Philip K. Dick’s Top Novels

The other day while I was answering another comment, I found a comment from James on November 8 which I had intended to address but it slipped my mind.  (James, I apologize)

He asked:

james Says:
November 8th, 2011 at 11:26 am e
Hello-
Quick question… his TOP 10 NOVELS, not novellas in your opinion ? I own & have read : Do Androids, Man in the High Castle, 3 Stigmata, & Ubik. What 6 should I add to my list ? Do you like any of the new, non fiction stuff being released ? i.e. His pre-sci-fi writing days ?
Lastly, whom do you think is his close second ? Asimov, William Gibson ?
Thanks for your time & knowledge… James

Here I need to admit to everyone that I have not read all of Philip K. Dick novels. So I can answer his question with the titles that I have read which one problem is that the only mainstream novels I have read are Confessions of a Crap Artist and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

One answer to the question I found on this page which list the top three novels from the long running survey that was conducted here. I don’t know if that one is related to the survey run in For Dickheads Only which is very similar.

So at the risk of beating a dead and rotting horse, I will list my favorite novels in order [from what novels I’ve read] each a link to Amazon.com for purchase or more information:

  1. VALIS
  2. Radio Free Albemuth
  3. The Man in the High Castle
  4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  5. Ubik
  6. A Scanner Darkly
  7. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  8. Martian Time-Slip
  9. Galactic Pot-Healer
  10. Confessions of a Crap Artist

I love all the non fiction being released but I am behind on my reading. I haven’t been reading the Exegesis like everyone else even though I have a copy of it to read later.

I tend to like J.G. Ballard and Thomas Disch also for Science Fiction. I used to read more widely in Science Fiction and Fantasy but now I include a lot more contemporary writing and literature.

I think we all know that these types of lists can be controversial especially with my number one choice which is also my favorite book of all time. Feel free to add your own top ten list in the comments or discuss my selections.

The 2012 Philip K. Dick Calendars Are Here!

2012 Philip K. Dick CalendarThe tradition continues with the 2012 Philip K. Dick Calendar (available as a single pdf or the original Word documents). We hope that you enjoy them and will use them throughout the year.

The creation of the calendars involved effort mostly by Lord Running Clam plus some work by the web site developer and are available for free. If you are impressed with the result and would like to give something back, please use the donate box on the right hand column of this page (“Help Keep The Site Running”) or donate to the Paul Williams fund at http://www.paulwilliams.com.

Brief Notes About Site Updates

I would like to encourage all fans of Philip K. Dick to check in on this site semi-regularly to see what is new because a lot of work has been spent bringing over old content and adding new content. So the site may seem to be more static now but actually much work has been happening. Articles, essays and criticism have been brought over from the old site so there items that may have been missed for the newer fans or even the older fans who weren’t able to read all the site’s content (and it was vast) before it was taken offline. Frank Views archives are being added and hopefully soon there will be new columns from Frank.

I have added a last updated widget so the users can see where I am working at the moment, what topic, what section, what page. Or the user can see when the last piece of new content has been added to the site.

Oh and volunteers are always welcome especially content writers!

Call for Papers: Worlds Out of Joint: Re-Imagining Philip K. Dick

An International Conference from 15-18 November, 2012 at TU Dortmund University, Germany

2012 sees the thirtieth anniversary of the untimely death, at the age of 53, of Philip K. Dick – a figure whose cultural impact within and beyond science fiction remains difficult to overestimate. Dick’s academic and popular reputation continues to grow, as a number of recent monographs, several biographies and an unceasing flow of film adaptations testify. Yet while his status as “The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet” (Paul Williams) is rarely questioned, scholarly criticism of Dick has not kept pace with recent developments in academia – from transnationalism to adaptation studies, from the cultural turn in historiography to the material turn in the humanities. Too often Dick remains shrouded in clichés and myth. Indeed, rarely since the seminal contributions of Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin have our engagements with Dick proved equal to the complexity of his writing – an oeuvre indebted to the pulps and Goethe, Greek philosophy and the Beats – that calls for renewed attempts at a history of popular culture. The aim of this conference is to contribute to such an undertaking.

At a time when mass protest against irrational economic, political and cultural orders is once again erupting around the world, the Dortmund conference will return to one of the major figures of the long American Sixties: to an author whose prophetic analyses of biopolitical capitalism and the neo-authorian surveillance state remain as pertinent as they were 30 years ago.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Marc Bould (University of the West of England, Bristol), Roger Luckhurst (Birbeck, University of London) and Norman Spinrad (New York/Paris).

