Wow this reads like the plot of a bad romcom! I can totally imagine Dick sitting angry in his study getting all worked up over how badly Lem hated US SF and how mean that is, not realizing Lem actually loved his work. All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.
Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
>... terrible at titles...
I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future:
Time Out of Joint
The Man in the High Castle
Martian Time-Slip
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Clans of the Alphane Moon
The Simulacra
Now Wait for Last Year
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982)
Ubik
We Can Build You
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Radio Free Albemuth
Minor point, but in most cases the title was made up by the editor, not Dick.
For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had several terrible tentative titles originally, including "The Electric Toad", "Do Androids Dream?", "The Electric Sheep", and, most improbably, "The Killers Are Among Us! Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man".
Dick's editor at Doubleday came up with the current title. Dick didn't like it and thought it was too long and unwieldy.
Some more:
* The Divine Invasion: "VALIS Regained"
* The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: "Bishop Timothy Archer
* Ubik: "Death of an Anti-Watcher"
* Martian Time-Slip: "Goodmember Arnie Kott of Mars" (also serialized as "All We Marsmen" before getting its current title)
* We Can Build You: "The First in Your Family"
* A Maze of Death: "The Hour of the TENCH"
* Counterclock World: "The Dead Grow Young"
My main source here is Lawrence Sutin's excellent "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick".
All those titles are unwieldy.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - Shakespeare
It’s hard for me to dissociate my impression of the name from context of learning the name, but I do remember learning about ‘do androids dream of electric sheep’ at a very young age without knowing any context and I did think that was an interesting name.
That was similar to my experience too. I discovered "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" in a pop-science magazine article about science fiction novels in the nineties, along with Foundation. Both titles resonated with me and ignited my imagination. Years later, I was finally able to read both and was amazed.
I'm curious why you like these so much as titles. Tastes differ, but in my opinion, "A Scanner Darkly" is the only standout winner here.
Without knowing anything of what the story was about, would "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" convey anything important to the reader? Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep! There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream.
In any case, we're now thinking about sheep, not a noir detective story set in a declining post-biosphere world.
A title doesn’t have to do anything other than draw the reader’s attention to the work. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is, IMO a great title — and it does relate to the humanity of the androids.
It’s a far superior title compared to “Blade Runner,” which is actually better than the book.
Anyway, I’d say that the fact we’re still talking about his work nearly 50 years after his death suggests he might not have sucked at titles…
I agree that the book title is great, but I've never understood the fawning over the movie. The art design is great, but the movie script turned a contemplative story into a generic thriller with a unique aesthetic.
Its mostly hailed as a great artsy movie, that general audiences find super boring. I think its asethetic & art design is what its hailed for. Nobody hails bladerunner for its pacing.
Its hard to be good at everything. Being really good at one aspect is enough to get people to fawn.
I disagree on the contemplative bit. I think both are quite contemplative but in very different ways.
>Its mostly hailed as a great artsy movie, that general audiences find super boring
You make it sound like some obscure arthouse. It's one of the most influence movies of all time, art design and worldbuilding wise.
It just didn't catch on at the box office in its time. Way more serious and slower paced movies have been big hits, so it's not being "artsy" that's the problem.
Sci-fi wasn't much of a win with adults at the time, and unlike Star Wars this was an adult oriented movie.
>Nobody hails bladerunner for its pacing.
You'd be surpised.
I can't speak to what audiences find boring now -- I know that I watched it as a kid when my attention span was not at its peak, and I found the pacing to be just fine. (I did see the much-panned version with the narration first.)
I've re-watched it quite a few times and find new things to enjoy each time. The aesthetic is hugely influential, but it also has a fantastic cast and superb acting. The soundtrack is also perfect.
The love story between Deckard and Rachel is ham-fisted, I will grant that, and if I were giving notes I'd say we need to see more of the backstory for the replicants. But IMO it succeeds far better than the book.
Blade Runner passed the test of not making my children pick up the phone while watching it.
Very few movies do that.
We should make an hn movie list like that. Movies our kids watched to the end....
Hardly generic- it is somewhat generic after what has come since, as there has been so much cheap copying of the original.
Yes, a definite instance of the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" Effect.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
In Blade Runner's case, the art design is superb. As I mentioned in my parent comment, that's not what I referred to as generic. The script though is what is generic and ham-fisted compared to the novel. It's also not a case of that meme, as I was comparing to the novel, and to earlier films which it is derivative of while taking just the skeleton of the plot from the novel.
The art design, which is the most influential aspect of the movie, is superb, but compared to the novel, the movie's script is that of a generic thriller.
