My God, he wrote a lot

My God, he wrote a lot.

I'm sure it's all good, but what would you recommend I start with?

if you actually cared, you’d just pick a point to dive in and then figure out where to go from there.

this board sees hundreds of posts a day asking “where do i start?” and the only answer is that you should just fuck off and start.

there isn’t a magical starting point where it’s all going to click into place for you. if you cared, you’d do the research and figure it out. so fuck off.

Agreed.

Do you really have to read into my post like such a fucking snob? Just name your favorite Dick book or something. That's all I'm asking.

And by the way it's funny that you say this board gets hundreds of where do I start posts and my thread is the one where you finally decide "THAT'S IT! I'VE HAD ENOUGH! TIME TO SPEAK MY MIND ON THIS ISSUE PLAGUING OUR SOCIETY!"

>That's all I'm asking.
But why? You could just read.

I'll TELL you why. Because you're fucking lonely. This pretence isn't fooling anyone.

Except me, user. You're alright. Read his short story compilation to get going.

Don't take the Lord's name in vain, asshole.
Maybe you're just more annoying than the rest.

Okay, I'll tell you. I like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Disregard the others.
Martian Time Slip.

The Man in the High Castle was my first PKD novel. That was a pretty decent starting point. 3 Stigmata is probably my favorite. I just read VALIS and The Divine Invasion. Finishing up Transmigration, now. But, I'd get some preliminary PKD novels down before diving into the VALIS trilogy.

I think A Scanner Darkly is much above average for him. He took time on it (i.e. not blasting it out in 2 months on amphetamines) and it shows.

i started with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, because i`ve had seen Blade Runner and wanted to know the source material, really good, some feelings triggers here and there.

i would actually recommend that you start with a volume of his short stories (doesn't matter which one--the first one, i guess, since i think they are all published in a convenient set of 5 volumes)

Dick is more of an idea man than a character-development or complex-plot or evocative prose man. i love many of his novels but his short stories convey his ideas in a succinct but sufficient way.

I'm a pleb so I've only read some of his short stories, I liked Second Variety and Beyond Lies the Wub.

Valis

Veeky Forums has a boner for Valis. It gets overly recommended.

I liked Ubik and Do Androids Dream, when I read them ages ago. I thought MITHC was boring af.

>I'm sure it's all good,
certainly not

but almost half of it is

Literally any of his more well-known and good novels.

The Simulacra
Ubik
Valis
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A Scanner Darkly
Martian Time Slip
The Game-Players of Titan
The Man in the High Castle
Galactic Pot Healer (unfortunately not about someone healing people with pot, but about a person who repairs broken pots)
etc.

t. Christcuckinson

methamphetamine is one hell of a drug.

test

The Unteleported Man is W I L D but probably not best for an introduction to Dick. A Scanner Darkly is fun, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep generally seems to be a good start for most people, especially if you've seen the movie to back it up.

>I'm sure it's all good

kek

he just needed the money for drugs

People tend to do their best writing when on drugs. See: Stephen King

Late PKD is vastly different from early PKD and also the preferred period of many of his fans, including me. Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, VALIS, etc.

the problem wasn't that he was on drugs, it was that in order to earn money for drugs he rapidly shat out all these novels that he obviously didn't think through and that read like rough drafts of something he would end up writing later. take a shot every time he introduces some elaborate concept only to forget about it for the rest of the novel because fuck reading what you wrote, that shit's getting mailed to the publisher as soon as he's done with the last paragraph.

So he didn't think them through but came up with countless elaborate concepts for them? That's contradictory.

>he just needed the money for drugs
And he just needed drugs to write

he came up with concepts on the fly without thinking through how they would be used in the rest of the novel so there's suddenly elaborately explained time travel in the middle of a book but it's used exactly once and for the rest of the novel no one remembers that time travel exists. inventiveness and a poor work ethic are not contradictory.

He had 5 ex-wives and 3 kids. He took drugs because writing fast was the only way to feed them.
Now if Dick had kept his dick inside his pants...

Early PKD is the drug phase
He was sober in his last years, but by then already suffered from frequent schizophrenic episodes

>He had 5 ex-wives and 3 kids. He took drugs because writing fast was the only way to feed them.

5 ex wives leeching all of his money? Jesus, that is fucking crazy.

You'd think he'd have learnt after divorce 4.

I've read Ubik, Man in the High Castle and Scanner Darkly. I thought High Castle was shit, Scanner Darkly was pretty good, and Ubik was excellent. I don't know how this helps you

Only thing I've read of his so far was Palmer Eldritch which was pretty good.