Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
New York : Library of America : Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Putnam Inc., c2007.
Description
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, and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure transcending even physical death.
User reviews
LibraryThing member elenchus
Electric Sheep (read April 2016)
I'm quite familiar with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: inevitable when reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that I would mentally compare the two while reading. Rather than pretend, I did so deliberately and hoped this approach would free me to read future PKD
There's a lot to like in each presentation. Unsurprisingly there are elements of the novel missing from film, others are altered. Scott omits explicit references to Mercerism; radiation fallout from World War Terminus (regulars and "specials"); the second bounty hunter (Phil Resch) and his alternate police headquarters; theme of world's physical decay and resulting kipple; the conspiracy linked to the Buster Friendly Radio Show; and, Deckard's spouse and their extensively described homelife, including ownership of android animals (the eponymous electric sheep), reliance on the Penfield mood organ, and the important glimpse into apartment living.
Scott's presentation (screenplay by Hampton Fancher & David Peoples) also makes many changes, including to the Rachel character, simplifying her Voigt-Kampff scene and her corporate strategy; the number of replicants on the loose (six in the novel, accounting for confusion in the movie with only five); the opera singer Luba Luft conflated with the dancer, Pris; and the theme of the unicorn and origami is only hinted at after stripping references to the Electric Toad at novel's climax. J. F. Sebastian seems based upon the "special" John Isidore, whose mental and perhaps physical abilities are affected by radiation sickness, but Isidore has important subplots separate from the hunt for replicants. Sebastian has none.
In the novel, they are not called replicants, but andys, or -- once, by Isidore -- constructs. In the screenplay, the term replicants appears in a second (fictional) dictionary definition of android. Evidently Scott honed in on the term for the film.
I'll watch the film again, definitely. It will also be worth re-reading the novel, and not feeling the need to compare the two visions, point for point. But first: more PKD.
//
I've read A Scanner Darkly, and later screened the Linklater film. I knew from Scanner that PKD's writing was better than much Golden Age scifi: more atmosphere, more ambiguity between what happened on the page and its significance for the reader, more emphasis on what goes on in the reader's own head. All of this is fully realised in Electric Sheep (1966), written seven years before Scanner (1973). Reviewing the LOA chronology, I am surprised to learn how many novels PKD wrote, at some points writing more than one novel a year.
I'm quite familiar with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: inevitable when reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that I would mentally compare the two while reading. Rather than pretend, I did so deliberately and hoped this approach would free me to read future PKD
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novels without distraction. I think it worked. There's a lot to like in each presentation. Unsurprisingly there are elements of the novel missing from film, others are altered. Scott omits explicit references to Mercerism; radiation fallout from World War Terminus (regulars and "specials"); the second bounty hunter (Phil Resch) and his alternate police headquarters; theme of world's physical decay and resulting kipple; the conspiracy linked to the Buster Friendly Radio Show; and, Deckard's spouse and their extensively described homelife, including ownership of android animals (the eponymous electric sheep), reliance on the Penfield mood organ, and the important glimpse into apartment living.
Scott's presentation (screenplay by Hampton Fancher & David Peoples) also makes many changes, including to the Rachel character, simplifying her Voigt-Kampff scene and her corporate strategy; the number of replicants on the loose (six in the novel, accounting for confusion in the movie with only five); the opera singer Luba Luft conflated with the dancer, Pris; and the theme of the unicorn and origami is only hinted at after stripping references to the Electric Toad at novel's climax. J. F. Sebastian seems based upon the "special" John Isidore, whose mental and perhaps physical abilities are affected by radiation sickness, but Isidore has important subplots separate from the hunt for replicants. Sebastian has none.
In the novel, they are not called replicants, but andys, or -- once, by Isidore -- constructs. In the screenplay, the term replicants appears in a second (fictional) dictionary definition of android. Evidently Scott honed in on the term for the film.
I'll watch the film again, definitely. It will also be worth re-reading the novel, and not feeling the need to compare the two visions, point for point. But first: more PKD.
//
I've read A Scanner Darkly, and later screened the Linklater film. I knew from Scanner that PKD's writing was better than much Golden Age scifi: more atmosphere, more ambiguity between what happened on the page and its significance for the reader, more emphasis on what goes on in the reader's own head. All of this is fully realised in Electric Sheep (1966), written seven years before Scanner (1973). Reviewing the LOA chronology, I am surprised to learn how many novels PKD wrote, at some points writing more than one novel a year.
