Philip K. Dick - Human Is?

Total Recall

Vangelis - Blade Runner

BUY>> 21. 06. 1994

Chicks With Philip K. Dicks....

Lies Inc.

(pub. 1964) - Vintage Books, 2004

In this wry, paranoid vision of the future, overpopulation has turned cities into cramped industrial anthills. For those sick of this dystopian reality, one corporation, Trails of Hoffman, Inc., promises an alternative: Take a teleport to Whale's Mouth, a colonized planet billed as the supreme paradise. The only catch is that you can never come back. When a neurotic man named Rachmael ben Applebaum discovers that the promotional films of happy crowds cheering their newfound existence on Whale's Mouth are faked, he decides to pilot a spaceship on the eighteen-year journey there to see if anyone wants to return.

Well.... I've previously (perhaps somewhat rashly) branded a book as being the most PKD effort ever. However, and in keeping with the theme of multiple, parallel realities, I can also award such an accolade to this novel (only this is pure PKD of a very different sort). This edition claims to be "its first complete appearance in the United States", published as PKD (more or less) wished it. Previously this book was known as The Unteleported Man, being essentially two early 60's novellas stitched together with (at one stage) additional linking material by another author as several pages of the original manuscripts had gone AWOL. However the afterword at the back of this book assures us "So what you are holding is the first American edition of this novel as Philip K. Dick intended it in 1979 when he prepared this "Lies, Inc." version of The Unteleported Man".

The book begins well enough, the various strands of the plot weaving in and out of each other as is PKD's style. But all of a sudden, about 70 pages in, and at the exact point when we segue from one novella into another, the book takes a very deep and intense (and somewhat confusing) dive, as the main character, Rachmael ben Applebaum undergoes a strange hallucinatory experience going from one location/reality to another.... or does he?

...involuntary subjective psychotic fantasy-superimposition...

From that point onward, and for much of the duration of the 'inserted' text, it's pretty hard going and you're often left scratching your head, reading back to catch up on the multiple threads, trying to work out what's going on. It certainly runs the full gamut of PKD terminology and I was constantly reaching for the Philip K. Dicktionary to help fathom out words like 'cephalotropic', 'hyperperistalsis', 'gynetropic', 'osteogenetic' and 'mysticomimetic'. However, skimming back through the book to refresh myself for this review it might just be that it needs another read - perhaps with all the WTDick? moments taken care if it'll prove to be a smoother, more enjoyable ride second time around....

          The inner face, emerging from the cracked-open gray-chitin mask, now tried to fold up within itself, attempted vigorously to wrap itself in its own semi-fluid tissue. a wet, limp face, made of the sea, dripping, and at the same time stinking; he smelled its salty, acrid scent and felt sick.

The Divine Invasion

(pub. 1981) - Voyager, 1996

Deep in cryonic suspension, Herb Asher thought he was still happily puttering around in his dome in the star system CY30-CY30B, listening to the latest Linda Fox album.

If only he hadn't been such a nice guy, he'd still have really been there. Instead he married the terminally ill (and pregnant) woman in the next dome and was taken advantage of by an obstreperous local deity (father of his wife's unborn avatar).

And now he had to go through it all again. (The story had been oddly familiar the first time.) Who would have thought that he, Herb Asher, would assist an invasion of his own home planet - even an invasion by the Son of God...?

I was unsure quite what to expect of this novel, the second in PKD's projected VALIS trilogy (which ought to have been completed with the unfinished The Owl In Daylight... only to be complimented by his final work, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). The preceding VALIS is pretty strong stuff, a book recommended for hardcore PKD fans only, written as it was "In the 1970's, Dick started to concern himself more directly with metaphysical and theological issue, experiencing a moment of revelation - or breakdown - in March 1974, which became the basis for much of his subsequent writing.... Like Island by Aldous Huxley, I found it more of an author's (largely impenetrable) manifesto draped over a rather sparse story, boiling down to characters making huge philosophical speeches at the reader while nothing much of interest happens - I believe Agent Johnny would refer to this, er, technique as "stodgy". See the first extract below for some idea of this particular book's initial (mis)direction....

