There are set of authors/artist who rely heavily on their "visions" and use these as a source materials. Philip K. Dick is one of these visionaries(Exegesis, VALIS). Also some other that come to mind are William Blake, Carl Gustav Jung(Seven sermons to the dead, Red book). Maybe even Robert Anton Wilson with his Cosmic Trigger book.
I wouldn't really say that Philip K. Dick relied heavily on his visions.
He was a prolific writer well before he had his visions. You could say he used visions as source material, but I think it is more accurate to way the he used writing to try to make sense out of his visions.
If you like this, have a look at some issues of the Ansible fanzine - https://news.ansible.uk/ - in particular the section titled Thog's Masterclass.
The latest issue has this sterling example : "I nodded at her and walked toward the suite door, feeling her eyes like ice cubes sliding down my back all the way out."
This can easily be a realistic description of a paranoid schizophrenic train of thought. It is interesting to contemplate Dick had a psychotic event in 1974 but this text is from 1953.
Honestly, practically everything from the Phillip K. Dick reader is a gem. Other favorites of mine include Fair Game, The Golden Man, Tony And the Beetles, Foster You're Dead, War Veteran, The Chromium Fence, and Second Variety. Truly crazy how ahead of their time some of these concepts were for the 1950s. (Of course, The Eyes Have It is just more of a little joke.)
He's poking fun at government bureaucracy. You tell them there's an alien invasion and they send you their latest helpful brochure. In other words totally ignore you and instead perform some default function.
So... it's a short story about a man recounting a book he read that claims aliens are invading the earth while describing a selfless alien woman who donates her body-parts to other people and the story ends with him playing Monopoly... I don't see a story here.
I know Philip K. Dick is a celebrated author, so I assume my not-getting-it problem is all-me - can someone please explain it to me?
The book isn't about aliens, it's an entirely normal book. The main character just interprets every phrase relating to a body part literally, and thinks it's talking about aliens. It's just a humorous short story, not a whole lot to it beyond that.
Philip K. Dick is having a little fun with a badly written paperback story or novel he must have found somewhere, and writing a cool science fiction story out of it. It is humor.
From the preface: "A little whimsy, now and then, makes for good balance. Theoretically, you could find this type of humor anywhere. But only a topflight science-fictionist, we thought, could have written this story, in just this way…."
Don’t read it so literally. Lots of ways to interpret it. Cultural relativism, correlation vs causation, overconfidence, conclusions in isolation, etc. I think it drags in just a bit too long but it did make me chuckle.
Only in jurisdictions where copyright has expired. For most works, just assume that it is copyrighted somewhere and that you need to figure out how and where before you derive your own work (e.g., a translation) from it.
Project Gutenberg will give you some hints to its status, but it is not exhaustive:
> This etext was produced from Science Fiction Stories 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
That is, there is always a risk that some troll will pop up one day claiming it holds the copyrights for a certain work. If you are not backed by a publisher who can handle the legal stuff, than your safest bet it to stick with much older works (generally pre-1900, but weird exceptions seem to exist in some countries). If you are only concerned with US law, pre-1926 is safe.
I dropped my Kindle in water a few months ago and picked up a new Kobo to replace it. Pretty happy with it (and it's supposedly waterproof too) although the plastic does feel cheap sometimes. The ability to add books via drag-and-drop (like a regular USB drive) is super helpful. Otherwise I also recommend using Calibre for book management.
I bought an off-brand eink reader (there are a number of them, but I got a Boyue Likebook and run KOReader on it) and load Project Gutenberg books through Calibre.
I was very very into PKD at one point, so much so that I had been in correspondence with his wife about rare books. I say this to convey ersatz authority on the subject, and I 100% agree with this comment. Ubik is fantastic, and quite hard to read. I’ll add a few more bangers, Flow My Tears, Radio Free Albemuth, Dr. Bloodmoney, and The Zap Gun.
Whilst reading Dr. Bloodmoney I had an eerie feeling that I had read some of those exact passages before. I was certain I had not read Dr. Bloodmoney. I had a true Dickian experience of questioning reality.
I persist in remembering The Zap Gun as being about a gun that, when the trigger is pulled, makes whatever it points at never to have existed. No one ever knows why they just used it.
But I also believe that isn't what it was at all, but cannot bring to mind what it really did.