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LibraryThing member ksmyth
I have only read two of the stories-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and The Man in the High Castle.
I've really enjoyed both. I'm not sure that it is appropriate to label Dick as a science-fiction writer. He seems more like an alt-fiction writer. Though there are elements of science fiction in
What I appreciate most in his writing is that there isn't the gee whiz gadgetry of many sci-fi stories. The stories are best served by the humanity of the characters-Androids's Deckard and Rachael, and High Castle's Tagomi, Wegener, and Juliana are all immensely complex, immensely interesting.
This collection is a great deal, part of the Library of America series, beautifully bound, and would cost a great deal more to buy the four books separately.
I've really enjoyed both. I'm not sure that it is appropriate to label Dick as a science-fiction writer. He seems more like an alt-fiction writer. Though there are elements of science fiction in
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his work Dick's work is rooted very much in his own time, or at least in his own near history. High Castle is really an alternate history of World War II. Androids takes place in the 1990's. What I appreciate most in his writing is that there isn't the gee whiz gadgetry of many sci-fi stories. The stories are best served by the humanity of the characters-Androids's Deckard and Rachael, and High Castle's Tagomi, Wegener, and Juliana are all immensely complex, immensely interesting.
This collection is a great deal, part of the Library of America series, beautifully bound, and would cost a great deal more to buy the four books separately.
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LibraryThing member lola_leviathan
The Man in the High Castle
Something I both love and hate about PKD is the banality of so much of his writing. While most other alternative histories about WWII tend to focus on military maneuvers or politicians, The Man in the High Castle is mostly about the everyday lives of various everyday
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
David Cronenberg, please make a movie of this. Why are all Dick's books so short? This book is a mindfuck in a way that was probably totally original in the '60s but is sort of old hat now, in that we've all seen Yellow Submarine at this point.
Something I both love and hate about PKD is the banality of so much of his writing. While most other alternative histories about WWII tend to focus on military maneuvers or politicians, The Man in the High Castle is mostly about the everyday lives of various everyday
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people. This is kind of a genius move, because it allows Dick to create a nightmarishly vivid alternate reality--vivid in its banality. He shows how the Axis hegemony changes American culture and individual America psyches from the inside out. This makes the wham-bam ending all the more potent and unsettling. I've heard complaints about Dick's female characters, but Juliana sticks out as a positive one, in that the entire thing hinges on her, and she is as nuanced as the rest of the dramatis personae.The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
David Cronenberg, please make a movie of this. Why are all Dick's books so short? This book is a mindfuck in a way that was probably totally original in the '60s but is sort of old hat now, in that we've all seen Yellow Submarine at this point.
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LibraryThing member agis
"Mindbending" is a frequent adjective used to apply to Philip K. Dick's works; after reading through all of the Library of America's first Philip K. Dick volume ("Four Novels of the 1960s), it seems entirely appropriate. The man can make my brain hurt, in a good way. The four novels included here
A common thread among these 4 of Dick's books is leaning more heavily on plot and setting than on characterization; especially with shorter length the characters tend to lead towards the archetypal over the complex. However, since his plots and setups are unconventional - even a straightforward alt-history uses a slightly unorthodox caste - and the novels brief, this doesn't become a problem. The dizzying world of "Palmer Eldritch" and the empathic, authenticity-obsessed world of "Electric Sheep" don't have stereotypical responses, and are intriguing enough on their own.
The author has admitted that the I Ching was not only on his mind when he wrote "The Man In the High Castle", but was used in plotting the book. Set on the Japan occupied west coast of the US in a world where Germany and Japan won WWII, the book doesn't dwell too much on how the Allies lost the war, but doesn't depend too much on it either. The cast, which includes an antique dealer and a couple forgers, initially seems like an odd mix; but as the novel progresses it becomes clear where Dick is going with everything (for once).
Dick also has the conceit of a alt-history book within his alt-history; a (somewhat suppressed) tale of the Allies winning the war is an important plot thread. There's actually some nice subtleties in the way the inner book is plotted, in it's own way more of a reflection of the world they're in than the world being written about.
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" is perhaps the hardest to describe. The initial plot is simple enough - a drug tycoon selling hallucinogenic VR drugs to colonists desperate for escapism is threatened when a famous traveler returns from an alien solar system, hawking a competing drug. But with precognitives that can see the future and the complicated realities of the drugs, you end up dealing with far more than expected.
