Rating: 
(11 reviews)
Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Library of America
Book Description
Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick (1928-82) is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem’s words, “wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him.” Posing the questions “What is human?” and “What is real?” in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works-fantastic and weird yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation-that are startlingly prescient imaginative responses to 21st-century quandaries.
This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick’s most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory “half-life,” pursues Dick’s theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions. As with most of Dick’s novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.
5 Comments
This is a collection of 4 of Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novels of the 1960’s including Hugo award winner “The Man in the High Castle”. The other three books are “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, and “Ubik” (see my review).
The Library of America has done the reading public a great service in printing collections of great American authors. This is the 173rd in the collection. I have read almost all of them. This one seems a little out of place, not because of the genre (I love science fiction and look forward to more LOA sci-fi), but because Dick is a second tier sci-fi author.
I know that there are Dick fanatics. But Dick’s novels are dated, the characterizations are weak, the dialogue is stilted, and the plots often make no sense - and that’s just what his admirers say.
Like all LOA offerings this is an excellent, low-priced hardback book that is well worth the money. Dick is still read-worthy mostly because several of his books have been made into movies - the best known of which are “Total Recall” with soft-core porn star and serial-groping Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger and “Blade Runner” with Harrison Ford. These movies are pretty good and “Blade Runner” was a great movie that has been influential. The problem is these movies are nothing like the books. The plots and characters have been changed by the screenplay authors, and I’m not talking a little bit but major changes in plot and character. So it really isn’t fair to credit Dick with these movies that are loosely based, at best, on his works.
To really get the most out of these books and understand Dick’s place in literature you need to understand a few things about the author. First of all Dick was nuts. Certifiably. In and out of asylum kind of nuts. His whole life. He was also into every drug you can imagine. His personal life was a shambles. His books never really sold well - as a matter of fact he was on welfare or bummed off of friends most of his life. No one knows whether anything Dick said was true or not. Many of his claims are clearly false. Some are not. He apparently was monitored by the FBI at some time, but then so were most malcontents of that period. But the prime suspect in a break-in of Dick’s house was - Dick himself - as Dick himself admitted.
Dick liked to go to sci-fi conventions and use drugs. The 1968 Bay area sci-fi convention was known as “Drugcon” (Drug Convention) due to the prevalence of various mind-altering chemicals. This is important because one of Dick’s novels main problems is that Dick’s novels and stories often don’t make sense.
And so we come to the four novels in this book. The first, “The Man in the High Castle” won the Hugo award of 1962. (The Hugo and the Nebula award are the highest honors in Science Fiction writing for you non Sci-Fi lovers) This novel is an alternate history if the US lost the Second World War. Interesting concept but the book’s characters were particularly weak with none of them being particularly sympathetic. And the ending was a typical Dick ending where he made it possible that the whole book prior to that point may have been an illusion. The middle part was slow, but hey, it won a Hugo so give it a read.
The second book, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” is a confused work that doesn’t make sense as characters die and re-appear from various time-lines. Dick’s favorite theme was “Is reality real”, but this book has all kinds of plot inconsistencies. And any book that Yoko Lennon wanted to make a movie of is clearly suspect.
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” is the third book and the source of “Blade Runner”. The movie screenplay is more interesting than the book. Dick’s female characters almost always tended to by tricky, sex-starved, and one-dimensional. The movie does a much better job with the female characters.
The last book, “Ubik”, is by far the best of the lot, though it won no prizes. The constant making fun of capitalist, American culture is one of my favorite things in this book. See my review for further details.
Overall, these are interesting books with the faults noted above. I think Heinlein, Card, Asimov, and other Sci-Fi writers are better though.
The book is worth owning for the quality of the binding work. Fine paper, pages are well set, the binding is cloth and durable. The novels are also interesting, a combination of time capsule and science fiction.
This was one of my early reads of Dick’s works and the 4 novels came across with mixed feelings. I was somewhat disappoiinted with “The Man in Highcastle” because of the pace and conclusion. But Dick does an excellent job, even with this work, in making the reader think. “The Three Stigmata…” was my favorite in that you are immersed in totally different realities and rules without knowing which one you are in at any given time. This is also the case with “Ubik” which was totally entertaining and the quick pace and plot lines never let you put it down. “Do Androids dream…” has the recurring robot, androids could be harmful theme with an interesting ironic twist as the hero owns a robotic animal but yearns for the real thing. Dick’s works are a dark comedy read in science fiction, but always entertaining and presenting a creative approach from both the author and the reader. Based on other novels and short stories, this represents the best of Dick’s efforts that I have read so far.
This was the first time I read anything by Dick, and I wasn’t disappointed. I have reviewed each novel individually already - and you may wonder why I give this book a five-star rating when none of the novels actually received five stars from me on an individual basis. Well, as a collection I think it’s great, and as individual novels, well it wasn’t equally as great, but I hope you see what I mean.
“The Man in the High Castle” is about reality and how it would be if World War II had been lost by the Allies.
“The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” is about a colonial world in which a certain drug is used to allow the colons to escape the harsh reality of their life on Mars. Here, reality is questioned from the point of view of altered-states of consciousness, such as happens with drugs. Eldritch is someone who went to the end of the known universe, and came back after 20 years or so of absence. But who really came back… He comes back with a new drug, more powerful than the one hitherto used. Yet, there’s something fishy about it. Eldritch is some kind of God, but malevolent, perhaps; at any rate, it is frightening. An impressive reality-doubting novel.
“Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?” is the novel that was the basis of the movie “Blade-Runner”, one of the best movies in existence. I believe the novel to be inferior to the movie, however, but it also contains a lot of material that the movie did not use; so even if you saw the movie a billion times, reading the novel will be worth it. The whole “Mercerism” thing you never heard of if you only saw the movie, for instance.
“Ubik” is another novel about virtual realities and the manipulations thereof. It shares similarities with “Eldritch” in that the theological and philosophical concerns are very close. In other words, the idea that reality is a manipulation, and that the whole thing is orchestrated by some malevolent entity.
I absolutely recommend this book for anyone who wants a taste of Dick - no pun intended - if only because LOA has the best of books out there in the printing world, and because this hardcover is just the best; and a quick perusal of the paperback covers that people give Dick’s novels will convince you that you want this edition over anything else (indeed, two thirds of the covers I have seen for his novels in paperbacks are plain simple hideous).
I rarely read science fiction, but that was before I was introduced to the work of Philip K. Dick. His prose is clean and precise. His vision of the future from a 1960’s standpoint can in one paragraph be eerily right-on and in the next, quaint. It’s a future where typewriters and moon colonies, cigarettes and time travel, can all co-mingle seamlessly and believably.