Possible topics for panels and papers include but are in no way limited to:

 

  • The Realist Novels: What do Dick’s early realist novels add to our understanding of his work? In what relation do they stand to late modernist and realist U.S. literature? Can they be understood as Beat writing?
  • Transnational Approaches: Dick drew on various European and non-European cultures, and his SF worlds are highly transnational in their hybridity: What cultural transfers and transformations are evident in his work?
  • Dick’s Global Reception: Dick’s fiction has been widely translated – from Portuguese to Japanese, from Finnish to Hebrew. Yet we know little about his global reception. How has Dick’s work been read abroad, and transformed in translation? What has been his impact on SF outside America?
  • Dick and the SF Tradition: Critics have rarely engaged in-depth with Dick’s contribution to SF. What is Dick’s debt to the pulp magazines, to Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, or other SF authors? To what extent did Dick influence his contemporaries, and what does today’s SF owe to him?
  • Dick and Fandom: Long before his canonization as a literary figure, Dick was a cult author, and he retains a committed fan base. How has fandom shaped the way we read him? What role does Dick play in SF cultures of fandom today?
  • Narrative Structures and Aesthetics: Dick’s short fiction and novels are linked by common motifs, tropes and fictional devices. How do they shape his writing? His status as a popular writer has also meant that the aesthetic dimension of Dick’s fiction has often been neglected. How can it help us understand his work?
  • Dick and Mainstream Literature: Dick’s impact on ‘serious’ literature has often been posited but rarely analyzed. What do Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut or David Foster Wallace owe to Dick? What role have his writings played in the integration of SF into mainstream literature?
  • Adaptations: What makes Dick’s writing so attractive to filmmakers? How have these visual narratives changed our understanding of his work? Should we pay more attention to adaptations to other media – from opera to computer games?
  • The Letters and Journals: How do Dick’s letters and journals, as well as interviews with him change our understanding of his fiction?
  • The Final Novels: Dick’s late novels are gaining increasing attention, but critical evaluations vary widely. Are they evidence of a spiritual turn in Dick’s writing? How do they allow us to look at his work of the 1960s anew?
  • Dick and the Sixties: Recent scholarship drastically has changed our understanding of the Sixties. Does this necessitate a re-writing of Dick? What can we learn from the contradictions and achievements that shaped this era and Dick’s writing?
  • Dick and Global Capitalism: How do Dick’s analyses of global capitalism, mediatized politics and individualized consumer culture correspond to our own present?

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short biographical sketch to Stefan[dot]Schlensag[at]udo[dot]edu before 29 February 2012. Presenters will be asked to submit a full version of their 20-minute presentation by 31 August, and an electronic reader will be distributed before the conference to all participants. A selection of the papers given at the conference will be published in book form.

Conference Organizers:

Walter Grünzweig, Randi Gunzenhäuser, Sybille Klemm, Stefan Schlensag, Florian Siedlarek, (TU Dortmund University); Alexander Dunst (University of Potsdam) and Damian Podleśny (Krakow)

Conference Director and Contact:

Stefan Schlensag
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
TU Dortmund University
Emil-Figge-Straße 50
D-44227 Dortmund, Germany
Stefan[dot]Schlensag[at]udo[dot]edu

2012 Philip K. Dick Festival

Philip K. Dick in 21st Century

The Largest Gathering of PKD Scholars and Fans Ever Assembled in North America, A Multi-disciplinary Celebration of the Legendary California Writer

2012 Philip K. Dick FestivalPhilip K. Dick is arguably one of the most important writers of the 21st century. Dick’s uncanny prescience not only foretold of our current surveillance technology and color-coded terror, but additionally captured the narcissism and psychological withdrawal that defines the early part of this new century. Considered at the time of his death to be little more than a genre writer, Dick’s burgeoning literary reputation was kindled by a handful of fans and scholars. With his recent canonization in the prestigious Library of America and the 2011 publication of Dick’s esoteric religious notes, The Exegesis, now is the time to examine Dick’s influence and how he became such an important literary figure. The Bay Area, home to Dick for the majority of his lifetime, is also the perfect location for the event, allowing fans and scholars to step into Dick’s own past and retrace his steps in this vibrant city by the bay. Sept 22-23, 2012 will be a weekend long celebration and examination of Dick’s life and work.

