Philip K. Dick discussion

My introduction to Philip K. Dick's books started in about early 2004 with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I read it because I am a big fan of Bladerunner. I bought Valis and A Scanner Darkly next, but only read about 50 pages of the latter.

I like PKD's ideas, but I'm not sure about how much I like his writing.

It's been four years since I've read his work, so its probably about time I revisit it.


DJ

I cried at the end of A Scanner Darkly. It was the first time I had cried at the end of a book since I read Of Mice and Men in 8th grade.

This was during my "read everything by PKD, no matter how bad" period, about 10 or so years ago.

It might be time to do some re-reading.

howdy cal... nice to hear from you.

Fawn (surely one of the most beautiful and intelligent women on the planet), handed me Confessions of a Crap Artist this week and i powered through it in a single night. my first PKD. i hear it's an unusual entry in his catalogue and i definitely dug it. i kinda agree with DJ in that the ideas and plotting and sheer strangeness of it all was great, but the writing was a bit ordinary. i'm a huge fan of weirdness presented in a very straight manner (a la bunuel), but, perhaps Confessions was a bit too ordinarily written... but, we'll see. i'm certainly intrigued enough to continue on.

i'd love to read High Castle with y'all. absolutely.

think i'm gonna pick up Valis and read it on my own. that whole trilogy sounds fascinating.

I have been reading pkd since he was still alive, with only a few stray books and stories that I have not been able to procure. Reading voices.. non scifi right now.

I swear his books change upon successive readings, so hang onto them and keep coming back.

My introduction to PKD was the great obituary written in Heavy Metal magazine by music critic Lou Stathis. one line in particular stuck with me: "By the late 1960s, Philip K. Dick had reached a level of paranoia that the rest of us are only beginning to comprehend." I knew I had to read this guy.

The first PKD book I picked up was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. (Nobody has mentioned that one - haha!) In retrospect I guess it's not the best starting point for the typical reader, but I have a soft spot for heresies and cognitive juxtapositions, both of which Phil delivered in spades. From then I was hooked.

Stephen said, "his books change upon successive readings" - and I agree.

Gents and Ladies, haven't read any Dick in a few years but I have to say that VALIS truly changed my life. The entire trilogy, actually, was quite moving for me.

I went on to read lots of PKD, including Electric Androids, Confessions of a Crap Artist, and Flow My Tears.

Around the same time I had finished the VALIS trilogy, I also read JKT's Confederacy of Dunces and funny thing, found similarity in the characters of Horselover Fat and Ignatious.

At any rater, happy to join the group and will be happy to get to re-reading some PKD.

Jason here, been a Dick fan for awhile and my first book was Volume One of the Collected Stories by Citadel.

It is good to "meet" you all. I am excited to read A Man in the High Castle for the first time with the group!

Hi all, My intro to PKD was a Scanner Darkly which I picked at random in the bookshop and read while ill on a holiday in a state of semi lucidity which fit the book perfectly. Just starting to read "Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep?" as the SCI FI book club are reading it this month and I bought it to read on my holiday next week...hopefully without the illness

Paul

I got introduced to Philip K. Dick by my boyfriend, who is an avid science fiction reader, this must have been about 2 or 3 years ago. The first book I read was either Blade Runner or A Scanner Darkly, I can't remember.
As I had to pick a subject for my final English term paper in High School, I decided on a subject that included PKD - and because my teacher did not know him at all, I was completely free in my choice and decided to write about how Dick's ideas became real in our world (or actually, in the 90ties).
I did not quite get started yet, because I wanted to do this during my summer vacations. So if anyone can think of anything that might help me with my term paper, please tell me :-)

Hey Paul, hey Marion, hey Matt. Thanks for posting! Its good to see the group liven up.

Marion, that sounds like an awesome paper! Oh, to be a student studying Philip K. Dick! Which books are you using for your report? His themes really vary from book to book.

Jason:
I decided to use his short stories because I found that most of his themes are elaborated more clearly in there. Maybe you know "How much does Chaos scare you?" by Aaron Barlow, this will be my main reference book.
If you are interested, I'll tell you more as soon as I know where I'll exactly be going :-)

Thanks Matthew :-)
I'll definitely have a look at those stories.