Thankfully The Divine Invasion only veers off into this territory on occasion. There's not so many sprawling speeches, although characters often quote scripture at one another before they elaborate (or, I suppose, labour) the point. But just when you think it will sink under such a wave of indulgence it pulls back from the brink and recovers its sure(-ish) footing. It helps that the ebb backward and forward flow of the plot here are recognisably "Dickian", Herb Asher being the standard hapless sap who cannot help but get tangled in up to his ears. In fact, were you to remove the overarching religious protagonists and replace them with manipulative aliens you'd be as close to his earlier works as could be. There's plenty enough to enjoy here, especially Asher's (somewhat debilitating) obsession with manufactured singer Linda 'the Fox' Fox that echoes throughout his overlapping selves, his cryonic sleep similarly disturbed by 'soupy strings' versions of Broadway tunes from Fiddler On The Roof, unsettling sounds that constantly nettle him as he negotiates multiple (un)realities. I wouldn't say The Divine Invasion is for 'Kompletists' only - if you're a fan fearing you're nearing the bottom of the PKD barrel this effort's definitely worth a scrape....

          He knew, of course, why the Christian-Islamic Church did not allow the transmuting of the Bible into a color-coded hologram. If you learned how you could gradually tilt the temporal axis, the axis of true depth, until successive layers were superimposed and a vertical message - a new message - could be read out. In this way you entered into a dialogue with Scripture; it became alive. It became a sentient organism that was never twice the same. The Christian-Islamic Church, of course, wanted both the Bible and the Koran frozen forever. If Scripture escaped out from under the Church its monopoly departed.

          Now, as he sat leaning over her, he saw her eyes shine; he saw spaces beyond her eyes, as if he were looking into something empty, containing huge stretches of space. Where are you? he wondered. It is a universe in there, within your skull; it is a different universe from this: not a reflection but another land. He saw stars , and clusters of stars; he saw nebulae and great clouds of gases that glowed darkly and yet still with a white light, not a ruddy light. he felt wind billow about him and he heard something rustle. Leaves or branches, he thought; I hear plants. The air felt warm. hat amazed him. It seemed to be fresh air, not the stale, recirculated air of the spaceship.

          'Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell,' Elias said. 'We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We;re at the mercy of some kind of whim.'

          'Strange,' Herb Asher said.

          His business partner said, 'Yes. Very strange.'

A Philip K. Dick In Time Saves Nine....

The Zap Gun

(pub. 1967) - Gollancz, 2006

After the Plowshare Protocols way back in 2002, Lars Powderdry, Wes-bloc's brilliant weapons fashion designer, has been inventing elaborate devices that only seem to be massively lethal. And the deception is taking a heavy toll of his personal life. But when the alien satellites appear in the sky and it's clear that they aren't friendly, the world suddenly needs military might like never before. So, Wes-bloc and Peep-East temporarily patch up their differences and Lars meets up with Lilo Popchev, his eastern counterpart, in the hope that they can create a weapon to save the world. It's a difficult task made even trickier by Lars falling in love with Lilo even though he knows she's trying to kill him . . .


The first 30 pages of this book are, quite frankly, dizzying in their intensity - almost to the point of being off-putting - I quickly jumped away from this then returned to start anew, my mindset better refreshed. Thankfully, a display of typically human hubris at the conclusion of the 3rd chapter helps crank things into a somewhat more accessible (and recognisable) gear. Originally published as Project Plowshare in the United States in Worlds Of Tomorrow - 'plowsharing', as I understand it, is the process of replicating a weapon as a harmless domestic product like, say, a shaver. As such, this has to be one of the weirdest PKD novels. The crunching of the number of ideas here - weapons conjured from trance states, our usual teen temptress, comic books, imposing aliens - really push things to the outer limits, even by his outre standards. The cheap, lurid 3D comic is called The Blue Cephalopod Man From Titan, so that ought to give you some idea of the (unchartered) territory being explored here. There's a great moment about 2/3 of the way in where I was 'gigglin' like a loon, marvelling at sheer twists and turns of the plot - pretty wacky and ridiculous stuff! A satisfying book, but best approached expecting plenty of rather obtuse "eh?!" moments as PKD fits/jams the pieces of his puzzle together as the plot(s) hurtle out of control towards the barely formed finish line....


....It was about time that someone with universal knowledge like himself got on the UN-W Natsec Board instead of the usual morons, the mass pursaps who read nothing but the headlines of the homeopapes and naturally the sports and animated cartoon strips and of course the dirty stuff about sex, and otherwise poisoned their empty minds with toxic, mass-produced garbage which was deliberately produced by the large corporations who really ran things, if you knew the inside story-....


          "What bothers me," Lars said as the up-elevator came and he and Maren entered it, "is that the elite, in this case, doesn't even bother to guard that knowledge which makes it the elite." There is, he thought, probably a free pamphlet, distributed by UN-West for the asking, called something like,  HOW WE RULE YOU FELLAS AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?