The conference’s guest of honor will be none other than Jonathan Lethem, the editor for Philip K Dick’s three volumes from the prestigious Library of America, an editor of The Exegesis of Philip K Dick (from Houghton Mifflin), and a celebrated novelist in his own right. Lethem currently holds the Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College and his writing about Philip K Dick appears in his essay collections The Disappointment Artist, and The Ecstasy of Influence.

Other confirmed guests include: Pam Jackson (Editor, Philip K Dick’s Exegesis), Erik Davis (Annotations Editor for the recent publication of The Exegesis), John Simon (director of Radio Free Albemuth), Sam Umland (Chair of English Department at University of Nebraska Kearney and author of Contemporary Critical Interpretations: Philip K Dick), Douglas Mackey (author of Philip K Dick, Twayne’s United States Author Series), Umberto Rossi (independent scholar and author of The Twisted Worlds of Philip K Dick), Marc Haefele (an Assistant Editor at Doubleday who worked with Philip K Dick on his masterpiece novels Ubik and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), William Sarill (a longtime friend of Philip K Dick who helped Dick develop the religious system in his novel A Maze of Death), and many, many more.

Stay tuned for more information about the schedule and lodging in San Francisco. If you are interested in either presenting or attending, please contact conference organizer, David Gill: dcgill[at]sfsu[dot]edu. We are currently looking for speakers to give cogent and plain-spoken presentations on the following aspects of Dick’s life and work:

  1. Biographical
  2. Literary Criticism
  3. Science Fiction
  4. Cinematic Translations
  5. Sociology and Psychology
  6. Religion and Philosophy

Review: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

In the comments section, please add your your review, your criticism or a link to as post when you have much more to write than would fit in a comment.

 

Clans of the Alphane Moon issue of
For Dickheads Only

Summary and Review by Jason Koornick
Amazon.com Reviews

Links from reader comments:

Book reviews: Clans of the Alphane Moon, by Philip K. Dick
by Kenneth Andrews

Clans of the Alphane Moon
by D. Davis

How could mergers improve innovativeness: Clans of the Alphane Moon
by Juha Antti Lamberg

Clans of the Alphane Moon entry in PKDweb

Review: The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (2111)

In the comments section, please add your your review, your criticism or a link to as post when you have much more to write than would fit in a comment.

Amazon.com Reviews

Explaining Philip K Dick’s Exegesis by Daniel Kalder

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick by Paul Di Filippo

The Voices in Philip K. Dick’s Head by Charles Platt

The page from the Exegesis that was with Charles Platt’s The Voices in Philip K. Dick’s Head

‘The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick’ edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem by Ethan Gilsdorf, Boston.com

Review: The exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem by Alex Good, The Star

The Exegete by Rob Latham

Philip K. Dick Reviews And Criticism

In the spirit of For Dickheads Only in which each issue was focused on only one novel and there were reviews, discussions, and well thought out literary criticism all mixed together, I would like to start a similar thing on this site. I will post a book and add any links I found of reviews, etc and in the comments section, please enter your review, your criticism or a link to as post when you have much more to write than would fit in a comment. These posts will be collected in a section in the Literary Criticism section of the site so that if you aren’t able to add any thing immediately, you can add it later. I will add my personal views in the comments section and add links to other published view that I find that are outside of our group to the post

For Dickheads Only already covered Clans Of The Alphane Moon, The World Jones Made, The Cosmic Puppets, Solar Lottery, Beyond Lies The Wub, Eye In The Sky, Blade Runner 2 and issue 7 looks like a mish mash. I’m not sure when these works would be put out here for the scrutiny again, but I think they should be at some point. At least for the meantime I would like to focus on other works. I’m not sure about the frequency of new works being put out and if anyone has any suggests, please add a comment or email philipkdickfans[at]gmail[dot]com. The first work I selected is the Exegesis since many of you are already reading it. Also, Literary Criticism section started working on the novels in chronological order so the next one would have been The Man Who Japed, I believe.

