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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : D : Dick, Philip K.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember, and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away; wonderful in itself, it is a flash thriller where Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially over-stretched municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet-keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break. The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember, and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away; wonderful in itself, it is a flash thriller where Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially over-stretched municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet-keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break. The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney
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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 parlours 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.
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 badly 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 time-slipping 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 US coins? Why the repeated ads for a hard-to-find universal panacea called Ubik ("safe when taken as directed")?Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
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...Another nifty choice from Millennium SF Masterworks. --David Langford
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Mind- and reality-bending drugs feature again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly is the novel that cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died through drug misuse. Nevertheless it's blackly farcical, full of comic- surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent "Fred", face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted. In a just world this harrowing novel, the 20th selection in the Millennium SF Masterworks, would have matched the sales of Trainspotting. --David Langford
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The 23 stories here were written 1953-4 and show one of science fiction's finest writers in prolific mastery of his craft. While Dick's deep concerns with perception, reality and the nature of humanity frequently recur he rarely fails to bring a fresh idea, a new perspective, a different twist to these very varied stories. Humour is never far away, reflecting his compassion for ordinary people battling often bizarre cosmic conundrums. "Kids understand: they are wiser than adults--" Dick wrote of the title story in which eight-year-old Charles discovers that his father is something else.Several of these stories are notably longer than his previous work, for Dick was developing his story-telling to the point where he would soon write his first novel, Solar Lottery. The writing is increasingly sophisticated: "Upon the Dull Earth" glitters with dark poetry, a chilling fantasy about a woman who summon angels and changes the world. It is a prelude to The Twilight Zone and the dreamscapes of Clive Barker and a revelation for anyone who thinks of Dick purely as an SF writer.
"The Golden Man", a compelling thriller about a mutant on the run, caused controversy on original publication, the implication that evolution will leave us behind provoking genuine anger. Clearly Dick was forging his own path, the antithesis of the bright shining SF of the American dream. The title of one story, "A World of Talent", is an apt description of the brilliance Dick poured into these amazing stories. --Gary S. Dalkin
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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 parlours 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.
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 badly 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 time-slipping 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 US coins? Why the repeated ads for a hard-to-find universal panacea called Ubik ("safe when taken as directed")?Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
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...Another nifty choice from Millennium SF Masterworks. --David Langford
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Only Philip K Dick could produce a novel as comically disturbing as Valis (1981), grappling with troubled, off-sane episodes of his own life and triumphantly resolving them through SF.Early in 1974 Dick felt a "pink beam" flashing through his head, a religious experience--or mild stroke--which inspired him to write his vast theological "Exegesis". In Valis the pink beam illuminates Dick's mentally unstable friend Horselover Fat; Philip is Greek for lover of horses and Dick is German for fat.
Dick's alter ego Fat duly creates the weird Gnostic theology of the Exegesis, with its visions of salvation from the insane side of reality--the Empire, whose Black Iron Prison cages us all. "The Empire never ended." Also there's a three-eyed race among us and all time between AD 103 and 1974 may be a divine illusion...
The resulting debates between Fat and friends, including Dick, are often hilariously insane. It's clear that Fat is deluded--until they all see the SF movie Valis, whose rock star actor-director suggests David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth and which uncannily features Exegesis code phrases, timeslips, third eyes, early Christian symbols and pink beams.
Maybe the film's Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a satellite which controls minds via lasers, is the same as the messiah imagined by Fat? Naturally he and friends contact the director, leading to an unexpected interview with VALIS itself.
Dick was the supreme SF master of booby-trapped reality and Valis celebrates his own escape from the trap that claimed him in 1974. Chilling, moving and acknowledged by the SF Encyclopedia as the finest novel of Dick's last years. --David Langford
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember, and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away; wonderful in itself, it is a flash thriller where Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially over-stretched municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet-keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break. The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney
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This second volume of the collected stories of one of the most influential of all science fiction writers gathers 27 stories from August 1952 to April 1953. In this extraordinarily creative period Dick produced a seemingly endless stream of breathtakingly audacious ideas, delving ever deeper into what would become major themes of his career: alienation and the nature of humanity. In "Second Variety" Hendricks and the Russian soldier Tasso fight a desperate battle for survival in a relentless future war against machine foes. Dick commented that here "my grand theme--who is human and who only appears as human--emerges most fully". The story is a taut, Cold-War-era ancestor of The Terminator. In 1976 Dick wrote "For me 'Human Is' is my credo". Lester is an emotionless workaholic devoted to making poisons for the military. When he returns from Rexor IV a literally changed man his wife faces a unique decision. The final story "Prominent Author" is an ingenious tale of instantaneous transport with strange repercussions in time. Still subversively shocking it points to the theological explorations which became increasingly important in Dick's later writing.With an introduction by Norman Spinrad and brief notes this collection is an opportunity to follow the development of a writer from dazzlingly original newcomer to a master of science fiction. While Ray Bradbury's The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953) reshaped the short story to his own poetic ends, Dick was rapidly turning the genre inside out. --Gary S. Dalkin
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Beyond Lies The Wub: Volume One Of The Collected Stories (Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick)
Though best known for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the source of the classic SF film Blade Runner, for four decades in dozens of stories and novels Philip K. Dick turned into poetic prose the metaphysical doubt and surreal zeitgeist of the late 20th century. This volume, the first of five, finds him at the beginning of his career, just starting to develop the themes which would make him one of the most important writers of the latter half of the century. The 25 stories come with a forward by the author, an introduction by Roger Zelazny, who co-wrote Deus Irae with Dick, and six pages of informative notes. From the previously unpublished "Stability" (1947) to "Nanny" (1952), these are science-fiction stories, fantasies, unique gimmicks and oddities. "Roog" is a dog's-eye view of refuge collectors, "The Preserving Machine" a chill allegory on the nature of change, while the title story concerns a psychic Martian with a remarkable survival mechanism.Inevitably some of the SF elements have dated, but it doesn't matter: Dick wasn't predicting the future, but shining a bright, sometimes mordant light on the baffling nature of reality. These stories still dazzle because they are mind-bendingly inventive, quirkily humorous, filled with original and startling ideas. Dick, who said he wrote about "The shock of dysrecognition", was a true original, a writer who expanded to possibilities of fiction. This collection is essential reading for anyone who wants to stretch the horizons of their universe. --Gary S. Dalkin
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Philip K Dick notoriously charted SF's most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn't what it should be.Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs and regular TV show. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight." "... It's my trademark." Although this future US is a grim police state with labour camps in Alaska and Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners.
Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed and flush with money, but no longer the famous Jason Taverner. No ID--that's a forced-labour offence. His agent doesn't know him. Nor do his closest friends. He's even vanished from police databanks.
Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy--one of Dick's most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who's also a police informer, who entraps and manipulates Taverner until he's terrified of her. He may deserve it: this self-obsessed megastar inflicts small, unthinking cruelties on virtually every woman he meets.
The title's policeman is another interesting character: Police General Felix Buckman, a mostly good man (and fan of Elizabethan songs: "Flow, my teares...") trapped in a horrible system. Is Taverner, the man with no past, a threat? Less so, maybe, than Buckman's amoral sister Alys, who takes special interest in Taverner and seems to have the world's only copies of his music albums...
Paranoid wrongness is expertly conveyed, and resolved with a typically offbeat SF notion. A sunny finale concludes one of Dick's most approachable novels.--David Langford
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