Dick, Philip K. Books

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

Philip K. Dick

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

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.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick

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Total reviews: 213 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world."
--John Brunner
THE INSPIRATION FOR BLADERUNNER. . .
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time.
By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . .
They even built humans.
Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.
Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.
"[Dick] sees all the sparkling and terrifying possibilities. . . that other authors shy away from."
--Paul Williams
Rolling Stone

Valis

Philip K. Dick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 95 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

PKD's finest book in my opinion 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is Phillip K. Dick's finest novel in my opinion. He wrote it at what I think was the peak of his artistic abilities: he has freed himself from the confines of traditional science fiction ("The Game Players of Titan" and "Time Out of Joint", two good novels from earlier in his career, both suffer from trying to fit into a standard sci-fi model), while also becoming much more comfortable with his style and with himself.

VALIS is a semi-biographical story. The first time I read this novel, it hit me so hard that I literally felt drunk for about a week. I have never had a book affect me like that; it literally stunned and dazed me. Over the years, I make a point of re-reading VALIS about once a year. Each time I read it, I get a different feel for the book, as I personally grow and mature as a person. This book provided me with insights into spirituality and religion that I never got for any other source, and opened my mind to less mainstream views on these topics.

If you are a PKD fan, this book is a must (along with the other 2 books in the VALIS series [not sequels, just in the same theme], "The Devine Invasion" and "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer"). The only book of PKD's that compares in quality is "A Scanner Darkly" (which also had a significant impact on me). If you are not a PKD fan, I also recommend this book, but keep in mind that it is not representative of his overall body of work.

J.Ja

Editorial Review:

The first of Dick's three final novels (the others are Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). Known as science fiction only for lack of a better category, "Valis" takes place in our world and may even be semi-autobiographical. It is a fool's search for God, who turns out to be a virus, a joke, and a mental hologram transmitted from an orbiting satellite.

The proponent of the novel, Horselover Fat, is thrust into a theological quest when he receives communion in a burst of pink laser light. From the cancer ward of a bay area hospital to the ranch of a fraudulent charismatic religious figure who turns out to have a direct com link with God, Dick leads us down the twisted paths of Gnostic belief, mixed with his own bizarre and compelling philosophy. Truly an eye opening look at the nature of consciousness and divinity.

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 2)

Philip K. Dick

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.

This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955. These fascinating stories include We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, The Cookie Lady, The World She Wanted, and many others.

"A useful acquisition for any serious SF library or collection". -- Kirkus Reviews

"The collected stories of Philip K. Dick is awe inspiring". -- The Washington Post

"More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds". -- Wall Street Journal

The Philip K. Dick Reader

Philip K. Dick

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

His religions, psychoses, divorces, and drug use aside, Philip K. Dick changed the face of American science fiction with his mind-bending writing. There may be readers who have only heard of him as the mind behind Blade Runner (based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). But even casual PKD fans should take a look at these 24 short stories, among them, "Second Variety," from which the movie Screamers was made, and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," basis of the Schwarzenegger film Total Recall. Other standouts include "The Turning Wheel," "The Last of the Masters," "Tony and the Beetles," and "The Minority Report." Readers will recognize PKD's trademark themes: capitalism and the American dream run amok, a disquieting loss of ability to distinguish friends from enemies, and humans versus machines.

Since Philip K. Dick's heyday, and thanks in large part to his influence, the contemporary science fiction short story has evolved into a form more self-reflective and psychologically complex. This is a wonderful development, to be sure. But don't regard the older stories in this collection as dated. Instead, enjoy the peppery punch: PKD's stories provide plenty of plot twists and surprise endings. --Bonnie Bouman

Ubik

Philip K. Dick

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Total reviews: 103 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Nobody but Philip K. Dick could so successfully combine SF comedy with the unease of reality gone wrong, shifting underfoot like quicksand. Besides grisly ideas like funeral parlors where you swap gossip for the advice of the frozen dead, Ubik (1969) offers such deadpan farce as a moneyless character's attack on the robot apartment door that demands a five-cent toll:

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."

Chip works for Glen Runciter's anti-psi security agency, which hires out its talents to block telepathic snooping and paranormal dirty tricks. When its special team tackles a big job on the Moon, something goes terribly wrong. Runciter is killed, it seems--but messages from him now appear on toilet walls, traffic tickets, or product labels. Meanwhile, fragments of reality are timeslipping into past versions: Joe Chip's beloved stereo system reverts to a hand-cranked 78 player with bamboo needles. Why does Runciter's face appear on U.S. coins? Why the repeated ads for a hard-to-find universal panacea called Ubik ("safe when taken as directed")?

The true, chilling state of affairs slowly becomes clear, though the villain isn't who Joe Chip thinks. And this is Dick country, where final truths are never quite final and--with the help of Ubik--the reality/illusion balance can still be tilted the other way. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Philip K. Dick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 63 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Best if read twice 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The plot will have you guessing throughout, but always guessing wrong. The reader always guesses consistent with his own prejudiced conception of reality; he's over-matched by the mind-blowing stuff Dick throws at him. Seasoned readers of Dick are perhaps an exception. If you're new to Dick, I suggest re-reading the book a second time, especially if you have to fully "get it" it to be satisfied.