Dick has long been famed for his drug-infused writing, and "Palmer Eldritch" shows why he became so - reality is undermined without ever losing coherence or stuttering into cliches. And here it moves smoothly, even as Dick needs to reveal a lot of what is going on. The denouement escapes disappointment by leaving enough interesting questions while resolving the plot.
Bladerunner is rather well known as a movie, so it's interesting to see where it diverges from the source text "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". The Voigt-Kampff test, designed to separate humans from androids is a test of empathy, and the idea of empathy - for animals, and for fellow humans - is a foundational religious concept in the culture. It's a more central concept here than in the movie.
But how much of it is a difference in empathy, as opposed to a difference in the targets of empathy? Deckard is increasingly battered and dependent on obscure, sterile tests that lack much of the empathy and emotion they're supposed to test; and the subplot of Mercerism adds in a dimension that the movie couldn't have reasonably had. Much of the themes and basic plot carried over to the movie, but there's still a fair amount that's distinct here.
"Ubik" is another of the more elliptical works; it doesn't work quite as well as "Palmer Eldritch" does and ultimately ends poorly. Still, the tale of dubious realities and sparsely lived half-lives following death is still a reasonably good read. Dick oddly leaves a couple of plot drives largely on the floor as he switches up, but this is as much due to a surfeit of ideas as anything else. The slow deterioration and disappearances that move along with the novel are extremely creepy even without bringing in everything the book was setup with.
The Library of America edition itself is well made; the texts are slightly cleaned up (typos corrected) versions of the first printings, the paper is thin but good, and the binding is very nice. "Four Novels of the 1960s" is well worth the premium price, both in content and in this edition.
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are "The Man In The High Castle", an early alt-history where Germany and Japan won WWII; "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", where a hallucinogenic virtual reality tycoon is threatened by sudden competition; "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", the basis for the movie Bladerunner, where a bounty hunter has to track down escaped, almost human androids; and "Ubik", which follows a group of anti-psychics after a disastrous mission.A common thread among these 4 of Dick's books is leaning more heavily on plot and setting than on characterization; especially with shorter length the characters tend to lead towards the archetypal over the complex. However, since his plots and setups are unconventional - even a straightforward alt-history uses a slightly unorthodox caste - and the novels brief, this doesn't become a problem. The dizzying world of "Palmer Eldritch" and the empathic, authenticity-obsessed world of "Electric Sheep" don't have stereotypical responses, and are intriguing enough on their own.
The author has admitted that the I Ching was not only on his mind when he wrote "The Man In the High Castle", but was used in plotting the book. Set on the Japan occupied west coast of the US in a world where Germany and Japan won WWII, the book doesn't dwell too much on how the Allies lost the war, but doesn't depend too much on it either. The cast, which includes an antique dealer and a couple forgers, initially seems like an odd mix; but as the novel progresses it becomes clear where Dick is going with everything (for once).
Dick also has the conceit of a alt-history book within his alt-history; a (somewhat suppressed) tale of the Allies winning the war is an important plot thread. There's actually some nice subtleties in the way the inner book is plotted, in it's own way more of a reflection of the world they're in than the world being written about.
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" is perhaps the hardest to describe. The initial plot is simple enough - a drug tycoon selling hallucinogenic VR drugs to colonists desperate for escapism is threatened when a famous traveler returns from an alien solar system, hawking a competing drug. But with precognitives that can see the future and the complicated realities of the drugs, you end up dealing with far more than expected.
Dick has long been famed for his drug-infused writing, and "Palmer Eldritch" shows why he became so - reality is undermined without ever losing coherence or stuttering into cliches. And here it moves smoothly, even as Dick needs to reveal a lot of what is going on. The denouement escapes disappointment by leaving enough interesting questions while resolving the plot.
Bladerunner is rather well known as a movie, so it's interesting to see where it diverges from the source text "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". The Voigt-Kampff test, designed to separate humans from androids is a test of empathy, and the idea of empathy - for animals, and for fellow humans - is a foundational religious concept in the culture. It's a more central concept here than in the movie.
But how much of it is a difference in empathy, as opposed to a difference in the targets of empathy? Deckard is increasingly battered and dependent on obscure, sterile tests that lack much of the empathy and emotion they're supposed to test; and the subplot of Mercerism adds in a dimension that the movie couldn't have reasonably had. Much of the themes and basic plot carried over to the movie, but there's still a fair amount that's distinct here.
