Lucas Blogs About Dick
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| DICK! |
Really? You're writing about one of your favorite writers, and you're starting it off with a dick joke?
Oh, I didn't see you there, Hypothetical Reader. I thought I would handle this one on my own.
What? You don't think I have anything to add to a discussion of the works of Philip K. Dick?
Well, it's more that Philip K. Dick is one of those writers who looms large in my reading life so I thought that I might make this one a little more personal and a little less joke-y.
I'll refer you to the first line of this post.
Fair enough. Philip Kindred Dick (1928-1982) was a prolific and influential science fiction writer who published dozens of novels and over one hundred short stories in his thirty-ish year career. Outside of his writing he's probably best known for his struggles with drugs and mental illness. Inside of his writing, he's best known for intelligent, idea-driven sci-fi, economic prose, and middle-aged, sad sack protagonists who romantically pursue younger, dark-haired ice queens.
A-hem! Less joke-y?
Oh fine, I wrote a very serious research/thesis paper on Philip K. Dick back in college, let's have some fun. Okay, real confession time: I'm not a big short story guy, so while I've read probably about a third of his novels, I haven't really explored his short stories.
Lucas!
Scandalous, I know. Particularly since so many adaptations of his work are based on those instead of his novels.
Well, what's your favorite Dick adaptation?
Well, honestly, the one I enjoyed the most is A Scanner Darkly. The rotoscoping was the perfect medium for rendering the more surreal aspects of the novel, from the characters' hallucuinations to Arctor's scramble suit. I know everyone else is way into Blade Runner and while it's a good movie, it's one of those films that I admire, but don't particularly like.
Wait! You don't like Blade Runner?
Not particularly, no, but it is a good adaptation.
Well, which cut did you watch?
Pretty sure it was the 1992 Director's Cut, definitely didn't have any voice over and it did have seemingly interminable shots of Deckard's unicorn dream. Though I do love the "tears in rain" monologue. Anyway, I feel like we're getting too bogged down in adaptations without discussing what I like about Dick in the first place.
Which is?
Dick was one of the first science fiction writers I encountered who focused primarily on the nature of humanity and reality. I'd read other science fiction and science fiction adjacent books before. But until two friends made me read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? back in high school, I thought of science fiction more in terms of large scale stories like Foundation or Dune. Dick's novels shrank sci-fi concepts to human scale for me. The idea is always more important than the characters themselves, but you always experience the idea through the ways in which it affects their lives and their perceptions of the world around them.
Huh.
What's wrong?
Nothing, I just figured you'd say something along the lines of, "Philip K. Dick shattered my reality and opened my mind up to new concepts."
Well, those things may also be true, but those have always been vicarious thrills. It's not your reality being shattered when Tagomi meditates himself into "our" San Francisco in The Man in the High Castle. It's his. Science fiction often works along two axes. On one axis you can disguise social commentary on the present with "what if" extrapolations, on the other you can take the reader on a journey that makes them question their own their own perceptions and biases about the world from the safe remove of fiction. So for example, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch lets you safely wonder what it might be like to have your view of reality warped by a drug that lets you project your consciousness into a doll. The shattering (and occasional reconstitution) of reality in Dick's work is always about the way in which that experience effects the character's life.
I gotcha. I'd ask if you have a favorite Philip K. Dick novel, but I'd probably get a paragraph of you trying to weasel out of picking just one because, "It depends on my mood," or, "the alignment of the stars," or something like that.
It's The Man in the High Castle.
Oh.
It's not so much the alternate history aspect (though that is always a fascinating thought experiment), but the way that Dick incorporates the I Ching as a plot device. On the one hand, it's a stretch that a Japanese invasion of the US would lead to widespread use of a Chinese oracle, but on the other it's a clever writing trick to get the characters to think through the consequences and implications of their actions.
Any suggestions for further reading?
