On Feb 21, 2005, at 5:08 AM, G. D. Akin wrote:
I hadn't read much of PKD before this class. He's quite good! At least his
short stories are. I was reading "Fair Game" in bed last night. My wife
came in and asked me why I was laughing so hard.
Always a fun question to be asked when one is in bed.
PKD wrote *very* fast; he cranked out something like 40 novels in his career, and died just as his work was becoming a bit more recognized.
Characteristics of his fiction are mistrust of authority and inability to say with certainty what is really happening in a given character's life. There's a heavy undercurrent of paranoia; a surreal scene from _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ takes place in an android-duplicated police station that's meant to be indistinguishable from the "real" thing.
His later works start exploring the philosophy of deity. After reading _Divine Invasion_, _VALIS_ and _The Transmigration of Timothy Archer_ in the early 90s, I found most of what was presented in _The Matrix_ to be actually predictable. PKD went Gnostic for a while and evidently had an episode wherein he thought a pink beam of light spoke to him abut the secrets of the cosmos. Later still he seemed to question the authenticity of that event. A lot of the ideas in his fiction seem to be based in a moderately schizophrenic and/or paranoid and/or manic depressive outlook.
Compelling reading, but his product was not consistent. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's possible to get your mitts on one of the less-stellar books of his and wonder why he's got the fan base he has.
Let's see -- I'd probably recommend _The Man in the High Castle_, the aforementioned _Androids_ and possibly _VALIS_ or maybe _UBIK_ to get a sense of the range of his writings in novel form; for shorts, check out "The Pre-Persons", "Minority Report" and "Second Variety" (the latter made into the movie _Screamers_). Also "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale", which turned into _Total Recall_.
("The Pre-Persons" was his means of protesting abortion; it's the story of several kids trying to avoid being taken away -- if they're caught, they're retroactively aborted. It's a fairly powerful story.)
Gary Sinise was in a sleeper called _Impostor_ that was based on a PKD short. After _Blade Runner_ it's my favorite text-to-screen adaptation; it stayed fairly true to the story and its ending was *not* the same one PKD wrote -- but it would, I think, have met with his approval.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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