> The Zap Gun as being about a gun that, when the trigger is pulled, makes whatever it points at never to have existed. No one ever knows why they just used it.
Like but not like Iain M. Banks' Lazy Guns [0]. When you pulled their triggers, literally anything could happen to the target, ranging IIRC from a cartoon anvil dropping on their head to a devastating volcanic eruption. Again IIRC, they weighed more when held upside down.
Once i was talking with Michael Kandel how he translated that passage, particularly the list of nonexisting things that begin with N. "I just made that up," he said.
After it was used on certain objects, enough of the past would change that it wouldn't have been invented anymore. In the extreme case, the Earth, moon, or sun, but likewise many antique artifacts.
It is similar to the reasoning about unstable existence of any time machine that can send you back to before it was made.
Also: after you use it, you are not even holding it anymore, and don't know you used it. You most likely have no reason anymore to want to use it, so it is in a drawer sonewhere.
Obviously if you cannot remember what the Zap gun does, you must have used it.
That said what I recall was that the main character was a weapons designer for coalition of western countries that had some name to signify they were an amalgamation of the US and Western Europe.
Weapons were designed but never used, they were designed to be destroyed thereby keeping the peace. There was also a similar designer for the communist bloc of countries, old USSR China amalgamation.
It turns out there is a comic book writer / artist in some African country that has been producing comics with their designs before even done. This threatens to collapse the whole clown show. I think there is a comic with the Zap Gun, nobody knows what it does, and neither of the weapons designers have thought it up on their own.
Wikipedia agrees with most of my description - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun however the Comic artist is a mad Italian, and it says that they draw the weapons designs telepathically from the comic book, which is true but is not known at the beginning.
An alien invasion is involved evidently, which I still have not memory of. The probably brainwiped me, darn aliens, when they took over the Earth.
I really loved reading Ubik. I seriously had trouble putting it down. But when I got to the ending. Well... I don't want to spoil anything but, is it just me or does it not make any sense if you really think about it? I did some research into the ending and the most satisfying conclusion I found was that was just the PKD surrealist style? Ubik is the only book I've read by him.
> Well... I don't want to spoil anything but, is it just me or does it not make any sense if you really think about it?
That's essentially the point of the ending, yeah. Well, less so that "it doesn't make sense" and more "actually, it's entirely unclear what is even going on".
Reality is slippery -- at the very moment you think you've got a grip on what's going on, it jumps out of your hands.
You'll see this same theme reflected in many of his other books, if you end up reading and more.
> actually, it's entirely unclear what is even going on
That's a good way of putting it and it does fit the theme of the book. I just spent a bit thinking about the ending again and while it's not any clearer I do like it more now.
I first read Ubik while on a coach (next to the loo) driving down from Edinburgh to London whilst suffering from from sleep deprivation and travel sickness - it made a lot of sense to me at the time! Almost as much as reading the Illuminatus trilogy when I was bed-ridden with a terrible dose of flu!
But seriously, Ubik is a great book - one of Dick's best.
>I don't want to spoil anything but, is it just me or does it not make any sense if you really think about it?
Most fiction doesn't make any sense if you really think about it, much less Science Fiction, much less Science Fiction in which Reality mutates unrecognizably several times in the course of the book.
It's a recurring theme, and IMO one of his strengths. Once the characters find out about the malleability and subjectivity of reality, or once they enter some drug trip, they are never again sure if they've properly returned.
Dick was a fantastic writer. Noone can alienate me like he can.
You might take some comfort that the ending works a little differently in the screenplay version PKD wrote later so that it makes more conventional 'sense'. Even the author had second thoughts about it. Whether it's really better that way is a debatable point.
I read ubik early in my science fiction journey and found it very bad. I read 200 sf books and then opened ubik again years later. This is the die hard of science fiction. a fantastic book like no other in SF but that takes all its greatness once you get to know better SF.
I've read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, A Scanner Darkly, and a collection of his short stories and while he's a very good author, I just find the spirit of his work so depressing. I don't want to read more.
"A Scanner Darkly" is dedicated to his many close friends that suffered or died as a result of drug use. I think there is this heartbreaking dedication at the end of the novel, with the names of his friends and how they ended.
Yet the book is full of subtle humor, and a profound understanding of individuals' tragedy at the same time.