Thankful For A Great Man

Paul WilliamsAs Thanksgiving approaches, I would like to share one person who I am very thankful for even though I have never met him:  Paul Williams. I will quote what Jason Koornick wrote about Paul on the  previous version of this site in May 2009:

 

Paul Williams was a friend and early champion of Philip K. Dick before anyone had ever heard of him. He wrote the famous 1975 Rolling Stone article that launched PKD into the public eye. He was PKD’s literary executor for many years after Dick’s death in 1982. Paul is also a music critic who has been around the music scene seemingly forever. What a career and a tragedy that he suffered in this accident….Here’s the news:

“Right now, Paul Williams, one of the pioneers of rock criticism, is in very serious trouble. As a 17-year-old college student in 1966, Williams founded the gloriously anarchic Crawdaddy! magazine, which predated both Rolling Stone and Creem. After he left Crawdaddy!, Williams sang in the background on the Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance”, published a series of books about Bob Dylan, and wrote a Rolling Stone article that helped repopularize the work of the cult sci-fi author Philip K. Dick.

In 1995, Williams suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bicycle accident, which may have caused early onset Alzheimer’s. Last year, Williams’ wife Cindy Lee Berryhill had to move him to an assisted living facility when she couldn’t care for both him and their eight-year-old son. Right now, Williams’ family is taking donations to help with his care. And given that Williams was working as a freelancer before his accident, their need is particularly great.”   Paul Williams

 

One of the things that I have been meaning to do for some time “when I had the money” was to make a donation. I have a signed copy of his Philip K. Dick biography, “Only Apparently Real” and bought a used copy of “Das Energi” which is a fascinating (and quick) read. I have great respect for the man and what he started not just with Philip K. Dick. Unfortunately now I am unemployed and unable to give, but I will be thinking of him this Thanksgiving and wishing him the best.

His website contains ways that you may donate money to help care for him after the accident. The web address is http://www.paulwilliams.com

Update: Paul’s condition is early-onset dementia and not early onset Alzheimer’s.

Question And An Update

I would like to give some updates on the progress on building out philipdick.com.  First, I have been working on pulling all available Philip K. Dick books from Amazon.com for the Works In Print section.  I have the Novels and Non Fiction completed, I believe (Please let me know if you see an error.)  The Short Story Collections should be done soon and then Secondary Resources section will be tackled.  I’m not sure that that section will ever be finished.  Oh, and if you have a suggestion for the Fiction Inspired By Philip K. Dick section, please send me them.  I put all the ones I knew about in the section.

I have spent some time roughing in the next set of changes that you will see on the site including the sidebar.  I have added some items including a PayPal donation box and a site only Google search box I am experimenting with.  I expect there may be more changes with the side bar as the site develops and things are moved around.  On the site pages, you may find a page with only the section headers on it which is a page that I have laid out what I think should be there but haven’t finished adding it.  I hope to have content in all areas soon but the timeline may change.  If I don’t feel that I will be able to get content in there soon, I will hide the areas I haven’t gotten to yet.  Nothing makes me madder than to follow a link and find nothing there and I don’t want to give that experience to someone else.

Which brings me to my question for the post?  I would like to steal/inherit/borrow and otherwise incorporate content from the old site into the new one, the new structure, not just the design but also the menu system.  Jason did an excellent job on the old site but I have always felt that the information architecture could have been improved.  I thank Jason for sending me a copy of the old site greatly.  How do you feel about me taking content from the old site and putting it into the new one?  Do you feel it should be left as it is or that the content should be repurposed?

11-17-1971 Break-in — 40 Year Anniversary

1974 Rolling Stone CoverAfter the comments by The PKD Fan Group on Facebook about the anniversary of the infamous break-in, I thought I would celebrate the date in a some way and post Paul Williams’s famous Rolling Stone article in which a discussion of it figures prominently.

/mirror/articles/1974_Rolling_Stone.pdf

This will be the permanent location on this site for the article.  Unfortunately, the copy isn’t the best and I don’t have a better scan of the article.

Just the PKD Facts, Please

I would really desperately like to offer Philip K. Dick relevant news on this site in such a way that I don’t need to post it all.  I would like it to come in automatically and appear in a feed like I set up on the top right box of the content.  Today’s top story is Standing Pat which only includes this part about Philip K. Dick:

“Thus Beattie winds up falling into the trap of conjuring not only Pat Nixon’s interior life but that of her husband — and inserting Richard Nixon into fiction usually yields cringe-inducing results, as works by Gore Vidal and Philip K. Dick, among many others, can attest.”

Not only is this story not primarily about Philip K. Dick, it appears to be insulting his writings.  The news feed generally works but the basis of it, is to find stories that mention Philip Dick.  We end up seeing stories like this one or The Technological Marvels Microsoft Hides in Its Labs “wouldn’t be out of place in a Philip K. Dick novel” or Sony HMZ-T1 3DTV Headset Review: An Amazing Toy “I’m already living the Philip K. Dick life.”  I’m not interested in these three articles and would guess that the site visitors are looking for this either.