Yes, Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick is an excellent warts-and-all biography, and Sutin also edited The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings for Vintage Books. The latter includes several essays by Dick, two chapters from an unfinished High Castle sequel, and excerpts from the Exegesis.
Oh, are we going to talk about his encounter with the Vast Active Living Intelligence System?
No, I think this is enough for now. If you want to know more about that, go read VALIS again.
Links:
There's also an annual sci-fi award named for PKD.
Philip K. Dick's papers can be found in the CSU Fullerton library's special collections.
A-hem! Less joke-y?
Oh fine, I wrote a very serious research/thesis paper on Philip K. Dick back in college, let's have some fun. Okay, real confession time: I'm not a big short story guy, so while I've read probably about a third of his novels, I haven't really explored his short stories.
Lucas!
Scandalous, I know. Particularly since so many adaptations of his work are based on those instead of his novels.
Well, what's your favorite Dick adaptation?
Well, honestly, the one I enjoyed the most is A Scanner Darkly. The rotoscoping was the perfect medium for rendering the more surreal aspects of the novel, from the characters' hallucuinations to Arctor's scramble suit. I know everyone else is way into Blade Runner and while it's a good movie, it's one of those films that I admire, but don't particularly like.
Wait! You don't like Blade Runner?
Not particularly, no, but it is a good adaptation.
Well, which cut did you watch?
Pretty sure it was the 1992 Director's Cut, definitely didn't have any voice over and it did have seemingly interminable shots of Deckard's unicorn dream. Though I do love the "tears in rain" monologue. Anyway, I feel like we're getting too bogged down in adaptations without discussing what I like about Dick in the first place.
Which is?
Dick was one of the first science fiction writers I encountered who focused primarily on the nature of humanity and reality. I'd read other science fiction and science fiction adjacent books before. But until two friends made me read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? back in high school, I thought of science fiction more in terms of large scale stories like Foundation or Dune. Dick's novels shrank sci-fi concepts to human scale for me. The idea is always more important than the characters themselves, but you always experience the idea through the ways in which it affects their lives and their perceptions of the world around them.
Huh.
What's wrong?
Nothing, I just figured you'd say something along the lines of, "Philip K. Dick shattered my reality and opened my mind up to new concepts."
Well, those things may also be true, but those have always been vicarious thrills. It's not your reality being shattered when Tagomi meditates himself into "our" San Francisco in The Man in the High Castle. It's his. Science fiction often works along two axes. On one axis you can disguise social commentary on the present with "what if" extrapolations, on the other you can take the reader on a journey that makes them question their own their own perceptions and biases about the world from the safe remove of fiction. So for example, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch lets you safely wonder what it might be like to have your view of reality warped by a drug that lets you project your consciousness into a doll. The shattering (and occasional reconstitution) of reality in Dick's work is always about the way in which that experience effects the character's life.
I gotcha. I'd ask if you have a favorite Philip K. Dick novel, but I'd probably get a paragraph of you trying to weasel out of picking just one because, "It depends on my mood," or, "the alignment of the stars," or something like that.
It's The Man in the High Castle.
Oh.
It's not so much the alternate history aspect (though that is always a fascinating thought experiment), but the way that Dick incorporates the I Ching as a plot device. On the one hand, it's a stretch that a Japanese invasion of the US would lead to widespread use of a Chinese oracle, but on the other it's a clever writing trick to get the characters to think through the consequences and implications of their actions.
Any suggestions for further reading?
Yes, Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick is an excellent warts-and-all biography, and Sutin also edited The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings for Vintage Books. The latter includes several essays by Dick, two chapters from an unfinished High Castle sequel, and excerpts from the Exegesis.
Oh, are we going to talk about his encounter with the Vast Active Living Intelligence System?
No, I think this is enough for now. If you want to know more about that, go read VALIS again.
Links:
There's also an annual sci-fi award named for PKD.
Philip K. Dick's papers can be found in the CSU Fullerton library's special collections.
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