What's the deal with Philip K Dick? Was he a good stylist? Plotter? How was his style, dialogue heavy...

I hate it when people reduce PKD to DUDE WEED LMAO, but doing that to VALIS is especially heinous.

PKD was one of the few authors to accurately describe living inside a mental ward from the patients perspective, if that's the very least you want from him, at least give him that credit.

he has good cooky high concept reality busting ideas a great formal education in philosophy/theology and an interest in the world of psychedelia which underpins all his works

prose is mostly bland serviceable pulp prose but he has some beautiful lines in his later works.

his characters are almost all flat, they're just pawns in the narrative. atmosphere is usually really vague and just kind of a generic scifi world. his novels don't take place in the same universe or anything but a lot of his novels have a similar version of the future.

I think his flat character's and mood tend to favor him when attempted comedy. I admit I kek'd at the Jew line in Androids

He had some very interesting ideas about reality.
I like his metaphysics.

This guy gets it.

That's not Stewart, that's Olivier Assayas

He started with the Greeks (+amphetamine)

Marshall Mathers

>but when I read it I felt it was very emotional and made me quite melancholic for days.
same.
I really hope he was right.

PKD saw over the mountain, he was a really intelligent and original guy who somehow ended up churning out shit science fiction stories for a living

hullo mack

Ubik is the kind of book no normal human could write.

You could sit down for decades studying and never be able to write a book in its style.

Philip K Dick is a genius.

i want to be pegged by that dyke

It's not that he's a bad writer, just that his prose is merely functional. He's not very strong at characterizations either. However I would consider him a great stylist, not for his prose but for the distinct and recognizable aura surrounding his works. Plus he has a really neat metaphysics.

Who are some other authors who write of the malleable nature of reality? I think someone like Ballard qualifies.

who's the boy?

confessions of a crap artist is pretty great and not sci-fi

Not Veeky Forums, but Grant Morrison

I've read a few of his comics. What are your favorites?

morrison is a solipsist ponce in the vein of alan moore and the guy that wrote camel rides again who is their 'intellectual' mentor

i don't follow, what does it mean to have 'neat metaphysics'? did dick actually develop any sort of philosophical system? as for ballard i did read him a lot and he's a decent writer that would be hanging on /r/futurism if he were alive today, regurgitating clickbait tripes from pop-sci publications as he did while arpanet was just a baby.

elaborate?

He had esoteric alien intelligence broadcast directly inside his brain so all his works are prophetic

Eminem, he started taking hormones

>elaborate?
I'm not that poster but PKD himself talked about it, and if you read the book you can see why. It's so unique and different from anything else in literature ever except perhaps other PKD books, but even his other ones don't go as far as this one. It's hard to describe. It's a novel where reality is entirely uncertain and there are nested realities inside realities, and these realities seem to be breaking down somehow. It completely does away with the novelistic idea of a standard reality, and yet while doing this, it isn't at all over-cerebral but strangely human because the characters are just normal, sometimes sentimental and sometimes scheming people trying to move around in it.

While doing this it also somehow manages to accidentally be a heavily Gnostic parable, as Dick interpreted it in retrospect, although it appears he had not yet gotten interested in Gnosticism or intended to do so while writing it

IDK but it's pretty badass imo