There is a great movie made after the novel, with the same name. The movie does capture the spirit of the book, even as switching the medium, a noteworthy achievement.
The book in particular really opened my mind to the idea that illicit drug economies and anti-drug police activity are ultimately symbiotic, forming a system that consumes lives. And nothing else that I've read has conveyed so vividly the confusion and powerlessness one can feel in a life of addiction to hard drugs, caught up in that system.
Reality copied his worlds and now they seem overwrought. Just like how Tolkien made all kinds of stuff everyone copied, and now you get people with no historical perspective calling him a hack for being derivative.
Like most famous sci-fi writers, Phillip K. Dick likely worried about the things he wrote about and hoped technologists would take it as advice against when faced with the same choices as the people in the stories.
VALIS is a full-fledged acid trip. There are pages where the narrative changes perspective so harshly it can break your brain. Recommend the trip regardless.
Not to mention the additional level introduced by the fact that VALIS is pseudo-autobiographical.
e.g., remember when Horselover Fat gets beamed secret information from a faraway satellite through a pink light to his forehead? Or when he learns we are secretly still living in first century Rome? Both things that PKD actually believed happened to him.
The lucidity with which PKD explored his mental illness in VALIS is pretty extraordinary.
It's just brain-breaking on so many levels. I often had to re-read couple of pages back to decypher what the hell was going on. But still in all that madness remains a certain lucidity and clarity.
I used to have this perspective, but then I read a quote or excerpt in which PKD says he was surprised that people find his work hopeless or depressing, because he intends his work to be hopeful.
I reflected on this and realised that he's right. In his stories the hero often courageously penetrates through the facade and gets to the truth of things. What's more, there is generally an objective truth underneath the facade. It's not turtles all the way down. There is a reasonable explanation and once the hero figures it out they manage to take some control of their own destiny.
He was a depressed and haunted man, and almost certainly suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness. Those aspects of himself were reflected in his works. Writing was a deeply personal thing for him, which you can see especially in The Exegesis (a collection of his journals published after he died, where he continuously grapples with the slipperiness of reality, the dark edges of his mind, and the absurdity of existence, just like his characters).
One of the most fascinating writers in history, I think, but can definitely be depressing to read sometimes.
It just seems like what is actually happening, the future we are getting. Mix in some Idiocracy and Infinite Jest and the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar and that’s what we have.
I made a spreadsheet of all of his books, and read everything my library had, which was about 70% of them. His early stuff is shlocky and gets tedious by the 10th book from that era. About 20% of his stuff is truly groundbreaking, the rest is ... boring.
The Crack In Space is the only Phillip K Dick book I have read. I found it on a bookshelf when I was maybe in middle school or early high school. I don't remember much about it, so I guess I did not find it memorable.
> I just find the spirit of his work so depressing
I don't. I think he paints up depressing worlds often, but there's also a spirit of perseverance, of ingenuity, of "life goes on". His characters are occasionally soldiers, but more often workers and everyday people doing their things. In a Nazi alt-history dystopia, he takes the time to explain how an antiquarian earns his living. [1]
In some dystopia were mankind loses a war against aliens, he makes the aliens sympathetic enough to give the remaining humans a fiction to believe in that will make them want to keep on living. The aliens are also quite forgiving and want to rebuild Earth after the war. [2]
When robots take over humanity, hidden in underground caves after a terrible war between the East and the West Blocs, they are actually hiding the fact they rebuilt the world and it's green and healthy, ready for us to re-enter it. [3]
When an alien invader supplants the horrible husband of the woman protagonist, she finds the alien is actually loving and caring, and prefers it to her husband. [4]
When a (possibly deranged) dog sees threats to the family it loves in everyday things, like the milkman or the garbage truck "stealing their garbage", it does this out of love and fierce loyalty -- however misplaced. [5] (or is it..?)
When an authoritarian interstellar military force wants to punish Earth for having ruined it all, those cheeky earthers invent an elusive rebel leader, Benny Cemoli, and pin all the blame on him; keeping the military force occupied chasing ghosts seemingly forever. [6]
When an underhanded authoritarian government is shaping up covertly in Callisto, Earth agents find the way to dismantle it -- and in the process, PKD shows his vision that there's no concept as absurd and easy to subvert as the concept of "a just war". The good guys win though. [7]
I agree PKD often imagined visions of dystopian hell, but he just as often offered nuggets of hope and everyday life. A bit like Bradbury, only more surreal.
