Favorite science fiction authors: Philip K. Dick

``What can I say about this elixir!'' [Frank Zappa, "200 Motels"]

Alas, Phil Dick has long passed on, but despite the ancient publishing dates (some in the 60s, for heaven's sake!) his work still has impact like no one writing today. If you like books that really mess with your mind, try almost any of his.

One of the interesting plot devices he uses is one I've seen nowhere else. In some of his work, one of the characters is taking some sort of drug that alters the subjective reality of others! This can make it kind of hard to follow what's ``real.'' If you are like me and hope that there is one ``objective'' reality out there, this might be somewhat disheartening. But, ``living in today's complex world of the future is like having bees living in your head,'' as the Firesign Theatre put it. And Dick's work has much of the funhouse quality of Firesign or Burroughs or the ``Illuminatus!'' trilogy by Shea and Wilson, but it's all written in a conventional, matter-of-fact style.

• The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. After swilling down all the Heinlein juveniles and Norstrilia and such while I was still in high school, I thought I could handle the strangest SF had to offer. My unformed teenage brain ran into this book like a knot runs into a saw. What the hell is going on in this book? I reread it thirty years later (in early '95) and it was still pretty intense.
• The preserving machine. If a Mozart sonata could be transmuted into a quadruped, would it rip your lungs out? An amazing collection of short stories.
• Flow my tears, the policeman said and Through a scanner darkly are very noir tours through the disorienting world of cops and robbers and intelligence and disinformation, yet they were written before a lot of the ugly stuff like Cointelpro came out. Here, it's not so much ``what is reality?'' as ``whose reality are we talking about?''
• Valis. Do you feel like an outcast sometimes, or like you might be going crazy? Read this book for hope and comfort on the deepest levels.

Last updated: 1996/01/21 20:13:37
URL: http://www.nmt.edu/~shipman/reading/dick.html