The search algorithm I used was to look for Philip Dick in Google News (http://news.google.com).  Two questions for the group:

1.  Is this acceptable that the news stories may only mention Philip Dick and not be about him.

2. If not, what alternatives would you suggest?

I appreciate all your feedback and will look into any suggestions.

 

New Cover Controversy?


I’ve seen many social media discussions about the new editions of especially the look and design of the covers.

I think the overall look that Mariner Books is shooting for with these is a literary novel or contemporary fiction. Maybe that’s part of why us science fiction readers (for those of you who identify with that label. I hope I’m not over generalizing here) who are used to garish covers aren’t reacting positively to the generic bland covers that could be on any book.


I like the older covers better because they were more garish, more distinctive and more Science Fiction. The new ones look bland and so similar I think it will be hard to tell one apart from another. And the covers I’ve seen don’t seem to even try to show items, content or concepts from the novel.

What does everyone else think about this issue? Feel free to post a comment and share your thoughts!

Major Changes To The Site!

I have made some massive additions to the site and I hope that everyone enjoys them.  The best way to understand what’s going on is to read “About The Site” which was added to the menu.  Basically, a resource repository has been added to the site which contains recent articles, journals and the old pre-2003 philipkdick.com site (which I know is a big request).

I hope everyone likes the direction of the site. I would love to hear comments or thoughts about what has been added to the site.  I think that the site will be in a state of flux for sometime until the additions are finished and everything is standardized.  For example, I am looking at the links menu/blogroll in the right column and it just isn’t working for me.  There are too many links and they all run together.  I’m considering a separate links page right now.

Exegesis Article With Excerpt

Slate posted a short article today about the publication of the Exegesis.  I have archived it on this site in pdf format Philip K. Dick Loses Touch With Reality.

I liked the article on something struck when I was reading the excerpt.  The Exegesis consists of notes and writings that can range in length from a multi-page discussion to a tiny note on a scrap of paper.  I was curious how the book captures this feeling if at all.  I have flipped through it and noticed that it was organized into sections based on the folders Paul Williams put the writing into.  That’s one thing that has always fascinated me about the Exegesis because it seems like it should be unpublishable due to it’s structure and I don’t think that Philip K. Dick ever intended to have it published.  I believe he was using it like a journal but the book or notepad structure was not kept.  I have found myself writing things out similarly to work through or think through issues I have had recently.  My idea to do it came from his original work.  And I won’t be trying to publish what I wrote in this manner.

I don’t want to dishonor anyone’s effort because I am glad it’s been published and the task must have been monumental to organize it so that it doesn’t seem like a bunch of writer’s notes strung together.  Or another tack is to weave and edit all the text together so that it flows like one cohesive piece of writing.  I hope this avenue wasn’t taken because I like the viewpoint that the ideas were explored and built up over time.  From what I understand this is how the first publication from the Exegesis was organized.  But I have heard that the compilers of the work intended to keep the integrity of the original writing intact.  If anyone has picked up The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick and can help with these questions, please add a comment.

Exegesis Is Here!


I haven’t posted anything about the release of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick because I assumed that anyone who likes Philip K. Dick knows about this because of the importance of this release.

I have a copy of the first release of the Exegesis and have only read parts of it because it is difficult to choose to read it over reading VALIS which is my favorite book and one that explains parts of the Exegesis so I get my fix from that.

I haven’t picked up my copy of this yet (I’m sure I will soon). I tend to buy all of my most desired books on the day of release.  If anyone would like to post mini-reviews in the comments or send a full length review, I will post (or allow) them here.

Must Be A Big Week For Ridley Scott…

Another story from  the Wall Street Journal blog this week about Ridley Scott.  A post titled “Ridley Scott Spills the Secrets of ‘Prometheus’”, his next movie which will be a science fiction movie and his first in several years.  I believe that it is a prequel to Alien.  I especially like this quote which also bears some relevance to the sequel to Blade Runner he’s developing:

“I think the reason why I haven’t attempted science fiction in a number of years is because I haven’t really come across a script that I really liked,” Scott says. “This developed and came out extremely well.”

The original article is posted here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/11/07/ridley-scott-spills-the-secrets-of-prometheus/