          Ahead, beyond an open door, sat a-a stick-like clothed skeleton, whose dim, retracted, withered-pumpkin, caved-in face revolved slowly as if motor-driven. The eyes did not blink. The features were unstirred by emotions. The organism had deteriorated into a mere perceiving-machine. Sense-organs that swiveled back and forth ceaselessly, taking in data although how much eventually reached the brain, was recorded and understood, God knew. Perhaps absolutely none.

Galactic Pot-Healer

(pub. 1969) - Grafton Books, 1987

Joe Fernwright's skills as a pot-healer are obsolete. Stuck in a miserable subterranean room, he can't even affort to keep up the payments on his window-hologram.

And every week there's a rush to the supermarket before galloping inflation wipes out the value of his dole.

Until the Glimmung offers a way out.

On Plowman's Planet this curiously fallible deity is gathering a team to raise the submerged cathedral of Heldskalla.

The Book of Kalends says it can't be done.

But following an animated conversation with his own corpse beneathe the Mare Nostrum, Joe decides to do battle with fate itself ...

Another great PKD novel - and one you can actually judge by its cover! - following on from Ubik and leading into A Maze Of Death (and continuing his frankly stellar run throughout the mid-60's). You can see how by comparison, being it's surrounded by pretty heavyweight contenders - in much the same way as equally excellent Our Friends From Frolix 8 seems to have been forgotten, sandwiched as it is between A Maze Of Death and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - the novel is often overlooked and as such currently out of print. I always feel a responsibility when writing about PKD books to not give too much away. All I can say is that Joe Fernwright, your standard PKD hopeless case, near jobless and suicidal, is recruited by the seriously idiosyncratic and exceedingly humourous alien, Glimmung, to assist him in his task of raising the cathedral of Heldskalla on Plowman's Planet in this novel that is by turns funny, grotesque and deeply thoughtful. I've opted to quote some of the best, most personally affecting passages below.... (As something of a strange bonus, this Grafton edition was "printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow".)


Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month. Because, he thought, I am too hollowed out to participate any longer.


Strength. The strength of being, he thought, and opposite to that the peace of non-being. Which was better? Strength wore out in the end, every time; so perhaps that was the answer and no more was needed. Strength - being - was temporary. And peace - non-being - was eternal; it had existed prior to his birth and would resume for him after his death. The period of strength, in-between, was merely an episode, a short flexing of borrowed muscles - a body which would have to be returned . . . to the real owner.


...his fear deprived him of his sense of being human, and of being a man. It was not a man's fear; it was the fear of a small animal. It shrank him, as if devolving him into ages past; it eradicated the contemporary aspects of his self, his being. God, he thought. I am feeling a fear that is millions of years old.

Blade Runner

Hmm, not quite the same meaning in Scotland....

A Philip K. Dick In The Hand Is Worth Two In The Bush....

Clans of the Alphane Moon
(pub. 1964) - Voyager, 1996

Chuck Rittersdorf, a 21st century CIA robot programmer, decides to kill his wife by remote control. He enlists the aid of a telepathic Ganymedean slime mould called Lord Running Clam, an attrective female police officer and various others, witting or unwitting. But when Chuck finds himself in the midst of an interplanetary spy ring on an Alphane moon inhabited entirely by certified maniacs, his personal revenge plans begin to go awry in this brilliantly inventive tale of interstellar madness, murder and violence.

I doubt there's a book that is more completely and utterly Philip K. Dick than this one.... Just imagine, a seceded (Terran) moon colony on Alpha III M2 derived from an abandoned hospital area  - over 25 years the clans of the title have separated into groups comprising the several sub-types of mental illness, the 'Heeb', 'Pare' 'Mans', 'Poly', 'Dep' 'Skitz' and 'Ob-Com's. (I'll not delve any deeper into their origins as, as ever, the joy is in PKD's gentle drip drip approach to his terminology and world building.) Meanwhile back on Earth the somewhat directionless Chuck Rittersdorf is programming CIA simulacrums and, as his marriage crumbles - PKD again employs a young temptress in part to help usher our hapless, hopeless, clueless "Joe Blow" on his way - he slowly, via the offer of writing for television, stumbles upon conspiracy within conspiracy. Just who is actually working for who, and quite why, to what ends? There's no pipes connecting the kitchen sink here as for once PKD opts to skip the notion of overlapping or underlying realities, but that doesn't detract in the slightest from what is a highly accessible, imaginative and rewarding read....