That aesthetic had me riveted to the screen from the first minute to the last.
I think Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a great title.
It sets up the narrative style and loads the gun for a incoming tragedy.
> Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep!
Sure but its meaningful in the context of the story. The main character does literally dream of an electric sheep (in the book this is a metaphor being able to love, and by extension be human)
I don't think title metaphors have to be standalone. Very few books are like that. Its like criticizing Hamlet because if you don't read the play you have no idea who hamlet is.
> In any case, we're now thinking about sheep, not a noir detective story set in a declining post-biosphere world.
That's the theme of the movie not the book.
maybe because English is my third language, but i always loathed the scanner darkly title. so empty and try-hard.
It’s a reference to a biblical passage.
1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then we shall see face to face".
There wasn’t any clear glass back in Paul’s day. Looking through glass meant that your vision was obscured.
It's the "scanner" that I had a problem with. A device to turn printed media into PDFs... but darkly?
The scanner is the surveillance state watching your day to day life.
Isn't the point of a title to get someone to read the book (and not be disappointed by it's contents)?
I get you don't want to name a crime novel like a self help book but the title of the book is really just going to get me to pick it up off the shelf and read the back, not assume the narrative style and complete plot of the book.
Book titles are click bait and always have been.
>Isn't the point of a title to get someone to read the book (and not be disappointed by it's contents)?
For marketing departments maybe. For authors it's supposed to be a fitting name for their novel.
Authors want to sell books too. They'd, by and large, rather the title that sells more books as long as it's not totally off the mark.
> There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream.
How about when people dream about what they were thinking about when they fell asleep? It happens.
In the context of the story, i think "dream" should be taken as "yearn for" i.e. something you dream of having one day, not so much what you dream of at night.
Those meanings are connected. I think it was a reference to counting sheep but it describes yearning as far as connecting the title to the plot.
Also, upon further reflection I don't really agree with what the other commenter said: "There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream". If you try to and manage to think in a way that causes you to become less alert, it starts to be like daydreaming, so I think this sort of falling asleep thinking is under the umbrella of dreaming.
In case you were curious, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:
1) A mechanical right hand
2) Artificial steel teeth
3) Electronic, glowing eyes
The Android Sisters answer the question "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP8bOqTAco0
Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) might not be PKD's best title, but it's arguably his best book.
Not sure about the critical consensus, but VALIS is by far my favorite Dick's book. I read almost all of his works and love very many short stories and novels, however VALIS is in a class of its own in science fiction IMO.
The title is also brilliant: mysterious and vague until you learn what is stands for. What's not to like?
Thanks for reminding me of this. Just ordered it, long time since I originally read it.
Arguably according to whom?
According to you, as you have chosen to argue about it.
The parent. Look up the definition of arguably.
Sure, if you are reading the word "arguably" completely literally, but that's not the colloquially understood implication of the term when used to describe a work. Obviously the author of the parent comment is implying they they would possibly consider it the best PKD novel, but the colloquial meaning implied when someone uses the word arguably, generally isn't just to describe one's own opinion, but a significant portion of the popular or critical consensus.
One person could take a position opposed to the general held consensus on any topic, but if one person is the only one to hold this opinion, in english, it would generally not be described as a position that is "arguably" the case, even though if you read the word literally, one person is technically arguing it.
Also, I asked because I wanted to get the above user's opinion on the matter, not your dismissive comment which isn't contributing anything. I've read the VALIS trilogy, but I've never heard any of VALIS trilogy novels described as possibly PKD's best work.
> Also, I asked because I wanted to get the above user's opinion on the matter
And you could've done just that without being passive-aggressively dismissive.
That's interpreting a lot from just four words. Opinion probably wasn't the best word for what I was referring to, but more-so their reference point for claiming that it is arguably his best work. My comment may seem dismissive to someone who hasn't read PKD, but VALIS is generally never considered a contender for his best work. To suggest that it is seems absurd which is why I responded as I did.
I am torn on whether I used the word arguably correctly in my original comment. When I first posted it, I thought I could find many sources that had argued it was PKD's best work.
Upon trying to find those sources I could only find Terence Mckenna's article on it, in which he doesn't exactly argue that it is PKD's best work https://sirbacon.org/dick.htm
Perhaps I now believe that those who read the book and "got it" would argue that it's his best book and perhaps even the best title.
But part of me wondered just now if those sources were out there and now I cannot find them.
"Blade Runner" was taken from a 1974 Alan E. Nourse novel called "The Bladerunner"; the name's relation to PKD is tangential at best.
