I don’t mean to offend anyone if this is one of your favourites by PKD, but I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed by the man in the high castle. Did I miss the more significant underlying symbolism or metaphors? I feel like he’s written better stories and this is hyped beyond reason.

I posted on here a few days ago about a PKD discord server and a number of people have shown interest. I'm currently working on setting one up but have 0 experience in setting it up, categorizing channels.... If anyone is interested in getting involved or helping set it up lmk.

I didn't really find much of interest in this book, it wasn't bad, but it didn't really have any big, mystical, sci-fi ideas in it, which is what I expect from Dick.

It's really more a kind of memorial to those who were killed or injured by drugs in the counter culture era, both people who he knew personally and in the larger society.

If that is something you're interested in, a look at the degenerating effects of drugs on society, and not psychedelics but just hard drugs, and want to dial that up to 11, if you're into complex webs of drug dealers and narcs and surveillance and all that, this would be interesting for you I think, but if you're looking for esoteric, mystical sci-fi there are better Dick novels you could read.

Again, it's not terrible, I only write this post because so many people give such high praise to this novel, but I just don't see it, and I wanted to counter that praise in case someone is trying to decide which of Dick's books to read.

I am increasingly convinced that Dick, over time, has developed a type of writing so descriptive and profound, that it seems closer to the concept of a literary screenplay than to a real novel, or in any case to a type of writing in the "traditional" or "formal" sense of the term. This precisely in its latest period of writing.

It is as if, through words, you project images into your mind, having the power to coordinate them in a very precise order through the unparalleled choice of the right sentences, expressions. I mean, it's something that I normally (or you) do while reading, right? Creating images in your mind...but Dick has the capability to do so like it's communicating to you in a metaphisical or telepathical manner.

I vaguely recall reading an anecdote about PKD meeting JG Ballard at Disneyland and taking a ride while discussing the rise of American Fascism (back in the good old days).

Did I dream this or transpose some of the participants?

EDIT: u/ubikcan called it, it was actually Norman Spinrad who was with PKD at Disneyland being interviewed for a Paris TV feature.

Is there a discord out there to discuss PKD?

I’m working on an essay about the comparisons between Elon and PE… there’s something off putting about the wannabe tony stark and I find he’s more comparable to the entity that assumes Palmers identity, especially with Elmo shilling the brain chip which will permeate society’s collective consciousness in the future. Keen to hear your thoughts.

My favorites so far have been a Scanner Darkly & Martian Time-Slip. His short stories are extremely interesting and complex as well.

I have been in a Philip K. Dick phase lately. Right now I am reading a short stories compilation. I just read The Eyes Have It and I don’t get it.

The story starts off with the narrator claiming he discovered evidence of Earth being invaded by life forms from another planet. The evidence being a paperback novel.

I get how the narrator is mortified because he is taking figures of speech in a book literally.

“His eyes movies from person to person”. “Poor Bibney has lost his head again”. “He took her arm”. “We split upl”. And so on…

The narrator himself is a human but somehow he takes figure of speech literally? Why? It makes no sense. Especially because throughout the story he himself uses a variety of figures of speech: “knitting her eyebrows”, “my mind reeled”, “burned in my mind”, “put me on the trail, “tipped me off”, “in a nutshell”.

What am I missing?

don’t kill me for being mildly feminist on a new subreddit but is anyone else kind of distracted by the way Dick writes his female characters? i am a pretty new fan (i’ve read a scanner darkly, electric sheep, flow my tears, and i’m starting on man in the high castle) and by no means someone who typically says this about books. i was a Steven King fan for many years and i didn’t notice anything until someone pointed it out to me. i didn’t even notice it until i was well into my third novel but it seems like Dick has a single female archetype that he alters slightly for every woman in his stories. i initially brushed off the way the women were described as a characterization choice to show the leading man’s limited mindset, but so many similar choices were made i found myself mixing up details between Donna, Rachael, Katherine, and Alys. it seems like they always initially come off as vulnerable and unstable, but possessing or accessing something the main character needs. the main character believes himself to manipulate this woman, only to himself be manipulated, often using his sexual attraction to them, and often intentionally landing him in greater trouble.

for the record, this is not a “let’s look at a book written 50 years ago and cancel the guy who wrote it.” i don’t care. i wouldn’t bother to criticize an author whose work i didn’t admire. i love how his work makes me question what reality and identity mean. maybe i just happened to read the books he published with the most similar characters, maybe i’m the asshole for even bringing it up, it just makes me cringe sometimes when he goes out of his way to describe a character’s tits. i just don’t feel it’s always the breast storytelling device.

