Philip K. Dick's 4-Dimensional Gun. "The Zap Gun" is one of Philip K. Dick’s lesser “pot-boiler” novels. It was originally serialized, so it’s shitty in the way that novels always are when it’s clear a writer is being paid by the word, all useless adjectives everywhere. Being a slice of PKD’s consciousness, however, it’s also completely insane. Case in point: the story revolves around a group of para-psychic government weapons “fashions” designers who receive schematics for world-destroying bombs while in drug-induced fugues. To fuel what is essentially a cold public relations war between East and West (here given the adorable monikers “Peep-East” and “Wes-Bloc”), the G-men tap into a higher plane and awake with sketched designs for things like lobotomy gas, the “Evolution Gun” and “weapon BBA-81D.”
This satirical vision of weapons created for immediate decomission–built to be melted down and repurposed like Napoleonic cannons–is prescient in a weirdly skewed way. . * See Motherboard's video on the very real 3D-printed gun. Philip K. Dick and the Pleasures of Unquotable Prose. What does it mean when a great writer like Philip K. Dick is considered to have an occasionally terrible prose style? Even so brilliant and well-regarded a defender of Dick’s novels as author Jonathan Lethem has referred, in a 2007 interview with the online journal Article for example, to Dick’s “howlingly bad” patches of prose. Lethem also made these sentiments clear in an interview that accompanied the publication of Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s by the Modern Library of America. (Lethem edited this and subsequent volumes.) For starters, we need a clear example of the bad prose in question. A long silence, then.
Take a minute to read this passage closely. The usual defense of the disappointments in Dick’s sentences is: ignore the bad patches; just keep reading. Paradoxically, plot summary can be exactly the opposite of what we usually assume it is: reductive. Ubik takes place in a world where psychics are common and commonly hated and feared. But with Dick it’s different. Dickian | Chris Beckett's Fiction. I’m taking part in several panels at the World SF Convention in London this August (details here).
Below are some preliminary thoughts for the panel on Philip K. Dick. (Through a Hollywood Adaptation, Darkly: Thursday, August 14th, 18:00 -19:00). The other panellists will be Christi Scarborough, Grania Davis and Malcolm Edwards, and the draft blurb for the panel is as follows: Thanks largely to the ever-increasing number of film adaptations of his work, Philip K Dick is one of the small number of genre authors whose names have been commoditised: “Dickian” is now a shorthand for paranoia, shifting realities and unstable identities, or even for the condition of twenty-first century life in general.
No one could deny that paranoia, shifting realities and unstable identities are major themes in Dick’s work, and Dick is indeed sometimes hailed as a kind of uniquely prophetic voice on ‘the condition of twenty-first century life’, a post-modernist ahead of his time. A sense of loss. Hope. “No Laughing Matter”: Media, Morality and Resistance in The Man Who Japed | Philip K. Dick Review. Philip K. Dick’s early novel The Man Who Japed is quite prescient in describing how morality and the media intersect as a tool of power. As the novel opens, we are given some very recognizable Orwellian imagery. Government institutions are abbreviated into newspeak-like slogans. He presents a totalitarian society with a fetish for large government buildings alongside dilapidated housing for the population.
One place where this is lived in everyday life is in the concept of ownership. The protagonist of the novel, Allen Purcell, works in an agency contracted by the government to produce media messages about Morec. The important point is that the ideological battle is largely public. The major plot of the novel followed Allen Purcell as he comes to realize that he has a deep psychological conflict with Morec. My moving the system of regulation into the public square, Morec society became quite stable. In the middle of the novel we are introduced to the Other World. . [1] Philip K. Arcane Knowledge: Philip K. Dick’s Solar Lottery | those big words. Solar Lottery was Philip K. Dick’s first published novel, and a “PKD” novel it certainly is.
Someone whose output was as large and as varied as Dick’s is bound to have a few clunkers, and his early work (early SF anyway, I haven’t read any of his “straight” novels yet) is no exception, despite coming before the mixture of amphetamine-psychosis fuelled misfires and, “Oh God, the FBI really did burgle my house!” Godhead paranoid freakouts the kind of which he is (generally) most loved and remembered for. It is great fun when you’ve read enough of someone’s work to be able to pinpoint, within a few pages, that it is definitely their work, without necessarily being able to say where that pinpoint landed.
Here’s a little laundry list of weirdness that evidences that early Dick was very much Dick, in this instance: - A world split into fiefdoms, run by mega-corporations. . - Complete with serfs, oaths, pledges of allegiance and so forth. I like the weird. Like this: Like Loading... The Aesthetics of Garbage in Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip - Canadian Review of American Studies - University of Toronto Press. The Fascinating Story of the Man Who Remembered the Future. This year saw the 30th anniversary of the death of one of the most influential writers of all time, ... This year saw the 30th anniversary of the death of one of the most influential writers of all time, the iconic Philip K.
