Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 27)

by Christopher Palmer

Once the sole possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films Blade Runner and Minority Report shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. Philip K Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily
more ingenious and chal

Genres: Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2003

Reviews

[AlastairWatts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Palmer writes clearly and with great lucidity and wit. He also demonstrates delightful concern for the stories and novels under consideration; this elevates the analysis and the conlusions reached above much of the other criticisms of Dick's writings that I've yet encountered. I heartily commend this book to fans of Dick and students looking for insights into P.K.D's work.

[Abbie]

"My guess is that disciplines that are populated by smart, well-educated people who are good readers but are nevertheless characterized by crummy, turgid, verbose, abstruse, abstract, solecism-ridden prose, are usually part of a discipline where the vector of meaning—as a way to get information or opinion from me to you—versus writing, as a form of dress or speech or style [...] that signals that 'I am a member of this group,' gets thrown off." --David Foster Wallace