... But his eyes. He had an alert yet warm quality; she rose and stood facing him. Over the TV the strength of his gaze did not register. This was not mere intelligence on Bunny's part; this was more, a perception of - she did not know what. And - 
          All about Bunny an aura hung, an aura of suffering. His face, his body, seemed sopped with it. Yes, she thought, that's what shows in his eyes. Memory of pain. Pain that took place long ago, but which he has never forgotten - nor will he. ...


... She smiled, and once again he marvelled at her teeth; they transformed her face, made it beautiful; as long as she smiled and she was delightful to behold, and it seemed to Chuck that this told something about her. The quality of beauty arose from within; inside, she was lovely, and he realized that over the years, as she aged, it would gradually work its way outward, influence the surface. By the time she was thirty or thirty-five she would be radiant. ...

Dr Bloodmoney

(pub. 1965) - Millenium, 2000

Seven years after the day of the bombs, Point Reyes was luckier than most places. Its people were reasonably normal - except for the girl with her twin brother growing inside her, and talking to her. Their barter economy was working. Their resident genius could fix almost anything that broke down. But they didn't know they were harbouring the one who almost everyone left alive wanted killed.

An excellent Philip K. Dick novel (which I first encountered in its truncated form as 'A Terran Odyssey' in the 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale' short story collection). This time we have everything and the kitchen sink in this tale of a post-apocalyptic California. However, the book has quite a gentle pace and a sunny, pastoral feel, the restructured society, though obviously chaotic, is still mostly beholden to the very same personal troubles that inflict us as individuals (but here it's mixed with a whole host of the furthest-out PKD characters and scenarios). Some of PKD's very best ideas reside here, in what is a hugely satisfying read....

          Stuart said , "Now." He knew it was now; he knew that the bombs were going off - he felt them. It seemed to occur inside him. Blam, blam, blam, blam, went the bombs, or perhaps it was the things sent up by the army to help, to stop the bombs; perhaps it was defense. Let me down, Stuart thought. Low as I can be. Let me into the ground. He pressed down, rolled his body to make a depression. People lay now on top of him, choking coats and sleeves, and he was glad; he did not mind - he did not want emptiness around him; he wanted solidness on every side. He did not need to breathe. His eyes were shut; they, and the other openings of his body, his mouth and ears and nose, all had shut; he had walled himself in, waiting.
          Blam, blam, blam.

 

         He (Walt Dangerfield) struggled up, disconnected himself from the straps, saw through the port the world below. Clouds, and the ocean, the globe itself. Here and there on it matches were lit; he saw the puffs, the flares. Fright overcame him, as he sailed silently through space, looking down at the pinches of burning scattered about; he knew what they were.

          It's death, he thought. Death lighting up spots, burning up the world's life, second by second. 

          He continued to watch.

David Dufty - Losing The Head Of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick....

The Man With Two Philip K. Dicks....

The Game-players Of Titan

 (pub. 1963) - Voyager, 1996

Roaming the pristine landscape of Earth, cared for by machines and aliens, the few remaining humans alive since the war with Titan play Bluff to maximise the remote chance some pairings will produce a child. When Pete Garden, a particularly suicidal member of the Pretty Blue Fox game-playing group, loses his current wife and his deed to Berkeley, he stumbles upon a far bigger, more sinister version of the game. The telepathic Vugs of Titan are the players and the stake is the Earth itself.

The first Philip K. Dick book I have read in some time. Initially I considered, as the story wasn't really grabbing me, giving up on this novel after about 50 pages. Aside from the blip in the pacing it has all you could want from PKD. There's the tried and tested structure of chapters jumping back and forth between multiple characters - themselves divided into two distinct social strata - and the complicated machinations of the game (of Bluff) itself to get a handle on.

Of course, as (un)expected the story suddenly takes an quite intriguing, typically Dickian twist, around page 70 and we're off (and at last I'm well and truly in!). From then on it's a case of bluff and double-bluff, with a tasty side portion of warring telepathic powers and puzzling shifts between planets and realities .... or is it? It transpires the Titanian Vugs of the title are caught up in their own power struggle and our unfortunate game-players are seemingly caught up within that .... or are they...? Maybe one of the talking cars will lose the attitude long enough to reveal all....