Dick. Although virtually unknown outside of science fiction circles, during his lifetime Dick’s intriguing philosophy on the nature of reality has become a staple of the modern Hollywood movie. Huge blockbusters such as Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly and Paycheck were loosely based directly on his novels or short stories, and movies such as The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, The Matrix, The Truman Show and Inception all owe a huge debt to his vision. One of the most intriguing themes of Dick’s writing was the concept of the “precog,” a person who could “see” the future before it happened. In 1954 Phil introduced the concept of precognition in his novel The World Jones Made.
The “Voice” Returns “p.s. Philip Purser-Hallard on Philip K Dick and drugs | Film. On first reading a Philip K Dick novel, many people wonder what kind of twisted mind could come up with such ideas. The answer is a very twisted mind indeed - even when writing science fiction, Dick wrote from experience. This is certainly true of A Scanner Darkly, perhaps the ultimate sci-fi drug novel, on which Richard Linklater's new film is based. Starring Keanu Reeves - albeit in a more animated form than usual, courtesy of a surreal rotoscoping process - it tells of an undercover narcotics cop named Robert Arctor who loses his mind while trying to bust an illegal drugs trade.
Many of Dick's writings contain such pharmaceutical themes, with their protagonists (usually cops) suffering catastrophic changes in perception, often brought about by exotic substances. These "reality shifts" generally lead to an understanding of the true nature of the universe - an effect that Dick, whose drug intake was as prolific as his fiction output, believed he had experienced personally. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Reality and the 3D Printed Worlds of Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick's Paranoid Science Fiction Has Largely Become Our Everyday Reality. Very few sci-fi authors have as colourful a story as Philip K. Dick. Not only was he tremendously prolific, churning out 44 novels and 121 short stories in his lifetime — he died in 1982 aged 53 — but he was famously prone to hallucinations and paranoid delusions, even having something of a religious experience that revealed his son had a fatal birth defect. Doctors successfully saved his son’s life, but only after Dick told them what to look for. He toiled in semi-obscurity for a large part of his career, but Hollywood later discovered his work, adapting story after story into numerous big-name movies.
Dick’s work addresses all kinds of topics, but it asks different versions of the same question over and over again: How do we know what’s real and what’s not? As our world becomes increasingly virtual, the “real” can be easily threatened by the “not-real.” He looked at a future where technology went unchecked by humanity, and he didn’t like what he saw.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: Book Review | The Inquisitor. It’s become fashionable in recent years to hail Philip K. Dick as the world’s greatest writer of science fiction. But why stop there? Why not hail him as the greatest writer of the 20th century full stop? It’s not like there’s been that much in the way of noteworthy competition. I was first introduced to the work of Philip K. One particular short story, The Electric Ant, has always stood out in my mind as summing up everything that Dick was all about. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of Dick’s very best novels, dealing not only with the nature of reality, but with another preoccupation of Dick’s later career: religion. A great name for a novel that, by the way. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is set at some unspecified point in the 21st century.
Savour that premise for a moment. An Earth-based corporation, P.P. P.P. It rapidly becomes apparent that Chew-Z possesses nothing less than the property of suspending time and space itself. Like this: Like Loading... Philip K. Dick Scanned Our Brains, Darkly. Philip K. Dick Scanned Our Brains, Darkly Art by David A. Johnson In his afterword to a 1977 paperback collection called The Best of Philip K. Dick, PKD writes about the notion of questioning reality. “I used to dig in the garden, and there isn't anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass...unless you are a sf writer, in which case, pretty soon you're viewing crabgrass with suspicion.
Looking back on his work today, on the 85th anniversary of Dick’s birthday, the escape from the conspiracy of the mundane is a concept that certainly dominates the oeuvre of perhaps the most famous science fiction author ever. Dick takes this notion one step further in his fiction by having his characters frequently wrapped up in an oppressively mundane society.
Dick’s brilliant novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And the work of Philip K. How Am I Not Myself? - OMNI Reboot. A Philip K. Dick Nightmare - Rolling Stone South Africa. Even though an American is four times more likely to be killed by lightning, there's no greater bogeyman in the Anglo-American body politic than the homicidal terrorist. It beggars belief that something so statistically insignificant (it has been suggested that the odds of death at the hands of a jihadist, or the like, is one-in-20 million) has been manipulated to trump fundamental freedoms – not just in the US, but globally. No matter that salt, sugar and fat contribute to a one-in-467 chance of dying from heart disease, or that, approximately, ten times the number of people that died in 9-11 are slain annually as a result of gun violence - it's counter-terrorism that sets the real agenda.