I read my first PKD novel, Time Out of Joint, when I was nine years old and it quite literally changed my mind. Since that time, I have read PKD and paid particular attention to his VALIS episode and subsequent ruminations about it. Ultimately, this sparked a rare opportunity for me and I was invited to write the VALIS/ Gnostic dialogue modules for Hanson Robotics' PKD android. I was allowed access to unpublished work and ultimately contributed a "catechism" of over 40 pages of Q & A relating to PKD's VALIS experiences of 2-3-1974. This was programmed into the robot along with variant questions and conversational forking paths. With due respect to our moderator, I would suggest that VALIS (the novel) goes far beyond identity confusion and paranoia to the beginnings of a cogent 20th century Christian Gnosticism with elements of prophecy. This is not to suggest that PKD didn't have problems with drugs and mental disorders, but from his massive, written self-analysis over subsequent years at least one functional system (among a great number of possibilities entertained) emerges with breathtaking ingenuity, rooted in older systems of thought and spirituality while remaining uniquely post-post-modern. Isolating this from the mass of PKD's written VALIS-related introspection and speculation took a lot of time and effort, but was an incredibly rewarding experience.

Sadly, I was only able to converse with the android once, in a meticulously recreated mock-up of PKD's 1974 digs, prior to its disappearance, due to a combination of mishap and airline inefficiency when the robit was in transit with its creator. The idea that the PKD android is out there, somewhere, like a robot hierophant with a systemitized "catechism" of Gnostic questions and answers in its head, is very much like something from the real PKD's work. I can't help but wonder in whose custody the android now resides and if that person (or persons) realizes what they have.

Anyway, cheers to a writer and intellect that we all presumably love. And thank you, Cal, for not only creating this group but for moderating it in an open-minded fashion.

Wow. That's awesome you joined this group! I'll have to read VALIS! How can I pass up an opportunity to discuss that here?! Maybe after we finish up with Man In the High Castle, we read VALIS?

Marion, I'm very much interested in hearing more about your story choices.

I've only read the first volume of collected shorts, recently, and some of my favorites from that one are:

The Nanny
The Defenders
Beyond Lies the Wub
The Preserving Machine

Hey there! Im Bridget, and if we could choose our own personal god, I would elect PKD as mine.

My introduction was supposed to be A Scanner Darkly, but it ended up being Three Stigmata because B & N was out and Stigmata looked amazing so I got it anyway. I first heard of Dick around 2000. I was reading an issue of Side-line Magazine (indsutrial music) and in it there was an interview with a band called Substanz-T (theyre German). One of the questions in the article was the obligatory "how did you come up with your name" question and they responded with describing A Scanner Darkly and that that was a drug (Substance-D in English) in the novel. I read that description and I just *had* to find out more about this author. I was going through a lot of crap in my life at the time so it took me a couple years before I actually went and sought it out.

After that, I think I must have read about 1 Dick a week and at this point Ive read 27 of his novels. Ive slowed down quite a bit lately to read some other things and also because once Ive read it all, thats it, theres no more to look forward to and I want to stretch the experience out as long as I can.

My favorites are: Now Wait For Last Year, Three Stigmata, Cosmic Puppets, The Man Who Japed, Ubik, and Eye In The Sky

Recently I finished reading Voices from the Street and it was INCREDIBLE! It did start off kinda slow, but it was an amazing "descent into madness" tale. I cant believe it was the last one (unless someone finds Time For George Stavros or Pilgrim On The Hill) to get published. Thats a sad sad thing. Im on to Mary and the Giant next.

Hey there,

As I posted there earlier, I did my senior thesis on PKD. It's finished now and waiting to be reviewed (maybe it has been already?) and as a legal fact I am not allowed to give any details about it until I have my grade, but if there are still some people here who are interested in it, I'll be glad to tell you some more about it.

Marion

Speaking of not-to-original usernames....ahem ^^

Marion, wow, thats a legality? Ineteresting. I can almost wrap my brain around that, but its pretty neat just learning that. Is that the case with any collegiate writings?

And yes btw, I am interested in knowing more about it/seeing it once you have your grade.

Ubik, seemingly, yes. Probably a bit like that ridiculous stipulate with the SAT essay prompts and so on. Don't know exactly why but I guess they just want to make sure I am not already uploading it to any homework website or something like that.
I can tell you the subject, after all: Philip K. Dick's reality theme analyzed in The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Sweet. Cant wait to hear/see more...