----
[1] "The Man in the High Castle"
[2] "Precious Artifact"
[3] Can't remember the title of this one, sorry
[4] Also cannot remember the title. It was included as an episode of PKD's Electric Dreams.
Thanks for refreshing my memory! I was thinking of the short story "The Defenders", which Wikipedia tells me it inspired the novel "The Penultimate Truth".
I find most (maybe all?) of PKD's novels were born of a short story with the same theme.
Philip K Dick is my favourite author. I’ve read Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Pynchon, McCarthy, Gaddis, Beckett.. like I’m pretty familiar with classics and literature and have read loads of SF as well, but PKD remains my #1.
The best description of his over arching theme that I've heard was: he explored the slippery nature of reality.
Sure, he explored technology, the future, dystopias, and a number of other things. But the one concept he seemed to continue to return to was the idea that you can never truly know what's actually going on.
Similar admiration of PKD. I used to be an "addict literature reader" and have read most the books in the Classics section of a typical library. PDK is one of my top five authors, an author I've "finished" - read everything they published, and my favorites of his multiple times. I rank him with Joyce, Pynchon, Burroughs, and Hesse - the others in my top 5.
He was a prolific writer well before he had his visions. You could say he used visions as source material, but I think it is more accurate to way the he used writing to try to make sense out of his visions.
The latest issue has this sterling example : "I nodded at her and walked toward the suite door, feeling her eyes like ice cubes sliding down my back all the way out."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41562/41562-h/41562-h.htm
Very funny and worth reading in the New Yorker archives if you have a subscription.
I don't get this. Is this some other misunderstanding by the character?
So... it's a short story about a man recounting a book he read that claims aliens are invading the earth while describing a selfless alien woman who donates her body-parts to other people and the story ends with him playing Monopoly... I don't see a story here.
I know Philip K. Dick is a celebrated author, so I assume my not-getting-it problem is all-me - can someone please explain it to me?
I went back and read the italicized lines only. I got the joke now.
From the preface: "A little whimsy, now and then, makes for good balance. Theoretically, you could find this type of humor anywhere. But only a topflight science-fictionist, we thought, could have written this story, in just this way…."
Here's my trippy understanding.
> I had had enough of the thing. I want to hear no more about it. Let them come on. Let them invade Earth. I don’t want to get mixed up in it.
> I have absolutely no stomach for it.
The author is finally mutated and someone took his stomach as well ?
He did not realize it because, someone stole his brain ?
Daaaaang, I never considered that.
Project Gutenberg will give you some hints to its status, but it is not exhaustive:
> This etext was produced from Science Fiction Stories 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
That is, there is always a risk that some troll will pop up one day claiming it holds the copyrights for a certain work. If you are not backed by a publisher who can handle the legal stuff, than your safest bet it to stick with much older works (generally pre-1900, but weird exceptions seem to exist in some countries). If you are only concerned with US law, pre-1926 is safe.
See also: https://www.gutenberg.org/help/copyright.html
Update: uh, just saw it's so short.
It turns out I forgot I read A Terran Oddessy...
But I also believe that isn't what it was at all, but cannot bring to mind what it really did.
Like but not like Iain M. Banks' Lazy Guns [0]. When you pulled their triggers, literally anything could happen to the target, ranging IIRC from a cartoon anvil dropping on their head to a devastating volcanic eruption. Again IIRC, they weighed more when held upside down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_a_Dark_Background
It is similar to the reasoning about unstable existence of any time machine that can send you back to before it was made.
That said what I recall was that the main character was a weapons designer for coalition of western countries that had some name to signify they were an amalgamation of the US and Western Europe.
Weapons were designed but never used, they were designed to be destroyed thereby keeping the peace. There was also a similar designer for the communist bloc of countries, old USSR China amalgamation.
It turns out there is a comic book writer / artist in some African country that has been producing comics with their designs before even done. This threatens to collapse the whole clown show. I think there is a comic with the Zap Gun, nobody knows what it does, and neither of the weapons designers have thought it up on their own.
Don't remember much else.
An alien invasion is involved evidently, which I still have not memory of. The probably brainwiped me, darn aliens, when they took over the Earth.
This quote from Ubik perfectly reflects how I feel on a regular basis.
