PKD Thread

Can we have a thread appreciating this guy?
What's your favourite PKD novel?

have only read Androids, where to go from there? Was thinking Ubik.

Do you want a nice read that twists you up in the end or a novel where from the middle to the end you basically can't tell what's real and what's not?

Just finished VALIS, and rapidly working my way through the trilogy. Divine Invasion, and Transmigration of Timothy Archer are up next.

The latter

The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

fucking finally. valis trilogy is a masterpiece

the one where he goes on and on and on about all kinds of disconnected things while occasionally throwing in some germanic philosophy terms mixed with greek christian terms mixed with whatever else his speed-addled pinball brain happened to be orbiting at the time.

"End of Zoobko, or perhaps Zoob of Endko."

Fill the bingo card, m8s

>flying car
This

hi drew

>helpful black man
Boy, he really did play with reality.

lol too true

The Unpooped Baby, about a man who has never defecated in his entire life.

at some point i am going to get the text of John Sladek's PKD parody from his collection "The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Stories", and put it up on pastebin. and just link to it whenever some twentysomething is jabbering on in doe-eyed wonder about how transgressive Dick's work is.

Solar Shoe Salesman
by Chipdip K Kill

Stan Houseman, shoe-salesman, punched a cupee of Kaff from the kitchen and scanned the footlines of his morning newsper:
OLYMPIC FINALS AT CARMODY STADIUM
POLICE BREAK UP HATTONITE RIOT
The stock market report listed only two corporations – the two which had between them divided the world – North American Boot & Shoe (Nabs) and Eurasian Footwear. Nabs was up two points, Eurafoot down the same, inevitably. In this two-person, zero-sum game, one side could only profit at the expense of the other. Like Karen and me, he thought grimly.
The corner of his eye caught movement – the racing figure of an autistic child. When he looked right at it, it was gone.
Karen came into the kitchen.
‘Let’s not start anything, for God’s sake,’ he said.
‘I’m getting a divorce, Stan. I’m seeing the lawster this afternoon.’
Suddenly the coffee-substitute tasted very bitter...

II
Ed Pagon gazed into the camera face of ‘Mel’, the robot interviewer for KHBT-TV. ‘Somehow I feel this is more than just a game I’m playing here today,’ he said. ‘I think a lot more is at stake here today than the Olympics jacks championship.’
‘Tell me, Ed,’ said the robot, ‘How does it feel, being the only male contestant in this jacks tournament?’
How do you think it feels? Like being castrated, he thought. Forcing a smile, he replied, ‘Frankly, I’ve always thought of jacks as a man’s game, Mel. It’s an art as well as a sport, and men traditionally excel in the arts …’
When the interview was over, Ed went into his dressing-room to warm up. He seated himself on the floor with the regulation red rubber ball and steel jacks, and tried to empty his mind for Zen exercises. The idea was to pick up jacks without picking them up mentally.
Onesies without thinking about it. Twosies without thinking about it. Threesies …
Ed felt sudden pain, a band of it, squeezing his guts. Pain blurred his vision as he looked down at the jack on the floor. This was no jack. It was a tiny metal man with his arms outstretched, fastened by magnets to a steel cross.

III
Joe Feegle stopped Stan Houseman outside the sales cubicle. ‘The word is, we’re on the brink of war, Stan. The two company presidents are having a summit meeting this afternoon – they’ll be playing one round of The Game – and if they tie, we’ll have war.’
‘But they always tie.’
‘Right. Hey, look!’
Both men turned to stare at a figure at the other end of the corridor, a figure in the official gold-and-black uniform of an Armourer. President Moniter was calling in an Armourer to design new weapons for the company – a bad omen.
Another was the unrest caused, or exploited, by the barefoot fanatic sect who called themselves the Hattonites. As Stan unlocked his cubicle and prepared for work, he thought of Herkimer Hatton’s strange and fascinating cult.
Little was known of the late Herkimer Hatton himself, except that he’d lived twenty years before, and had been accident-prone in the extreme. In a series of over a thousand small accidents, Hatton had lost limbs and other bits and pieces of his body, and replaced them with synthetics. Finally he was (except to his followers) an android. Legend had it that he’d finished up on an iron cross, and that he would return when the world needed him.
And now the world needed something, and fast. Stan cleared his mind of Hatton and other worries, and turned the energy of his psychic influence upon a million potential customers. His influence spread over the city, giving a million men and women this imperceptible nudge. For some it might come as a moment of reflection: I do need new shoes … For others it might be a slight hesitation as they passed a Nabs window display. Still others would be in the stores, trying shoes on, when suddenly they’d find something …

So what’s the former?

lol. it needs a space for "woman with small breasts."

Dick's works are still visionary and great even if they're repetitive and of shoddy quality sometimes. Most writers explore the same themes and situations over and over again in throughout their entire careers, only in slightly different ways. In Dick's works, it's only more noticeable because of how distinctly unique and recognizable his themes and situations are, and how many books he wrote and how relatively easy it is to read a lot of them. No one will ever write works as strangely unique and with the same compelling but familiar atmosphere as Dick's, in my opinion. Dick actually wrote in his Exegesis how a lot of wacked-out people he knew (from drugs, insanity) thought that his books had somehow CREATED the modern world because of how perfectly they seem to sum up the modern world.

Ubik