Quite a strange one, I was expecting a bit more to come from the simulacra near the end, or some kind of twist where Pris was never real, or that either she or one of the characters also turned out to be a simulacra. I have seen that this book had an additional chapter when it was originally published in magazine form. Does anyone have this final chapter or know roughly its contents?

Hi everyone! After cataloguing, putting them altogether and making collages of my wonderful Philip K. Dick collection, I’m gauging interest in and selling the whole set. It’s a comprehensive collection of 48 books, including:

• Some Rarer books and his Serious Novels: Features harder-to-find titles like Voices from the Street and his more serious novels.
• First Edition Thus and Second Prints: Some first edition thus and many second print titles, all in great condition.
• Collected Short Stories: The complete five-volume set of PKD’s short stories, mostly in like new to very good condition, with some variability there also.
• The Exegesis: This copy was damaged by a wine spill recently :( but remains a valuable part of the set.
• Bonus: Includes a 3-in-1 edition that features The Man Who Japed, Vulcan’s Hammer, and Dr. Futurity.

I’m located in Ireland, but I’m open to shipping internationally if the cost is agreeable with all parties. Most books are in like new or very good condition, and this collection would be perfect for a PKD fan or serious sci-fi collector which I hope to find for this lovely collection. Hope you like them :)

Sorry about the image format. Having some trouble with them.

Philip K Dick Complete Collection | eBay

Feel free to ask any questions or express interest!

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Looking forward to adding more titles in time, especially in English, most pictured here are French, but I guess I’m feeling proud enough to share it with you guys!

ELIZA was made between 1964-1967 and was basically the first rendition of what would eventually become ChatGPT today, it was a Natural Language Processing model, basically it was the first program that could kinda read natural human language and return something, and it was made to be a rogerian psychotherapist, crazy, I was learning about it as I'm into computer science, and studying to become an ML engineer, then I thought, that's really cool they made that in th 60s, then I remembered, hey wait I feel like I have heard about it before and started thinking hmmmmmm, then I remembered, Dr Smile from Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, it was basically a therapist in a computer just like Eliza and was written at the same time Eliza was being developed, so did it inspire PKD, but if it did it'd mean he'd have to know about it in 1965, which'd mean he was probably in touch with the tech community of his time and developments of computers during that time

I finished reading the book and really enjoyed it however I find many themes and events confusing. Do any of you have some good analysis/reviews etc that could help explain some stuff?

I don't think PKD is the best at prose, plots, characters, pacing. Not even delving deeply into the themes and ideas, albeit he does have good themes. His world building is cool but not masterful either.

But there's just something about his style that I love and I can't define it. It's as if every page was soaked in gasoline.

Does anyone agree? Does anyone feel they know what exactly it is that makes him stand out? Or even better, anyone disagree?

Synopsis: «Because what is continuity but a fever, an aberration?»

In the beginning there is a city, two lonely men; a tattoo artist and a postal worker become friends in a forgotten gallery downtown and are witnesses and protagonists of the collapse that breaks the world as they knew it. Reality begins to fail, to malfunction, as if there were a bad signal, as if the software was damaged: the horizon becomes pixelated, the characters flicker, they fragment, and no one can be sure that, if they enter a room, they will leave at some point. People disappear, people who are trapped in an action, in a landscape, in a sentence. And the city grows and multiplies with an entropic voracity, which opens like a carnivorous flower. We are, then, at the end of the universe. There is no reason to be shocked. We have been there for a long time and perhaps we have not realized it. The entire history of humanity could be a tiny part of this end of the world. Our consciousness could be part of that dark energy that we only have news of in its constant dialogue with gravity. What if that energy were, finally, the god we have been searching for? A disruptive novel, a fractal novel, an attempt to capture the complexity of a world that is crumbling before our eyes, it is the total novel of our present. Also, an open, inexhaustible experience, in which the nature of the text is the very overflow of the human being.

Unfortunately, it is only available in Spanish at the moment, but who knows, maybe one day they will translate it!

So far:

VALIS

3 Stigmata

A Scanner Darkly

The Divine Invasion

Flow My Tears

Ubik

Ordered (descending) by my love for them

found at a used bookstore for 8 bucks!

I was reading the Exegesis under the influence of weed The first part of the book became extremely spiritual at times. If you surrender to the reading and accept the flow of thought, then everything feels free and premeditated, unique and universal, mundane and infinite and fractal, communicable and forbidden.

Tell me ur experience reading Dick's Work being under altered states of mind by substances

What's the PKD story that Groundhog Day sort of ripped off? Story was great, told from the point of view of a couple of tv announcers who are giving commentary on a parade celebrating the successful return of a time traveller.