"Ubik" is another of the more elliptical works; it doesn't work quite as well as "Palmer Eldritch" does and ultimately ends poorly. Still, the tale of dubious realities and sparsely lived half-lives following death is still a reasonably good read. Dick oddly leaves a couple of plot drives largely on the floor as he switches up, but this is as much due to a surfeit of ideas as anything else. The slow deterioration and disappearances that move along with the novel are extremely creepy even without bringing in everything the book was setup with.
The Library of America edition itself is well made; the texts are slightly cleaned up (typos corrected) versions of the first printings, the paper is thin but good, and the binding is very nice. "Four Novels of the 1960s" is well worth the premium price, both in content and in this edition.
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LibraryThing member InfinityOutlaw
The Man in the High Castle - Alternate World War II story in which the allies lose and the US is divided between Japan and Germany. (3/5)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Title character returns from journey possibly altered and bearing a new 'translation' drug. (4/5)
Do Androids Dream of
Ubik - What is reality? Half-lifers experience regression and struggle for their existence. Everything is not as it seems. (5/5)
Overall, a great collection. Contains two of my favorite PKD stories, Ubik and Androids. The man in the High Castle is kind of the odd man out in this collection, and not my favorite, but still an enjoyable read. The endnotes are fairly informative and useful, and the timeline is a nice edition. The quality of the book itself is wonderful, great binding and great paper. I'm glad to see The Library of America put out this collection and give PKD some well deserved recognition.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Title character returns from journey possibly altered and bearing a new 'translation' drug. (4/5)
Do Androids Dream of
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Electric Sheep? - Rogue nexus androids on Earth are hunted and 'retired'. What does it mean to be human? (4/5)Ubik - What is reality? Half-lifers experience regression and struggle for their existence. Everything is not as it seems. (5/5)
Overall, a great collection. Contains two of my favorite PKD stories, Ubik and Androids. The man in the High Castle is kind of the odd man out in this collection, and not my favorite, but still an enjoyable read. The endnotes are fairly informative and useful, and the timeline is a nice edition. The quality of the book itself is wonderful, great binding and great paper. I'm glad to see The Library of America put out this collection and give PKD some well deserved recognition.
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LibraryThing member MaowangVater
The Man in the High Castle
This is a mind bender of a book. You may occasionally feel that you’ve wandered into a house of mirrors. This alternative history is set in the Pacific States of America and the Mountain States of America, formerly part of the United States before its defeat in and
The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
The earth has become so hot that the government is drafting people to colonize Mars. Barney Myerson has received his draft notice, and he’s desperately trying to get himself declared exempt. Mars is a desert exile. Colonists live in hovels, futilely attempting to grow hybrid vegetables. The most popular escape the grinding monotony of existence is through the use of the hallucinogenic drug Can-D and your Perky Pat layout. Perky Pat is a fashion doll with a boyfriend. She has even more stuff than Barbie™. Take Can-D and you experience her rich and relaxing life back on earth and at the same time a mystical union with your fellow colonists. It’s almost a religious experience. Barney knows all about it; he’s the Pre-Fash consultant at Perky Pat Layouts headquarters in New York. He also knows that part of the income for the firm comes from the illegal drug trade in Can-D.
Barney’s boss has his own worries. An intersystem ship from Proxima Centauri has crashed on Pluto, and from its wreck were rescued rich industrialist Palmer Eldritch and “a carefully maintained culture of a lichen very much resembling the Titianian lichen from which Can-D is derived.” – pages 24-247 in 4 Novels It looks like Perky Pat Layouts is about to get some stiff competition, from a company who advertises "God promises eternal life. We can deliver it." But Palmer Eldritch has brought more than lichen on his return voyage.
It is impossible to predict what will happen next in Dick’s fascinating down-the-rabbit-hole tale of adventure, tension, and a reality that’s constantly being twisted in unexpected directions and peppered with theological, metaphysical, and ontological puzzles. Is what’s happening to the characters a drug induced hallucination? Is it just a bad trip or a hostile take-over from another star system? And who’s behind it, a millionaire do-gooder, or a god or a devil disguised as him? And can they ever possibly escape?
