The day after he died Ursula LeGuin was supposed to give the commencement address at Reed College, in Portland. She started by saying, “Yesterday the greatest science fiction author of all time, and the greatest living author in English, died. So I’m going to talk about Philip K Dick instead of give this speech I wrote.”
(Source: I took SF classes at Portland State University with Tony Wolk, a good friend of Ursula LeGuin. He’d often have her come and talk to a class.)
Now, many people I respect would still say LeGuin herself is still the literary pinnacle in SF, and I agree. That she, the most human of writers, saw such humanity in PKD — that’s always struck me.
She talked extensively about him in a 2012 interview with Wired (https://www.wired.com/2012/07/geeks-guide-ursula-k-le-guin/) and in the introduction to the Folio Society's edition of The Man in the High Castle (included in her essay collection Words are My Matter). In both, she mentioned the Phildickian anecdote that they were both students at the same large high school in Berkeley at the same time, but that none of her friends or acquaintances remember Dick.
https://luisurrea.com/2018/01/tolfink-was-here-on-ursula-k-l...
Beware: low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, "frustrating close to being great."
Yes, it's close to be great, but lacks to be it. Mostly because it's not another Hollywood sugar story about the good guys killing all the bad ones.
But I would recommend it to anyone who like a serious SF.
The short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", on which Total Recall is based, is a fun read - it's not quite the same as the movie.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_W...
They also made some odd choices that didn't really emphasize the qualities that PKD is known for. "Autofac" is the only really classic story here. Why not "The Electric Ant", "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (rights still owned by the Total Recall producers maybe?), "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts", or "Faith of Our Fathers"? Or, indeed, Second Variety?
> What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds.
- VALIS
I would be interested in hearing more about this, if you are willing to expand on it.
Reading his stuff at 10-15 years old can set you up with a follow-up reading list that lasts decades and reaches way outside of scifi. As a human being, there's some very real benefit to explicitly grappling with ideas like Cartesian solipsism at ~12 instead of hearing about it for the first time at ~20 in philosophy 101, but there's also some real dangers too! Besides being well read, PKD was obviously compelled to imagine the logical conclusion of almost everything he encountered in his life, including socio-political trends. While this inclination obviously bestowed an amazing gift, if you look at biographical elements of his life, it's equally obvious that it was a curse. There's definitely such a thing as being way too smart for your own good.
His prescience on many topics is well known, so I'll skip that and add something more obscure. I'm very pleased that PKD is gradually becoming recognized as way more than just some pulp / SF writer, or just another prolific pop-fiction dude (like say Dan Brown or Stephen King) with an existing audience that Hollywood can monetize. PKD deserves much credit in the high-brow postmodern canon too, and although it's not widely realized yet, probably has done more to pioneer and popularize truly experimental fiction generally, and metafiction in particular, than almost anyone else you could name.
Since I recently reread 3-stigmata, I will also quickly remind everyone that Choosy folks choose Chew-Z. As of today, it's uncanny how much Palmer Eldritch looks like an unholy combination of Zuck+Musk.
Confessions, Mary and the giant, Milton Lumkey, all the rest - I don’t know if anyone captured the texture of the American mind quite so perfectly.
He may have been a philosopher and a prophet, but the thing that he seemed to really understand was people. Their frailty, their avarice, their comfortable delusions, their prejudices, that love and hate are one and the same. As with his SF work, he poked at this consensus driven thing we call “reality”, and brought it crashing down.
He profoundly shaped my thinking, too - you see a cat, I see a thing that is labelled “cat”.
Shit, Jean Baudrillard developed an entire philosophy after reading his stuff.
[1]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/philip-k-dick/short-fictio...
dsq•7mo ago
danielschreber•6mo ago
Never understood why Harlan Ellison insisted it was ripping off his work instead.
ChrisMarshallNY•6mo ago
jhbadger•6mo ago