Do you enjoy dick?

Do you enjoy dick?

no
Worst american writer

Yes

I made friends with the man with no face that some have secretly seen down here. He told me his story, in the afterlife he accidentally stuck his face out for a look as a life force wave was passing through and it took it completely off. He has no face at all, but this didn't stop him and didn't effect what we were doing together. He was with another boy (we were kids in this space) and they were trying to make an escape path horizontally from this space when I got there and there was an old man there next to a singularity deliberating about an escape path vertically up a time spout. After some time and deep thought (those two almost took off horizontally, which would have been bad, they could have got lost) we all molded into one being taking on the different functions inside and traversed to the higher dimension.

He's one of my favorites.

Dude was insane, but also a highly critical thinker with a vivid imagination and that combination gave him a unique perspective on a lot of things.

You don't have to believe his theories to like him, but you do have to WANT to believe them and be prepared to sit and think for a long time about what the fuck you just read every few pages.

I will say, however, that his style is rather choppy and dull, but the ideas he has are bright enough to make up for it.

I suggest:
A Scanner Darkly
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (of course)
Ubik
Time Out of Joint

insatiable.

I thought "Do Androids..." was one of the best, most tightly written sci-fi novels I had ever read, not to mention it managed to cover a lot of different areas like capitalism, personhood, animal rights, religion, value of our emotions, etc., in one really short book.

But then I read A Scanner Darkly and thought, "eh, it's okay."

And then I read "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and I was like where's the ipecac. It was total garbage. Hamfisted social commentary, absurd plot devices, too many perspectives.

Now I'm afraid to even pick up another Horselover Fat. Wat do? Thanks.

Yes, he's got me into Sci-fi books

The Man in the High Castle is one of my favourite books

Are you into psychedelics
If yes: VALIS
if no: maybe Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

VALIS is another Fat book, the main perspectives are basically Fat and Phillip self-inserting 1st person (and even then they're both the same person). It's a fucking roller coaster though so if you preferred his earlier, more consistent stuff like Andoirds, you might not like his later stuff.

VALIS sort of made me feel bad for the guy. He had a fucking terrible taste in women, since nearly every single one fucked his life up and sent him further into madness. He even acknowledges in some parts of it that it's probably his own bad life choices that sent him along that path.

Scratch flow my tears, read ubik instead

Read the Exegesis and stop being a faggot.

Yes yes you are very special we know, but the Exegesis is not exactly one his more open works. It's too raw for my approaching reader.

>my

an*

>in a 1977 interview he listed Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black, and Fathers and Sons as some of his favourite novels

Damn didn't know the Dick had taste like that

I have to say, I like the taste of Dick.

pretty patrician

I recall that he mixed with the academic crowds at Berkeley from earlier on, where he developed a taste for the French writers you mention, as well as Balzac. PKD notes that his books did particularly well in France, and wonders if this is merely due to them having good translators, or otherwise. I would be curious to hear an opinion from somebody who has read him in French.

Yes. He wrote way too much though. He should have went for a more quality > quantity approach, and his books would have probably been better.

What books would you say are his most diffierent from his usual shtick? I've read the ones mentioned by this guy and more, but i've gotten bored of Dick, because it feels like everyone of his novels that i have read are saying the same thing.


Proust and Finnegans Wake were mentioned right at the start of Flow My Tears. He's obviously familiar with the canon.

Not homosexual or bisexual sorry.

>Read the Exegesis and stop being a faggot.

alternatively you could do a fuckton of speed and develop your own theories of how the universe is trying to control the universe via pink lasers beamed into your brain.

>He wrote way too much
Drugs are expensive and because of this Philly D. spent a lot of his life borderline broke churning out stories without any drafting or rewriting to keep the lights on.

Yeah i know, that's why i wish it could have been different. You can tell reading his books that many of them could have done with more work and would have been better. It's a shame.

as a matter of fact

Dare ye enter the castle of dicks?

...

Someone post the rest of these.

I'll post the few I have for you, user.

...

...

I think this is the last one I've got.

ITT: Lovers of fat horse dick

I sometimes feel a bit of a dick. especially when i am in Bangkok.

>Supposedly, Dick's wife transcribed the sounds she heard him speak, and discovered that he was speaking Koine Greek—the common Greek dialect during the Hellenistic years (3rd century BC–4th century AD) and direct "father" of today's modern Greek language—which he had never studied. As Dick was to later discover, Koine Greek was originally used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint. However, this was not the first time Dick had claimed xenoglossia: a decade earlier, Dick insisted he was able to think, speak, and read fluent Koine Greek under the influence of Sandoz LSD-25.
What's your excuse for still not knowing Greek?

>xenoglossy
>real

If you feel bad about his choice in women after reading VALIS, just wait until you start on his realist novels. The only theme that Phil tries to address in Confessions of a Crap Artist is the moral bankruptcy of his ex-wife.

This belongs in the containment thread.

His most quality novel is actually A Scanner Darkly, which I myself felt to be his masterpiece before I'd ever read that he thought so too and that he wrote this book with a genuinely good editor who told him what to do with it and, finally, that he wrote it without any drug use at all, in fact after he had gone to rehab, and he actually wrote it slowly and took time with it for what it's worth.

So I think you're right, he could've been very good if he wrote novels slowly, purposefully, with a good editor and without drug use. The editor not to make his books shorter (they're all pretty short) but more purposeful, since a lot of them spontaneously recycled the parallel-universe/huge simulation/conspiracy-theory shtick without caring about characterization, for one thing.

Here's one moar

I disagree

Would it be worth reading A Scanner Darkly despite having seen the movie beforehand?

Sure, the movie was fun but Dick's tangents and thoughts are even more entertaining

I read them in French when I was a kid, the translations were fine but the writing was nothing special as far as I remember. Other than patching up the occasional bump or awkwardness there's not much to work with in his prose desu, but I do generally speaking find that short or simple sentences work better (in the sense that they sound less incompetent) in French than in English...