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
On an Earth devastated by W.W. T. (World War Terminus), the atmosphere poisoned by its dust, the most desirable possession for the remaining humans is a pet. Your status among your neighbors is determined by the size of the animal. If you own a horse, or a sheep, instead of a cat your self-esteem is greatly enhanced. And if you can’t afford a live animal, perhaps you can make do with a life-like mechanical one. Rick Deckard, a contract bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police department owns an electric sheep, but he’s a bit ashamed of it. He wishes he could afford a live one, and then opportunity comes his way. He has a chance to track down and retire a group of eight illegal immigrants – escaped slaves from the colony on Mars, humanoid robots, Androids that looked and spoke exactly like human, smarter than human, but without empathy. Rick must “retire” them using his gun before they kill him.
It is impossible to guess where Dick will take you as a reader, all expectations of where the plot is heading or what the characters will do, are relentlessly burst in a series of surprising shocks.
Ubik
Starting off with the same premise as Alfred Bester’s novel The Demolished Man Dick imagines a future in which the main threat of industrial espionage comes from psychics who can read your mind and sell the results to your competitor. In this future, where privacy can be thoroughly breached a very wealthy business tycoon murders a business rival. Unlike Bester’s war of wits between murderer and detective, Dick takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through alternative shifting realities where nothing is certain, time seems to be regressing, and only the all-purpose spray-can of the miracle product Ubik can save a person from an agonizing death. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to obtain when someone or something is working very hard to keep it away from you.
This is a mind bender of a book. You may occasionally feel that you’ve wandered into a house of mirrors. This alternative history is set in the Pacific States of America and the Mountain States of America, formerly part of the United States before its defeat in and
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partition after the Second World War. The cast of characters includes a very nervous dealer in authentic “American traditional ethnic art objects,” including Mickey Mouse watches, old comic books, and some recently manufactured civil war weapons, one of the makers of the newly minted but made to look old Colt .44s, his ex-wife, the head of the Japanese Trade Mission in San Francisco, the Reichs Consul in San Francisco, a spy, an assassin, and the author of a book (banned in the United States and throughout Europe) called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternative history in which the United States and Britain won the Second World War. What all these disparate characters, with the exception of the Reichs Consul, spy and assassin, have in common is the Yi jing. Thanks to the hegemony of Japanese culture they all constantly consult this ancient Asian text for oracular guidance about what they should do next. And they have need of all the guidance and wisdom they can get because a change in power in Germany has brought the world to the brink of war again. The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
The earth has become so hot that the government is drafting people to colonize Mars. Barney Myerson has received his draft notice, and he’s desperately trying to get himself declared exempt. Mars is a desert exile. Colonists live in hovels, futilely attempting to grow hybrid vegetables. The most popular escape the grinding monotony of existence is through the use of the hallucinogenic drug Can-D and your Perky Pat layout. Perky Pat is a fashion doll with a boyfriend. She has even more stuff than Barbie™. Take Can-D and you experience her rich and relaxing life back on earth and at the same time a mystical union with your fellow colonists. It’s almost a religious experience. Barney knows all about it; he’s the Pre-Fash consultant at Perky Pat Layouts headquarters in New York. He also knows that part of the income for the firm comes from the illegal drug trade in Can-D.
Barney’s boss has his own worries. An intersystem ship from Proxima Centauri has crashed on Pluto, and from its wreck were rescued rich industrialist Palmer Eldritch and “a carefully maintained culture of a lichen very much resembling the Titianian lichen from which Can-D is derived.” – pages 24-247 in 4 Novels It looks like Perky Pat Layouts is about to get some stiff competition, from a company who advertises "God promises eternal life. We can deliver it." But Palmer Eldritch has brought more than lichen on his return voyage.
It is impossible to predict what will happen next in Dick’s fascinating down-the-rabbit-hole tale of adventure, tension, and a reality that’s constantly being twisted in unexpected directions and peppered with theological, metaphysical, and ontological puzzles. Is what’s happening to the characters a drug induced hallucination? Is it just a bad trip or a hostile take-over from another star system? And who’s behind it, a millionaire do-gooder, or a god or a devil disguised as him? And can they ever possibly escape?
