recently-deceased Phil ‘returns’ from the dead during Richard Nixon’s fourth term as President in an ‘alternative’ United States.
Back on the old site, I published this review of the under-rated Dr. Bloodmoney under the title ‘Reality, in inverted commas’:
Originally published in 1965, Dr Bloodmoney (or: how we got along after the bomb) traces the story of a group of people living on the west coast of the USA in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Dick paints a strange landscape in which the post-blast radiation has produced bizarre mutations like talking dogs, intelligent rats and ‘evolved’ humans with highly developed skills.
Meanwhile, circling the earth, the lonely astronaut Walt Dangerfield is still in orbit seven years after the conflagration, growing weaker by the day but faithfully maintaining his broadcasts to the survivors. With enough supplies to last for several years, Dangerfield, with his avuncular homespun humour, is a purveyor of hope, an orbiting disc jockey /town crier, connecting the disparate and far-flung communities as he relays messages, survival tips, recipes and advice on how to rebuild civilisation.
Down on the surface, the ‘evolved’ humans are not always (or even often) tolerated, but in the case of Hoppy Harrington, the community of Marin County is prepared to overlook his ‘otherness’ because of his extraordinary technical skills. Born with no arms and no legs, Harrington is embittered and scarred from the discrimination he had encountered in the pre-war world, but finds his own peculiar niche after the bombs have dropped. A humble TV repair man before the conflict, he becomes a brilliant and indispensable mechanic, developing his own personalised servomechanism technology, along with his incredible gift of telekinesis. These skills and powers make him one of the most feted, then feared, people in the country. As his influence and capriciousness grows, we start to realise that his ultimate goal is to dominate first Marin County and then the rest of what remains of the United States.
When Walt Dangerfield starts to experience symptoms of an unknown medical condition, his listeners are worried, mindful of the fact that they rely on his transmissions to maintain some sense of continuity with the old world. We assume the astronaut to be ill, or perhaps a hypochondriac, until we discover that he is actually under psychic attack from the increasingly powerful Harrington, who has not only mastered Dangerfield’s voice and idiom, but has developed the ability to run the equipment in the orbiting satellite by remote control.
In a typical Dickian twist, Harrington meets his nemesis in the unlikely form of Bill Keller, a sentient foetus living inside his seven year old sister, Edie. Bill experiences life and interprets it through dialogue not only with his sibling, but with the spirit world. He can communicate with the dead, read the thoughts and feelings of others and has the ability to envisage future events. As the story develops, so does his yearning for an independent life; he begins to perfect a technique for leaving his sister’s body in order to ‘occupy’ living beings. After a couple of false starts, he finally gets his wish to see, hear and feel for himself when he transfers briefly into the body of an owl and then, at the climax of the novel, into another human being.
Because his mental health was not always entirely robust, it has been claimed that Philip K Dick didn’t merely write about ideas that he dreamed up; perhaps, some folk believe, he wrote about things that he actually experienced, or thought he experienced, in his everyday life. For those who subscribe to that theory, the fact that he had a twin sister who died after only a few weeks will be considered significant to the plot of this novel. However we analyse it, it is clear that when Dick is on his A-game, he can cram more ideas into one book than some writers stretch over an entire career. He is a deep thinker on a variety of themes: artificial life, parallel universes, theology, metaphysics and, above all else, the illusory nature of ‘reality’.
And by that, I don’t mean reality. Philip K Dick’s ‘realities’, you see, are always in inverted commas.
Are we just the converted? I’d go for the stories, a scanner Darkly, Man in the High Castle and take it from there
There is a collection of 13 early PKD short stories taken from old pulp magazines, which are now out of copyright and available as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Philip+K.+dick
There is a recurring idea in some of his stories where people are plagued by tiny little flying advertising nanobots, like insects, that follow you around hassling you.
In at least one story it is perfectly legal to shoot them.