Sure there must be some fellow ‘dickheads’ here.
Reason why I’m posting this is that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is currently a 99p last minute deal on Amazon UK (link attached).
While I prefer the five volumes of PKD’s collected short stories over his novels, Androids is one of his more accessible longer works and was the basis for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
If you’ve never read any Biggus Dickus, this might just be the kick up the arse your bookshelf needs during these dark, dystopian times (and times don’t get much darker or more dystopian than they do in Androids).
On the subject of Kindle Deals, anyone know if mousey is OK as he’s not posted his regular monthly update yet.
Hi @jaygee its moles not mousey with the Kindle updates and am fine, one coming. Big PKD fan – contemplating restarting the canon again in 2021 in order of writing – determined by Lawrence Sutin’s very fine biography. Cosmic Puppets first, Transmigration of Timothy Archer some 40-odd novels later. I agree the short stories are on the whole better than the scifi novels, which themselves are better than his mainstream literary novels which manage to be extra-ordinarily dull. And God Tier, as my kids would say, would belong to anyone who’s waded through the 800-odd pages of the Exegesis as edited by superfan Jonathan Lethem, whose The Arrest I reviewed here recently and is in many ways a homage to the PKD of Dr Bloodmoney.
Kindle update later today: spoiler alert, December is not a great month.
Sorry for the mix up, Mosley!
Anyway glad to hear you are OK and that your monthly update is coming. From the length of your list, it’s obvious you’re a much bigger PKD fan than I am. Given that it’s been 20 years since I ploughed through the stories, I really should give them one last run through.
WIth Brexit on the way and Ireland likely to get shafted every which way in the fall out, I bought quite a few Kindle deals this month. Would imagine you would probably have them in your list but if not I’ll drop by later to add ’em to the mix
I read the Palmer Eldritch Stigmata tome many years ago and felt a little weirded out – in a kind of twisted and enjoyable fashion – by the end of it.
Obv I know of the Blade Runner source, but love the film(s) – and the PC game! – so much I have no desire to read the inspiration, so if I want to read another PKD work – and I do – what would you recommend?
I’d go for the short stories he churned out at – and often on – great speed for the pulps in the 40s and 50s, the vast majority of which are positively fizzing with ideas. As a writer, he was a genuine one-off and it was only when the technology became available to directors like Ridley Scott that the world was able to catch up with him.
While his characters in the stories tend to be a bit two-dimensional, it doesn’t really matter as the dystopian vision and imagined realities that underpin each yarn are just so thought-provoking as titles like “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” attest.
Not sure if the three volumes of stories up on Amazon Kindle (link below) contains all the stories from the full set of five volumes that I picked up in the early 90s, but at £3.99 for one 400+-page ebook containing 25 classic stories, it’s worth a punt.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Philip+K+DIck+Collected+Stories&i=digital-text&ref=nb_sb_noss
I would start with any of these:
Martian Time-Slip
Ubik
We Can Build You
Now Wait For Last Year
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Man In The High Castle
Time Out Of Joint
And late period drugs/paranoia masterpiece A Scanner Darkly (not really scifi).
Thanks for those suggestions. Like Vulpes, I also have read Palmer Eldritch and I was quite taken with it. I’ve also read Ubik and that is also pleasantly weird. I then tried A Scanner Darkly and couldn’t really get into it, although I loved the film.
Thanks folks – I’ll follow up for Christmas reading. I’m currently on a David Raker (Tim Weaver’s series) jag, so some sci-fi will be a good place to go next.
BTW – last year I really enjoyed the first of the ‘Altered Carbon’ series, which I thought had a very strong PKD feel; do you know the books? Are the later yarns as good as the first?
Free PKD pulp shorts for your reading device on the Project Gutenberg site.
A good taster for those who are unfamiliar with his stuff.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=philip+k+dick&submit_search=Search
Oooh, good call – I’ll grab a couple to try – straight to Google Drive. Thanks!
Another PKD fan here. The thing is I have never read `The Man In The High Castle` but have seen the TV series.
@moseleymoles & @Jaygee how does the TV series compare to the book?
It’s notably shorter on long tresses, explosions and chases than the TV series – which I thought was great but basically just took the premise of the book and built an entirely new plot.
There is much more detail on the shabbiness of the post-WW2 West Coast, way more i ching and a somewhat diffuse plot. It has in spades the ‘PKD effect’ which is a sense of unease or vertigo as he gets you to question whether the world around us is as solid, fixed or inevitable as we think. Referred to by @vulpes-vulpes above.
Thanks @moseleymoles.
“The PKD effect”! I like it.
By any chance, have you read a biography of Dick called something like “I am Alive and you are Dead”? Strangely, I have read that and I haven’t really read that many of his novels. I really enjoyed it. I think it was originally written in French and translated to English maybe? Anyway, it has a real continental feeling directness and brevity – it is also a bit unusual in that it takes his hallucinations at face value (ie: “In 1955 Phil pulled a light cord and realised it was previously a light switch, so the universe had changed around him….”) then as you read on you find yourself getting pulled into his world as he gets obsessed with Jesus and the Roman Empire and all that. Reading it feels like getting brainwashed into a weird cult!