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
On an Earth devastated by W.W. T. (World War Terminus), the atmosphere poisoned by its dust, the most desirable possession for the remaining humans is a pet. Your status among your neighbors is determined by the size of the animal. If you own a horse, or a sheep, instead of a cat your self-esteem is greatly enhanced. And if you can’t afford a live animal, perhaps you can make do with a life-like mechanical one. Rick Deckard, a contract bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police department owns an electric sheep, but he’s a bit ashamed of it. He wishes he could afford a live one, and then opportunity comes his way. He has a chance to track down and retire a group of eight illegal immigrants – escaped slaves from the colony on Mars, humanoid robots, Androids that looked and spoke exactly like human, smarter than human, but without empathy. Rick must “retire” them using his gun before they kill him.
It is impossible to guess where Dick will take you as a reader, all expectations of where the plot is heading or what the characters will do, are relentlessly burst in a series of surprising shocks.
Ubik
Starting off with the same premise as Alfred Bester’s novel The Demolished Man Dick imagines a future in which the main threat of industrial espionage comes from psychics who can read your mind and sell the results to your competitor. In this future, where privacy can be thoroughly breached a very wealthy business tycoon murders a business rival. Unlike Bester’s war of wits between murderer and detective, Dick takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through alternative shifting realities where nothing is certain, time seems to be regressing, and only the all-purpose spray-can of the miracle product Ubik can save a person from an agonizing death. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to obtain when someone or something is working very hard to keep it away from you.
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LibraryThing member kcshankd
THIHC - Exhilarating premise, but unfortunately the rest of the novel fails to live up to it.
LibraryThing member Stevil2001
Dick is an author I'm not as familiar with as I'd like; basically, prior to reading this, I'd only read three things by him, all ones that got turned into movies! (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and "The Minority Report") Though I guess the first of these got turned into a
The Man in the High Castle
Since reading this but before writing up this review, I've gone on to read five more Philip K. Dick novels, and by the standards of many of his later ones, The Man in the High Castle is positively subdued. About a world where the Axis won World War II, and set mostly in Japanese-occupied California, there's not much in the way of a sfnal elements beyond that. I can see why it captured the Hugo electorate (it was one of only two of his many novels to be a Hugo finalist, and the only won to win): it's a triumph of worldbuilding. We get a real solid sense of what this new world is like and how it functions, on the most local of levels: people in highway diners, people in factory jobs, people eating dinner together. From this, we can infer and understand the big political stuff that underlies the story and drives it in the background. The whole idea of the Japanese being obsessed with American pop culture, and Americans supplying obsessive collectors with counterfeit American artifacts was quite fascinating.
Dick also demonstrates a real solidity of character; these are ordinary people, both admirable and despicable in their ordinariness, which drives them to do things they often don't understand. I particularly liked Juliana Frink.
The novel is also quite well put together thematically: it's all about people placing value in things based on the extent to which they perceive them to be true, even when they are not actually true. Things mean only what we believe them to mean. When a pair of counterfeiters try to make their own jewelry, no one likes it because it doesn't carry the aura of authenticity, even though it is much more authentic than the fakes they have been making. Does the counterfeit become real if we believe in it enough? This all reaches a thematic climax at the end: many of the characters have been reading a novel about an alternate timeline where the Axis lost World War II, and they have been inspired by it. What the ending makes clear is that this novel-within-a-novel is not "real," as it does not depict our world, the real world where the Axis lost; its author imagines a completely different, and wrong, alternative history. So the book that has been inspiring resistance is utterly fake! But everything else the novel has told is would indicate this doesn't matter, because everyone in the novel believes it is real.
Library of America editor Jonatham Lethem does a good job on notes throughout the whole volume, but in particular the end notes for this novel are very useful in explaining what German figures were real historical persons, and what their real roles were.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
None of the other three are really like The Man in the High Castle, except in that they largely focus on "ordinary" people. These people all live in extraordinary worlds, and sometimes even do things that would be extraordinary to us, but in every case, they are people just doing jobs, working in offices, dealing with petty bullshit, even when their job is to hunt down killer androids or achieve corporate superiority through telepathic espionage. Dick is extraordinarily good at capturing a feeling of alienation from modern life: these books were written in the 1960s, and set in the future, but they feel every bit as relevant to the 2020s. These books are filled with people desperately seeking connections and meanings, and finding that the whole world is oriented against letting this happen.
In each case, Dick is also really good at what you might call "slippage," slowly easing you into an utterly weird thing that happens with total matter-of-factness, causing you to question the reality of what you are reading: the visions of the future in Three Stigmata, the entire alternate police force in Do Androids Dream, the advancing decay in Ubik. I liked all three a lot, but I especially liked Ubik; each chapter was a such a beautiful surreal poem, almost, as the world began to decay around our protagonists, and they desperately tried to hold it back with whatever "Ubik" happened to be at that moment. (And I loved the Ubik advertisements; as I've noted before in this reading journey, 1950s/60s sf was very much interested in the power of commercial advertising.)