...'Mutreaux,' she said, 'can you turn your thoughts to - ' It was difficult to know what to call it. She had, in her hundred years of scanning, never run into anything quite like it. Puzzled, she passed over Mutreaux' surface thoughts and probed into the deeper levels of his psyche, into the involuntary and repressed syndromes which had been excluded as part of his ego-character, of the conscious self-system.
     Now she was in a region of ambivalent drives, and of nebulous and stillborn wishes, anxieties, doubts interwoven with regressive beliefs and libido wishes of a fantastic nature. It was not a pleasant region but each person had it; she was accustomed to it, by now. This was what made her existence so rife with difficulty, running into this hostile area of the human mind. Each perception and observation which Dave Mutreaux had rejected in himself existed here, imperishable, living on in a kind of half-life, feeding deeply on his psychic energy.
     He could not be held responsible for these, and yet there they were anyhow, semi-autonomous and - feral. Opposed to everything Mutreaux consciously, deliberately believed in. In opposition to all his life aims.
     Much could be learned about Mutreaux' psyche by this examination of what he chose to - or had to - reject from consciousness.

The Simulacra

(pub. 1964) - Magnum Books, 1977

Earth in the twenty-first century was a shifting, shadowy and dangerous world. Most people were content merely to survive, and to grab what little pleasure they could. But there were others who cunningly played the game of world mastery. Among them were the outstandingly beautiful woman who had ruled the White House for nearly a centruy, the world's last practising psychiatrist, a psychokinetic pianist, the time traveller, the 'chuppers', and the simulacra...

One of four(!) PKD books published in 1964, together with The Penultimate Truth, Martian Time-Slip and Clans of the Alphane Moon (though it seems he wrote six(!) altogether that year!). I'd consider this to be peak period DicKiverse!(?!) and you can't escape the feeling that he really took a bit more time with this book (if that's at all within the realms of human possibility!) There's everything you'd happily expect from Philip K. Dick here only rendered with just a bit more substance.

It's hard to write a truly constructive review as part of the joy of this book (as it is with most PKD books) is the little flourishes of imagination, the bizarre turns of phrase or those canny and sublime moments, the delightful juxtapositions where countless fantastical ideas rub up against the all-too-familiar trials and tribulations of the everyday grind. It's this honest skill - something that I think Agent Johnny himself has managed to master - that so appeals to me and, to my mind, it's this understanding of (dare I say it) 'humanity' and what it is to be human (messy and frightening and confusing!) that clearly separates PKD from the usual sci-fi pack. Still, strap yourself in for a bit of time travel, Nazis, insidious advertising, futuristic audio recording techniques, an irresistible infatuation with a political simulacra and so much more....

... he was seeing, he realized, a demonstration by political extremists, the so-called Sons of Job, neo-Nazis who seemed to have sprung up everywhere, of late, even here in this god-for-saken town in California.
     And yet wasn't this actually the most likely place for the Sons of Job to show themselves? This decadent region reeked of defeat; here lived those who had failed, Bes who held no real role in the system. The Sons of Job, like the Nazis of the past, fed on disappointment, on the disinherited. Yet these backwater towns which time had bypassed were the movement's feeding-ground ... it should not have surprised him, then, to see this.

     But these were not Germans; these were Americans.

     It was a sobering thought ...

Philip K. Dick - Dr Bloodmoney

Hoppy Harrington....

Philip K. Dick - Gather Yourselves Together

Carl Fitter....

Blade Runner 2049

Philip K. Dick - Galactic Pot-Healer

Joe Fernwright....

Where To Start With Philip K. Dick...?

Might as well start at the end. Just where is the best place to begin with Philip K. Dick? There's a huge amount of lists online that will run through a countdown of his best books, some more comprehensive than others, with the general consensus tending towards the (hard to argue with) holy trinity of 1968's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Ubik (1969) and A Scanner Darkly (1977) and his solitary piece of what you could call accepted mainstream 'classic literature', the novel The Man In The High Castle (1962)....

Pre-Agent Rob & 2005's 'best of PKD' copied from a newspaper article.

Having read in the region of 15 PKD books - I was fortunate enough that 2 winters ago the Glasgog FOPP stores had a run of laughably affordable SF Masterworks, with far too many PKD titles on the shelves to be ignored a moment longer - I would actually suggest that the curious begin, well, at the very beginning. Like Agent Johnny's beloved Pink Floyd - if you exclude the initial LSD spike of the Barrett-induced The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn - there's a definite sense of the band's progression from album to album as with PKD's growth from book to book, similar themes are explored and the weaker discarded (or cleverly reworked) as the ideas coalesce and the creative vision consolidates....