Reality is weird. What's even going on here, anyway? Perhaps we should just put our faith in Ubik. It's safe when taken as directed, of course.
That's essentially the point of the ending, yeah. Well, less so that "it doesn't make sense" and more "actually, it's entirely unclear what is even going on".
Reality is slippery -- at the very moment you think you've got a grip on what's going on, it jumps out of your hands.
You'll see this same theme reflected in many of his other books, if you end up reading and more.
That's a good way of putting it and it does fit the theme of the book. I just spent a bit thinking about the ending again and while it's not any clearer I do like it more now.
But seriously, Ubik is a great book - one of Dick's best.
Most fiction doesn't make any sense if you really think about it, much less Science Fiction, much less Science Fiction in which Reality mutates unrecognizably several times in the course of the book.
Dick was a fantastic writer. Noone can alienate me like he can.
Yet the book is full of subtle humor, and a profound understanding of individuals' tragedy at the same time.
There is a great movie made after the novel, with the same name. The movie does capture the spirit of the book, even as switching the medium, a noteworthy achievement.
Like most famous sci-fi writers, Phillip K. Dick likely worried about the things he wrote about and hoped technologists would take it as advice against when faced with the same choices as the people in the stories.
e.g., remember when Horselover Fat gets beamed secret information from a faraway satellite through a pink light to his forehead? Or when he learns we are secretly still living in first century Rome? Both things that PKD actually believed happened to him.
The lucidity with which PKD explored his mental illness in VALIS is pretty extraordinary.
Have you read How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days?
Check it out
I reflected on this and realised that he's right. In his stories the hero often courageously penetrates through the facade and gets to the truth of things. What's more, there is generally an objective truth underneath the facade. It's not turtles all the way down. There is a reasonable explanation and once the hero figures it out they manage to take some control of their own destiny.
But it's very Star Trekky, full of hope of "doing better" even when failing at times, and much unlike everything else I've watched! And I love it!!
One of the most fascinating writers in history, I think, but can definitely be depressing to read sometimes.
I don't. I think he paints up depressing worlds often, but there's also a spirit of perseverance, of ingenuity, of "life goes on". His characters are occasionally soldiers, but more often workers and everyday people doing their things. In a Nazi alt-history dystopia, he takes the time to explain how an antiquarian earns his living. [1]
In some dystopia were mankind loses a war against aliens, he makes the aliens sympathetic enough to give the remaining humans a fiction to believe in that will make them want to keep on living. The aliens are also quite forgiving and want to rebuild Earth after the war. [2]
When robots take over humanity, hidden in underground caves after a terrible war between the East and the West Blocs, they are actually hiding the fact they rebuilt the world and it's green and healthy, ready for us to re-enter it. [3]
When an alien invader supplants the horrible husband of the woman protagonist, she finds the alien is actually loving and caring, and prefers it to her husband. [4]
When a (possibly deranged) dog sees threats to the family it loves in everyday things, like the milkman or the garbage truck "stealing their garbage", it does this out of love and fierce loyalty -- however misplaced. [5] (or is it..?)
When an authoritarian interstellar military force wants to punish Earth for having ruined it all, those cheeky earthers invent an elusive rebel leader, Benny Cemoli, and pin all the blame on him; keeping the military force occupied chasing ghosts seemingly forever. [6]
When an underhanded authoritarian government is shaping up covertly in Callisto, Earth agents find the way to dismantle it -- and in the process, PKD shows his vision that there's no concept as absurd and easy to subvert as the concept of "a just war". The good guys win though. [7]
I agree PKD often imagined visions of dystopian hell, but he just as often offered nuggets of hope and everyday life. A bit like Bradbury, only more surreal.
----
[1] "The Man in the High Castle"
[2] "Precious Artifact"
[3] Can't remember the title of this one, sorry
[4] Also cannot remember the title. It was included as an episode of PKD's Electric Dreams.
[5] "Roog"
[6] "If there were no Benny Cemoli"
[7] "The mold of Yancy"
I find most (maybe all?) of PKD's novels were born of a short story with the same theme.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/philip-k-dick/short-fictio...
The best description of his over arching theme that I've heard was: he explored the slippery nature of reality.
Sure, he explored technology, the future, dystopias, and a number of other things. But the one concept he seemed to continue to return to was the idea that you can never truly know what's actually going on.