The only disappointment was that in the end of each case, Dick seemed to feel compelled to tie everything up and explain it in the process. Do Androids Dream probably does this the least, but both Three Stigmata and Ubik get less weird near the end, as they explain why all the weirdness was happening, and this makes them a bit unsatisfying. I feel like it would be better to not entirely know or understand what was going on in these books. In being incomplete, I think they would feel more cohesive, ironically.
One last note: it's funny to compare Do Androids Dream to Blade Runner. I do like Blade Runner, but what is sort of subtext and an ending twist in Blade Runner—maybe Decker is the real replicant!—is just text in Do Androids Dream. You spend the whole book questioning who is real and who is not, because Decker himself is always doing this. I feel like Ridley Scott fanboys expect your mind to be blown by this, but where Scott ends is where Dick begins even though Dick came first, and I find that much more interesting, and that gives you much more to think about.
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tv show, albeit one I never saw. (My dad was a fan.) Anyway, for many years now I've owned a Library of America box set of fourteen of his novels, and I was happy to finally dip in.The Man in the High Castle
Since reading this but before writing up this review, I've gone on to read five more Philip K. Dick novels, and by the standards of many of his later ones, The Man in the High Castle is positively subdued. About a world where the Axis won World War II, and set mostly in Japanese-occupied California, there's not much in the way of a sfnal elements beyond that. I can see why it captured the Hugo electorate (it was one of only two of his many novels to be a Hugo finalist, and the only won to win): it's a triumph of worldbuilding. We get a real solid sense of what this new world is like and how it functions, on the most local of levels: people in highway diners, people in factory jobs, people eating dinner together. From this, we can infer and understand the big political stuff that underlies the story and drives it in the background. The whole idea of the Japanese being obsessed with American pop culture, and Americans supplying obsessive collectors with counterfeit American artifacts was quite fascinating.
Dick also demonstrates a real solidity of character; these are ordinary people, both admirable and despicable in their ordinariness, which drives them to do things they often don't understand. I particularly liked Juliana Frink.
The novel is also quite well put together thematically: it's all about people placing value in things based on the extent to which they perceive them to be true, even when they are not actually true. Things mean only what we believe them to mean. When a pair of counterfeiters try to make their own jewelry, no one likes it because it doesn't carry the aura of authenticity, even though it is much more authentic than the fakes they have been making. Does the counterfeit become real if we believe in it enough? This all reaches a thematic climax at the end: many of the characters have been reading a novel about an alternate timeline where the Axis lost World War II, and they have been inspired by it. What the ending makes clear is that this novel-within-a-novel is not "real," as it does not depict our world, the real world where the Axis lost; its author imagines a completely different, and wrong, alternative history. So the book that has been inspiring resistance is utterly fake! But everything else the novel has told is would indicate this doesn't matter, because everyone in the novel believes it is real.
Library of America editor Jonatham Lethem does a good job on notes throughout the whole volume, but in particular the end notes for this novel are very useful in explaining what German figures were real historical persons, and what their real roles were.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
None of the other three are really like The Man in the High Castle, except in that they largely focus on "ordinary" people. These people all live in extraordinary worlds, and sometimes even do things that would be extraordinary to us, but in every case, they are people just doing jobs, working in offices, dealing with petty bullshit, even when their job is to hunt down killer androids or achieve corporate superiority through telepathic espionage. Dick is extraordinarily good at capturing a feeling of alienation from modern life: these books were written in the 1960s, and set in the future, but they feel every bit as relevant to the 2020s. These books are filled with people desperately seeking connections and meanings, and finding that the whole world is oriented against letting this happen.
In each case, Dick is also really good at what you might call "slippage," slowly easing you into an utterly weird thing that happens with total matter-of-factness, causing you to question the reality of what you are reading: the visions of the future in Three Stigmata, the entire alternate police force in Do Androids Dream, the advancing decay in Ubik. I liked all three a lot, but I especially liked Ubik; each chapter was a such a beautiful surreal poem, almost, as the world began to decay around our protagonists, and they desperately tried to hold it back with whatever "Ubik" happened to be at that moment. (And I loved the Ubik advertisements; as I've noted before in this reading journey, 1950s/60s sf was very much interested in the power of commercial advertising.)