Ragle Gumm....

If you opt to read the novels in order - you might prefer to ease yourself in via the short story anthologies, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale being a fairly astonishing collection, far beefier and better than the readily available Minority Report tie-in - then you can see PKD's core themes evolve, making it far easier to get to grips with the more complex novels. Time Out Of Joint (1959) is considered to be the first book that really gets to grips with the concept of the nature of and our perception of reality and is therefore the ideal place to start. I began with The Penultimate Truth (1964), a more traditional sci-fi storyline of sorts, dealing with the manipulation of people and truth as opposed to the endless complications of shifting and/or overlapping realities and one's effect thereon....

Talbot Yancy....

PKD's novels are generally populated by 'everyman' characters, those John Shmoes and Joe Does; the menial job employee (until he loses it), the put-upon husband (or recently divorced/separated) seemingly trapped in their lot, striving for a meaningful, fulfilling existence, drawn to bad relationships, powerless to affect the overarching circumstances of their collapsing world (which might explain why I enjoy them so much). PKD tends to set up a few story arcs in tandem which he'll steadily and cunningly weave together over the course of a novel, the bewildered everyman unwittingly drawn into a situation he struggles to grasp, tumbling deeper and deeper into the network of shifting realities and perceived truths over which he has no influence (or does he?). And all the while there'll be an 'official' further up the chain, just as troubled under the skin no matter the bold front, who we assume - as he assumes/assures himself - to be in complete control. Of course, as reality unravels he will more than likely discover his situation is no different, being just another small piece (to be placed if not jammed) in the vast puzzle. Atop this fragile 'house of cards' we're likely to find the ultimate authority figure, the bloated leader, safe but panicked in his self-imposed isolation, surrounded by toadying, plotting bureaucRats. Who is really pulling the puppet's strings? Is he real, or is he slipping between realities and spinning the plates of fate accordingly...? 

Ferris F. Fremont....

It's interesting to note that PKD does not spend a huge amount of time on explaining the 'science' of his fiction, the setting of his novels can be refreshingly pedestrian and familiar (in this respect he brings to my mind J.G. Ballard, a favourite for merging his present self and reality into his wildly imaginative and disturbing fiction) - if cars do indeed fly or planets are colonised then no time is wasted embellishing the simple fact - with the geopolitics far more likely to take priority in order to establish a (winding) narrative path. He seems much more concerned with the human element and its desire to be understood, its desire to be free (as well as the doomed desire to peer behind the facade, however terrifying and destructive that might be - curiosity almost always kills the cat!). It's no great secret that PKD pushed his personal life as far out as his novels - even a feverish Dicolyte like Agent Johnny cannot claim to suspect himself of burgling his own house whilst under the influence of drugs....

Bob Arctor....

And the Brawcommended titles? Hmm, I'd consider A Scanner Darkly (1977) to be amongst the very best - strange as it sounds part of this is the impression created by the book itself, the text is noticeably denser than other novels, the story seems to have been long laboured over and it feels razor sharp and precise - and it certainly would justify garnering the same 'classic literature' tag that has (unfortunately) seen The Man In The High Castle quarantined away from the rest of his tacky oeuvre (or vice versa, depending on your POV). Chronologically if you were to tackle Time Out Of Joint before High Castle following that with Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Now Wait For Last Year (1966), Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (1968) Ubik (1969) Our Friends From Frolix 8 and A Scanner Darkly then you'd be getting a very decent headbang for your buck. 1981's oft-mentioned VALIS is not for the faint of heart, the trial run that is Radio Free Albemuth (1976/1985), though slighter, is much more easily digested. From my age-old list - itself a relic salvaged from another alternative existence altogether - Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer (1982) and Confessions Of A Crap Artist (1959/1975) are yet to be explored. If the latter's about an emaciated, unemployable loser who willingly feeds his precious lifeforce into an ambivalent 'electronic brain machine' while meshing with a healthier, saner and more success full other reality then maybe, just maybe, we're all on to something....

\/ Links \/

Philip -- Kindred -- Dick

Philip -- Kindred -- Dick

Philip K. Dick - Now Wait For Last Year

Eric Sweetscent....

Philip K. Dick - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

Douglas Quail....

Philip K. Dick - Our Friends From Frolix 8

Thors Provoni....

Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle

Mr Tagomi....

Philip K. Dick - Minority Report

John Anderton....

Philip K. Dick - VALIS

Vast Active Living Intelligence System....