Its counter-laws (laws that repeal the rule of law) have been used to explain away indefinite detention, extrajudicial assassinations and torture – sure signs of a tyrannical order. Phillip K Dick's 1956 short story, The Minority Report, describes a dystopia overseen by the "Department of Pre-crime". Philip K. Dick’s Visions. Burned out from 20 years of speed and an increasingly fragile soul, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick is still bleary from getting his wisdom teeth removed when he answers his door to find a smiling delivery girl sent by the pharmacy. Her fish pendant—hippie Christians adopted the mystic symbol in the early 1970s—catches his eye, and a stream of pink light enters his mind.... We Can Rebuild Him: David Dufty's Exploration into Philip K. Dick's Robotic Resurrection. The difference between David Dufty and Philip K.
Dick can first be glimpsed right there on the cover: when Dufty promises to inform readers “How to Build an Android”, unlike asking about electric sheep or policemen’s tears, he isn’t being coy, cagey or even philosophical. The story of How to Build an Android walks its readers through the steps involved, even as it radically simplifies them to both illuminate and demystify the process of an initiative that was as forward-thinking as it was difficult to believe. This is one book that could be read by its cover. In opening chapters that contain some of Dufty’s relatively few stylistic missteps (an unnecessary focus on his own role in the story, an unfortunate slip into present-tense narration), readers arrive at the conclusion of roboticist David Hanson’s story, when he loses the talking head of a Philip K.
The unadorned writing, it should be stressed, is a good thing. Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Truman Show Economy (With a Nod to Philip K. Dick) A Northern Ireland county made news this week when it literally created a false front of prosperity for dignitaries in town for the G8 conference. The Irish Times reports that County Fermanagh spent roughly £300,000 ($456,000 at today’s exchange rates) to conceal the shuttered storefronts and empty buildings left behind by economy-killing austerity cuts. They were too close to the “sumptuous” resort where the meeting’s being held, says the Times: “The (boarded-up) butcher’s business has been replaced by a picture of a butcher’s business ... A small business premises has been made to look like an office supplies store ... billboard-sized pictures of the gorgeous scenery have been located to mask the occasional stark and abandoned building site or other eyesore.”
Many observers have called it a “Potemkin village.” “If only the czar knew...” But they’ve already seen austerity’s results — in unemployment and GDP figures, discredited spreadsheets, and greater deficits. Jobs situation improving? Rowley's Whiskey Forge: The Wu of Maker's Mark. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
~ Mark 8:36 Never mind whiskey aficionados; tongues on even vodka lovers were wagging earlier this month over a rare public relations stumble in Kentucky. Rob Samuels, COO of Maker's Mark, announced that the alcoholic strength of the company's signature bourbon was to be lowered from 90 proof to 84 proof. The company had announced, quite literally, that it was watering down the product. The ensuing uproar was immediate, vocal, and sustained. I was struck immediately by the resonance of Samuels' announcement with Philip K. It wasn’t indignation over the decision to dilute the whiskey or even anger, really, I felt. Into this morass steps Maker's Mark with another assault on our faith in the goodness of humanity. Deplorable things happen. Until the day it wasn't, the day we were told it was to be cheapened for the masses. "Here is a piece of metal which has been melted until it has become shapeless.
The Gift That Keeps On Giving. Philip K. Dick was a friend of mine - Books. Black Iron Prison - Page 1. Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 1. A Science Fiction Story That Predicted The Manner of Western Suicide. What is reality? Philip K. Dick. What is reality? Philip K. Dick. Strange Horizons Articles: More Real Than Real: Philip K. Dick's Visionary Posthumanism , by Alex Lyras. Philip K. Dick and the Pleasures of Unquotable Prose. Culture > The Sunday Hangover with Warren Ellis. Exegesis Afterword. How Phil K Dick took over the world. Philip K. Dick: Speaking with the Dead.
PKD Invents 21st Century. A Visionary Among the Charlatans. Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference, by Erik Davis. Reality's Hidden 'Minority Report' - The Political Gnosis of Philip K. Dick. TIM BOUCHER RAW! » L. Ron Hubbard vs. Philip K. Dick. A Scanner Darkly: Philip K. Dick's thematic obsessions | Books | Wrapped Up In Books. Why Jonathan Lethem Keeps Coming Back To Philip K. Dick. Philip K Dick - Master of Pulps. Philip K. Dick Meet George W. Bush.