Haha, I doubt a Dick book will ever be presented on Oprah's show/chosen for her book club. And I equally doubt that my thesis will be that widely read to have such a great influence.

Hey y'all! I've been a Dick devotee for some seven years now, and recently have been on a serious Dick Kick (ha), thanks in part to the discovery of the Total Dickhead blog. (That's http://totaldickhead.blogspot.com for anyone interested.) I believe that my first foray into the PKDverse was Valis and nextly A Scanner Darkly. Or vice versa? Both of these novels grabbed me and throttled the shit out of my brains during the mixed-up teenage kind of time I was having, and the fact that I came across them without knowing what the hell they were (in a now-defunct used bookstore less than a quarter mile from my high school- the perfect class-cutting destination) made me think they were meant for me. And I still think that they were. I've read plenty of his short stories (most memorable, for me- tearjerkin' "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon") and a few of his other novels (the four from the first LoA & Time out of Joint. Just started on Radio Free Albemuth and plan on then reading the Valis trilogy in order now that I have each book. So yes, I'm a bit fixated at the moment. Looking very much forward to discussing the great and strange and troubled world of PKD with everyone here. Wheee!

Hmmm, I would think it would have been vice-versa. I cant see how anyone can start out with VALIS. For the uninitiated, its quite unapproachable/inaccessible. I would think someone who is already more in tune with PKD would want to read and understand VALIS. I think VALIS was the third or fourth of his that I read. Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch was the first and ASD was the second.

Welcome to the forum btw

Commenting on the starting out with Valis thought by UBIk: I loaned the book Valis to a person years ago who was very much into new-age religion, and he enjoyed it much without earlier exposure to Dick. He loved the part about finding God but not being able to keep him.

I guess enjoying/understanding Valis really does not only depend on how much you like PKD but also on how much you are interested in religious things or philosophy. My boyfriend read Valis last summer and had read before almost all of Dick's works. Still, he found Valis pretty hard, confusing and inaccessible as he isn't very much into religion. I haven't read it myself, only read about it, so I can't really say how it would be for me.

Hmmm. Ubik, I am not saying that I immediately understood Valis entirely the first read- in fact, I'd be skeptical of anyone who made this claim- but knotted and occultish as it is, I teased out enough to get hooked. It's full of powerful ideas that humans have always and will never not agonize over. Well, the un/fortunate ones paying attention, anyhow. "Finding God and not being able to keep him" (as Stephen said), the elusive nature of reality, blah blah blah. Not to be flippant, I just haven't had any coffee yet.

And I wasn't suffering anything at the time resembling Dick's diagnosed achizophrenia but I was having a very fine nervous collapse of my own. Perhaps this is why it resonated so excruciatingly beautiful for me.

Hi. I found Dick through Blade Runner, which is probably my favourite film of all time. I didnt even know it was based on a book until I read Future Noir by Paul M Sammon.
I then had a serendipitous happening - I was on a holiday, in Skiathos, in Greece. One day the heavens opened, and the rain hammered our little island for half a day solid. We had nothing to do but stay in our rooms and read. I finished my books, and ran into the foyer of the hotel to look up what they had in thier paltry 'library'.
I picked up a massive book - it was 'Androids', 'Ubik' and 'Palmer Eldritch' as a three in one. I was hooked. I had never read sci-fi - and to this day, PKD is the only 'Sci-Fi' author I read. My tastes lean toward American Fiction, Beat, Erotica and Dark Fiction, but to me, PKD fits right in with my other heroes such as Hunter S Thompson, Burroughs, Miller & Mailer. He makes you seriosly think, and question everything. on the whole, I reckon PKD is the one author i find myself recommended to people over everyone else - because his profile is so low. What a shame.

I have known of Philip K. Dick ever since I had seen the movie Bladerunner. The movie as I'm sure with many other members of this group had a profound effect on me. Nonetheless, I never got around to reading a PKD novel until I picked up a used 50 cent copy of Martian Time-Slip at a used bookstore about 8 years ago. Once started, I couldn't put it down, finishing it in the wee hours of the morning. After that, I was hooked, collecting many more of his novels as well as his biography and a DVD documentary about him. While his writing sometimes can be a bit clunky, I was always intrigued by the philosophical themes and convoluted plots found in his work. Of the books of his that I have read, I think my favorite is Time Out of Joint. I am happy to find a readers group dedicated to this enigmatic author on Goodreads!