Dick probes the profound mystery of personal identity and its particularly effective because it's set against the backdrop of a neo-Stasi, dystopian America. In this world, existence means a dossier, an ID card, a micro-transmitters, etc. It's inconceivable that existence remains undocumented. Nevertheless, as Jason Taverner proves, it is possible -- somehow! We ought to take note of the implications of this type of society considering the Real ID Act of 2005 will soon require us all to carry National ID cards.

The finale of the story is very provocative and satisfying. I adored all the female characters in the book -- they were all so colorful.

Altogether, and satisfying and trippy read!

Editorial Review:

Stunningly plausible in its portrayal of a neo-fascist America, where everyone informs on everyone else, this Orwellian novel bores deeply into the bedrock of the self--and plants dynamite at its center. "Fifty or a hundred years from now, (Dick's) world will stand alone on its own terms."--Norman Spinrad.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Philip K. Dick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 64 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Difficult but interesting once you grok it 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Working through the nature of reality and illusion, this story is set in a future that is anything but Utopian. Earth is going through a "fire" age and a human can not survive more than a few seconds outside during daylight; this has forced humanity to spend all daylight hours in a warren of buildings and tunnels. Additionally, a draft is set up to send humans out to the colonies on Mars and various asteroids. These colonies are living at subsistence level and the colonists there are invariably hooked on a drug called Can-D, that allows them to live in an illusory world populated by Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walt. They use miniature items to create these worlds; these "mins" are provided by the same company that supplies the illegal Can-D, which is run by Leo Bulero.

However when the famous explorer Palmer Eldritch returns from his trip to Proxa, he brings with him some lichen, with which he creates a product called Chew-Z - a legal alternative to Can-D. This is a more potent drug that allows people to create their own universes, without needing the mins. However, what most do not know is that all these universes are controlled by Eldritch. Is Palmer still human, or did something else come back in his place?

Playing onto our worst nightmares - namely those in which we continually think we've awakened, only to find we're still inside the nightmare - this story keeps you guessing as to what is real and what is hallucination. It is difficult to explain too much of the plot without giving away key elements that will spoil the story, which is why I've stuck mainly to what is given in the editorial review or on the book cover. However, I found the story to be very much in the lines of a typical Philip K. Dick story - twisted and convoluted. Well worth the read, however. My copy of the story is part of am omnibus, Counterfeit Unrealities (contains Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [aka Blade Runner], The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), which title describes the overall topic of this story, at least, very well. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Editorial Review:

Godlike--or perhaps Satanic--takeover artists and corporate psychics wage marketing battles for the human soul in this wildly disorienting funhouse of a novel.

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Philip K. Dick was a master of science fiction, but he was also a writer whose work transcended genre to examine the nature of reality and what it means to be human. A writer of great complexity and subtle humor, his work belongs on the shelf of great twentieth-century literature, next to Kafka and Vonnegut. Collected here are twenty-one of Dick's most dazzling and resonant stories, which span his entire career and show a world-class writer working at the peak of his powers.

In "The Days of Perky Pat," people spend their time playing with dolls who manage to live an idyllic life no longer available to the Earth's real inhabitants. "Adjustment Team" looks at the fate of a man who by mistake has stepped out of his own time. In "Autofac," one community must battle benign machines to take back control of their lives. And in "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," we follow the story of one man whose very reality may be nothing more than a nightmare. The collection also includes such classic stories as "The Minority Report," the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie, and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," the basis for the film Total Recall. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick is a magnificent distillation of one of American literature's most searching imaginations.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Philip K. Dick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The long search 4 out of 5 stars.
21 of 23 people found this review helpful.

Angel Archer is in distress. The three people she has loved the most in the world are all dead: her husband Jeff, her father-in-law Timothy, her best friend Kirsten. At a lecture given by Edgar Barefoot (a character based on that of Alan Watts) she reflects:"It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you.." Barefoot later tells her that the point is to eat the sandwich, the rest doesn't really matter. Philip K Dick's book is the story of how Angel comes to the point where she can eat that sandwich.

Angel is disillusioned by many things. By her education ("I graduated from Cal. I lived in Berkeley. I read The Remembrance of Things Past and I remember nothing.") By concepts ("Like the medieval realists, Tim believed that words were actual things. If you could put it into words, it was de facto true. This is what cost him his life.")

