Anyone else frequently consume dick?

Anyone else frequently consume dick?

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Dick's one of the few writers from the SFF crowd I consider to be sincere. Also he had good taste in literature.

He's great. I don't read much SF, but his interest in Gnosticism got me hooked.

The first few times he made me gag a little, but it gets much easier after a few tries...

even enjoyable.

I've heard people say the drugs were instrumental to his writing, but I disagree. I think he was a promising writer ruined by drugs - not to say the work he did was bad, but you just know he could have written much more concise and intelligent work, if he hadn't been scrambled by the drugs so much. He's a tragic figure to be honest, and I respect him for persevering in what he could.

>SFF
Did you mean SF or is there an expansion of the genre I'm not familiar with?

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Ahh, do you consider Dick's work to crossover into fantasy at any point or do you just put them together for convenience as they're both types of genre-fiction which can be used to do more or less the same things.

Sort of an audience thing more than the authors themselves - readers of Sci-fi tend to read Fantasy and vice-versa. Obviously I'm giving a stigma to them in that they tend to prefer pulp adventure stuff over literary qualities.

Just read 'A Scanner Darkly' and thought it was great. It contains some of the best descriptions of the indirect effects of substance addiction I've ever read.

That sounds like pretty valid thinking. The crossover is pretty strong. Both with audiences and often thematically too.

If the strongest substance I've ever abused is caffeine can I still appreciate 'A Scanner Darkly?'

Sure

I believe so, yeah.
It's an interesting exploration of the use of drugs, on an (almost) almost (sometimes?) philosophical level. But you certainly don't need to be a drug addict to enjoy it.

...

No i'm not gay

>sincere

Can sincerity fags fuck of? It's not about sincerity, it's about quality.

>he's so sincere
>also his taste is patrician xd

I subscribe to neither of both views. Drugs were not instrumental to his writing, nor would he have been better without drugs. A PKD without drugs is unthinkable, it's not instrumental, his consumption was simply an essential part of his thought. It is part of his work. I don't think he decided to suffer from a psychosis for his writing

Personally i wouldn't want PKD to be any different. In VALIS he's already beyond everything and what a splendid psychotic and unsettling reading experience it makes. I've read it in one sitting, afterwards i felt somewhat out of my mind.

Sorry it triggers your autism but that's how I feel about him. He wrote what was personal to him, and that's rare even now in SFF.

More than anything Dick was obsessed with ideas and the instability of reality. That his personal drug-amplified psyche shines through everywhere doesn't make him a sincere writer. The only personal work of his, is VALIS, and there isn't much emotion into it, except for the suicide and clinic-part, in which the whole resolution is that he finally is able to commit to his delusions again (with the wonderful line: You are the authority).

Since you seem so keen to use the term "SFF", i have to assume you're a genre-fiction fag, so maybe it's understandable why you perceive Dick to be particularly "sincere" or "personal". Personally i encourage you to not just parrot the latest Veeky Forums-memes to describe your favourite authors.

I disagree with those points entirely, his work - even pre-1974 - has always had elements of his struggles (whether emotional, spiritual or material) that he expresses in the writing, intentional or not I feel it resonates with the reader.

Can you name a few works? Since Dick wrote so much maybe i have just the books in which his struggles were apparent.

>It resonates with the reader
Kind of bad if a book doesn't, no?

A collection of his short stories, drawn throughout his time, came in the mail. goodreads.com/book/show/816494.Human_Is_

How is the selection?

You two knoe that PKD didn't abuse drugs right? He was more of a famaceutical drug user than a "street" drug user. He used LSD only a few times and smoked marihuana in some cases. The fact that PKD was seen as a LSD guru and drug user writter is because he used that myth to get around the crazy ideas he was putting on paper and to justify the crazyness that was going on in his head. He oftenly opened his house to stranges wich live like his house was a crack house, but he didn't abuse the drugs. The fact that his reallity was altered by his own perception was enough for him to not abuse drugs. His "experiences" came from his "not functional" head that was near to a schizo, if he wasn't one.
I really recomend his Biography by Emmanuel Carrere called "I am alive, you're dead". It talks a lot of his experiences (described by Dick itself) and his non drug abuse.

Yea, every tuesday

Here is an overview of his work, from a March 1985 copy of Heavy Metal Magazine

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>Add to that the Dino De Laurentiis film of Total Recall [...] gearing for pre-production with a rewritten script by director David Cronenberg

Weird to think of what might have been.

>David Cronenberg
I like Cronenberg's work but I think Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger is too amazing a combination to ever be beaten.

He was on Amphetamines for whole years of his life. And suffered from a psychosis. That's what his friends and wife say. He wasn't a psychedelics-guy but i don't think i've ever heard somebody claim that. Neither was he a guru. He was somebody who just took amphetamines every single day

Through a scanner darkly is loosely based on his experiences with his friends...
He absolutely abused amphetamines and if that didn't outright cause his mental illness then it definitely exacerbated it. You don't don't what the fuck you're talking about.