-Todd

Hello fellow PKD fans!
I was convinced to try Philip K.Dick by an artist friend back in 1995. I read Counter Clock World first and then tried Ubik. And then I completely was sold. Since then I have pretty much read all of his novels and most of his short stories. Still missing some non-scifi novels though.

My favorite novels would be

A Maze of Death
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
VALIS
A Scanner Darkly
Eye in the Sky
Time Out of Joint
Ubik
Now Wait for Last Year
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

If you're having trouble finding the PKD non-sf books, check with Mark Ziesing at Ziesing Books: http://www.ziesings.com/

He's a big PKD fan and always has loads of titles on hand. He even published a handful of PKD titles in some super-ultra swanky editions several years ago.

Anyway, he's a great guy and he'll be able to help you out. Plus he'll be happy to talk PDK with you all day.

Palmer wrote: "Hello fellow PKD fans!
I was convinced to try Philip K.Dick by an artist friend back in 1995. I read Counter Clock World first and then tried Ubik. And then I completely was sold. Since then I hav..."

Much like other people here, I was introduced to PKD through my fav movie, Blade Runner. I just recently started downloading the free stories from the Project Gutenberg site: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/searc.... I was totally psyched to find this and it's very easy to get them to a Kindle or other ebook reader. Just read Beyond Lies the Wub and can't wait to keep going! BTW, I liked The Adjustment Bureau and had no idea it was based on a PKD story until the credits.

I'm not sure how I missed this introduction thread, but Marge's post notification has led me here. I recently found PKD's writings and have been engrossed in them since the Fall of 2016. One of my favorite things about his novels and stories are the references to classic works, which in turn sends me on a foray down the rabbit hole.

I'm currently reading Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which I picked up as a first edition at my local Half Price Books. Working my way through his creations has been and will continue to be an amazing journey.

Hi Marge and James!

I just discovered Philip K. Dick. I read Ubik and was instantly addicted. (They should have put a warning label on it!) Now I'm looking forward to reading everything.

I know...it is a bit odd how impacting his writings are. In fact, I may have an issue, I started buying his books and am obsessed with searching for them at thrift shops, Goodwill, etc. I'll have to post a photo of my recent finds, including a few first editions. =0

I do love vintage paperbacks. I used to have lots of 70's mass market paperbacks that I would find in the 50¢ book bin at The Strand. I wish I had kept them, but in my younger days I would move a lot so I would frequently throw books away. I wish I could go back in time and slap my younger self.

I assume I first heard of Philip K Dick when I was in high school after watching Blade Runner. The first novel I read was The Cosmic Puppets and I was immediately hooked. I liked the way his writing made my head spin the same way that psychedelics do. 15 years later, he is still my favorite author and I still have so much more to read. I still haven't tackled the Exegesis and I have first editions of Martian Time Slip and The Divine Invasion that I haven't read because I'm too afraid I'll damage them.

Hi Tyler! I just read The Cosmic Puppets a few days ago. I agree that it’s a good place to start. Like the more mature Ubik ~ my first PKD ~ it questions the very nature of reality.

greetings! i am ᴜsᴇʀ known as ＭＴＢＤ... PKD is one of my absolute favorite authors. easily in the top 3. i am new to goodreads. currently reading Ｕｂｉｋ and i love it!! and i also own many more titles. looking forward to meeting other likeminded friends.

Hi MTBD! I read Ubik this year too. It was my first PKD.

Hello Susan thank you for the warm greeting. up next on deck is ꜰʟᴏᴡ ᴍʏ ᴛᴇᴀʀs, ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴏʟɪᴄᴇᴍᴀɴ sᴀɪᴅ. i just got Valis & Later Novels from eBay it contains A Maze of Death and the complete Valis Trilogy

I'm looking forward to Valis. As much as I wanted to read it first, I thought I'd appreciate it better after reading a few earlier novels and getting the feel for Dick's style and themes.

Is your copy the LOA edition? I was wondering if I should get the LOA books or stick to the paperbacks.