The only disappointment was that in the end of each case, Dick seemed to feel compelled to tie everything up and explain it in the process. Do Androids Dream probably does this the least, but both Three Stigmata and Ubik get less weird near the end, as they explain why all the weirdness was happening, and this makes them a bit unsatisfying. I feel like it would be better to not entirely know or understand what was going on in these books. In being incomplete, I think they would feel more cohesive, ironically.
One last note: it's funny to compare Do Androids Dream to Blade Runner. I do like Blade Runner, but what is sort of subtext and an ending twist in Blade Runner—maybe Decker is the real replicant!—is just text in Do Androids Dream. You spend the whole book questioning who is real and who is not, because Decker himself is always doing this. I feel like Ridley Scott fanboys expect your mind to be blown by this, but where Scott ends is where Dick begins even though Dick came first, and I find that much more interesting, and that gives you much more to think about.
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LibraryThing member TChesney
I want science fiction!
Let's try Lovelace. Wrong, he's weird fiction.
How about Hearn. No, I'll save his ghost stories for later.
Where are Azimov and Vonnegut?
Alright, let's try Dick.
Wrong, the first book ('The Man in the High Castle') is alternate history.
So, on to the second book ('The Three
'The Man in the High Castle' was worth it. Alternate history is not my bag, but I found the book to be very enjoyable. Except for the ending, Dick handled the alternate stuff very well.
More to follow.
Let's try Lovelace. Wrong, he's weird fiction.
How about Hearn. No, I'll save his ghost stories for later.
Where are Azimov and Vonnegut?
Alright, let's try Dick.
Wrong, the first book ('The Man in the High Castle') is alternate history.
So, on to the second book ('The Three
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Stigmata of Palmer Ekdritch'). Wow! By page 3, I am really interested. Let's go back and try 'High Castle' again (with a more open mind).'The Man in the High Castle' was worth it. Alternate history is not my bag, but I found the book to be very enjoyable. Except for the ending, Dick handled the alternate stuff very well.
More to follow.
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LibraryThing member wildbill
This book is another journey to a different reality courtesy of Philip K. Dick. It reminds me somewhat of Ubik because of the different levels of reality that the story travels on. It is about a competition between two tycoons who sell hallucinogenic drugs. It is about a being who inhabits the body
Some of it takes place in reality and some takes place in drug induced hallucinations. The author is reputed to have dropped a lot of acid and seems comfortable in the world of drug induced hallucinations.
The book did keep me turning the pages to see how it would turn out. Then when I was finished I was not certain how it turned out. It is well written and with all the weirdness going on is internally coherent. I read a review of the book which while accurate does not convey the experience I had while reading the book. You will just have to judge that for yourself.
This is the fourth Philip K. Dick novel I have read and I am putting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on my tbr list. He is very thought provoking but definitely more work than some nice narrative history.
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of someone on an interstellar space journey and when it comes back to the nine planets seeks to invade the bodies of others. And it is about God and/or the Devil. At least I think so.Some of it takes place in reality and some takes place in drug induced hallucinations. The author is reputed to have dropped a lot of acid and seems comfortable in the world of drug induced hallucinations.
The book did keep me turning the pages to see how it would turn out. Then when I was finished I was not certain how it turned out. It is well written and with all the weirdness going on is internally coherent. I read a review of the book which while accurate does not convey the experience I had while reading the book. You will just have to judge that for yourself.
This is the fourth Philip K. Dick novel I have read and I am putting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on my tbr list. He is very thought provoking but definitely more work than some nice narrative history.
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LibraryThing member FKarr
Man in the High Castle: disappointing; Japanese invaded and won California in WW2, Nazis victorious in Europe; not-well connected story of conflict between J and N and a novel of triumphant America
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: at least the title makes sense in the novel, Dick had great
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: at least the title makes sense in the novel, Dick had great
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ideas, but he wasn't much of a writer; focused much more on mundane life of the future than the movie would ever make you believe Show Less
LibraryThing member JoePhelan
I love these Library of America volumes, but they do make me cheat a little on my Goodreads lists. I just finished _The Man in the High Castle_. What a trip.
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
2007-05-10
Physical description
830 p.; 21 cm
ISBN
9781598530094
Other editions
Four novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick (Paper Book)