Timothy is the opposite. He knows things. He knows the Holy Ghost is the Hebrew ruah, the female spirit or breath of Yahweh. He knows 'If I have all the eloquence of men or angels but speak without love I am just a gong sounding or a cymbal clashing'. He knows he can hold heretical beliefs and take a mistress and get away with both. The charismatic bishop gives life to all the people around him. But as the newly discovered Zadokite documents are published and translated, the cornerstone to his assurance, his faith, is lost. He believes that if the sayings of Jesus are merely quotations from the sayings of another teacher who lived 200 years earlier, then Jesus cannot be the son of god, the gospels cannot be inspired literature and the Christan church cannot be the one true faith. His faith is built on concepts: once one falls, the rest fall too, like a house of cards. Desperately, Timothy seeks another faith to fill the gap. For a while he becomes a spiritualist, believing he has been contacted by his dead son Jeff. Then he believes that if he can find the anokhi, the process whereby the early Christians partook of the Eucharist and became one with Christ, he will find answers which will resolve his doubts. The Zadokite Documents imply that anokhi was a real substance, which believers consumed, a kind of magic mushroom. If Timothy can find and take that mushroom he will be saved. He flies to Israel, drives ill-equipped into the desert, and dies.

Angel has always taken drugs. Now, in her grief, she has come to earth. To help her she has Bill, who can't follow concepts but who can give her affection. And Barefoot, who knows that death and life are two parts of one whole, and that focusing on being in each moment granted us is the closest we can reach to purity in this life. Pondering on the life and death of Timothy, Angel begins to find meaning in each, comes to understand that it was necessary for him to die and her to suffer so she can find some form of resolution, and with it, some form of wisdom.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (published 1982) was Philip K Dick's last work, and one of his best written and well-organised (Dick's 12 'mainstream' novels are much more carefully written than his SF stories). Dick's book comes with a bibliography and references to Aeschylus, Plato, Dante, Donne and Yeats among others.

Philip K Dick is best known for his novels The Man in the High Castle (published in 1962, awarded the SF Hugo award 1963) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (published 1968, the basis for the 1982 film Blade Runner). It is generally accepted that Dick is a great science fiction writer. Stanislaw Lem says in his essays Microworlds (1984) that there are only three science fiction writers: H G Wells, Dick and the Strugatsky brothers. The rest are adventure story writers. It is possible to turn this assertion on its head and say that these three writers are not science fiction writers at all. This fussing about labels is not as trivialising as it sounds. How we classify a writer, for instance, controls what preconceptions we bring to their work, and whom we compare them to, what context we see them in. Dick's work does not fit easily into the science fiction mould, nor into that of the 'novel': romantic, experimental or post-structuralist. He belongs to a tradition that includes Aristophanes, Lucian of Samosata, Grimmelshausen, Swift, Gogol, Kafka, Orwell, Hasek, Samuel Becket, Nabokov, Simenon, Borges. These are all 'respectable' authors, but are they novelists? Or science fiction writers? Dick will be appreciated best, and given his true stature, if seen as part of this stream of fiction.

All these writers, including Dick, express unease, self-doubt, even paranoia as a response to the society in which they live. They satirise, express cynicism, look for some more 'eternal' structure where ideals and values are more stable.

It is these concerns that unify Dick's work. "Second Variety" (1953) shows automated mechanisms taking over the conduct of a war for their own, non-human, purposes; in Mary and the Giant (1955, 1987) the titular character enters the alien world of adulthood and becomes an alien herself in order to survive; in Eye in the Sky (1957) a number of characters impose their own radically different 'reality' on others (what is real?); in Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959, 1975) characters' fantasies become realities to others; in The Man in the High Castle (1962) an alternative reality in which the Axis powers won WWII gives birth to a banned work of fiction in which the Allies were victorious - which is real?: more germane, conquest and control are shown as unreal and destructive values; in The Simulacra (1964) the President of the United States is one: is this fantasy or reality?; in The Penultimate Truth (1964) peace is declared, but not for the majority of the world's population, who are spurred on to greater efforts by a televised simulation of war; in "We can remember it for you wholesale" (1966) memories are implanted, we cease to be what we remember; in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) machines become more human than humans, and have the same existential problems (what is human?); in A Scanner Darkly (1977) reality is distorted by a drug, and the drug is called death, which we all have to take; in Valis (1981) god searches for man just as man searches for god and one of these is a science fiction writer called Philip K Dick: the question asked is, is this real or is it science fiction?; in The Divine Invasion (1981) god forgets who he is and is healed by his feminine part so he can heal the world.

The progression from distrust of political manipulation, fear of alienation caused by mechanical and electronic substitutes for the senses, paranoia and 'reality fluctuations' caused by drugs taken to deal with these fears, doubts caused by unrestrained metaphysical speculation ending in a powerful need for a healing resolution fuel the works Dick wrote between 1956 and 1982.

More important than what form of fiction Dick wrote is the realisation that he was a gnostic, one who sought for (and found) hidden knowledge. But he was a very strange kind of gnostic, one who expressed his wisdom in pulp fiction.

Editorial Review:

Loosely based on the story of Bishop James Pike, Dick's last novel tells of an erudite man of the cloth whose faith is shaken by the suicides of his son and mistress, and then transformed by his bizarre quest for the identity of Christ.