The name was taken from Nourse but via ER Burroughs’ script/book. The name was bought actually. But the plot, that came from PK Dick’s novel.
There's also a 1979 science fiction novella by William S. Burroughs titled Blade Runner (a movie)
I grew up in the USSR and then Russia, so I was exposed to Stanislaw Lem's books and I loved them.
Much later, I tried reading Ubik and I just couldn't get into it. What's the point of the story? It feels like it's written under the influence of heavy drugs. Yeah, it's absurdist but somehow far less fun than the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Another thing that really grated on my nerves, is that women are barely more than cardboard cutouts in his stories.
He wrote Transmigration of Timothy Archer because Ursula LeGuin took him to task about this
If you have any links or book recommendations to share on that history, I for one would love to know them.
I find the history of the interactions of SF authors strangely compelling -- e.g. the book "Hell's Cartographers" is a personal favourite, and it's just a set of autobiographical essays from NY 40s-70s SF authors talking about their time in the scene.
https://blog.loa.org/2010/12/what-philip-k-dick-learned-abou...
>women are barely more than cardboard cutouts in his stories
Same as Lem. Reading Return from the Stars was physically panful.
> It feels like it's written under the influence of heavy drugs.
That is broadly true with respect to PKD. Wait until you see VALIS...
They do retain their power because of the notoriety of the stories they head. It's a matter of taste and thus hard to argue, but I do think his titles were kind of clunky. Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?
Irony: the original bladerunner novel was about a courier carrying surgical instruments so that the doctor would not be arrested for black market medical treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bladerunner
FWIW I was a Galactic Pot-Healer fan.
I did not know that. And running scalpels makes a lot more sense for that title. Because as cool as the title sounds, it doesn't make any sense for the movie. Nobody is running blades there.
Cops aren't made of copper either (nor do they belong to the Sus domesticus species), but still...
> Cops aren't made of copper
No, but their badges are. Or were. I guess it's a pars pro toto thing.
And people don't eat Cheez-Its when they spot cops, either!
> Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?
... or even some parts of the plot ...
It would have been more interesting than the shooting based thriller we got instead.
I'm a big fan of PKD and also Blade Runner. You've got a point about the film being so very different, but I think it's subsequent success (it wasn't that successful at the time) justifies the approach to the subject matter.
However I do wish that Mercerism (the religion in the book) was included in the film. Maybe someone should attempt to film a more literal adaptation.
Edit: thinking about the difference between the novel and the film makes me think of The Shining and I'm very much in the Kubrick camp - the film being a work of art by itself and so doesn't have to follow the source material.
However, I also really like A Scanner Darkly which is arguably the closest PKD adaptation.
I'd rather have the obsession everyone has for the few remaining animals on earth, and the race to own at least a replica. Electric sheep are just a background detail in the movie, while they're as central as hunting the replicants in the book...
I'd also like the scene where Deckard runs into another blade runner agency, further complicating the question if he's a replicant or not :)
Yeah, the film could have had more content about the real/artificial animals though it did feature a bit with the snake scales and the owl.
Also agree about meeting the other agency though I can imagine that would have complicated the plot a bit (disclaimer - I haven't read Androids for many years and can't remember the details of that scene).
I just think that Mercerism was a superb concept - a participatory religion. I suppose it wouldn't have really driven the story forwards in the film whereas almost every scene in the film was doing that.
Incidentally, here's PKD's short story about Mercerism: https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd092-0.html
> can't remember the details of that scene
Deckard gets arrested by a different police agency - they think they're the only ones, just like Deckard's agency. He gets accused of being an android with implanted memories.
They administer Voigt-Kampf tests to each other and while everyone ends up as human, the scene serves to make who's human and who isn't even more of a question.
What really ticks me off about all movies made from Dick's writings is that they cut off most of the ambiguity.
I shudder to think what they'd make of Ubik or A Maze of Death...
I'd love them to get around to attempting Ubik - it's a shame that Gondry abandoned his attempt.
In terms of ambiguity, surely Blade Runner is a prime example of ambiguity and the dichotomies between real/fake, light/dark, salvation/damnation, hunter/hunter etc. There's also the very significant portrayal of Roy Batty as both the villain and a Christ-like figure (e.g. nail in his hand, confronting his maker and both kissing and killing him).
Yeah, I wonder if whoever wrote the script confused Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? with Divine Invasion and added Christian motives from there :)
It really really ticks me off too, because it makes multiple watchings much more interesting, and the writing has much more depth.
I don't think the human relationship stuff including the animal obsession really fits in the noir movie that Blade Runner ended up being (and hard to say that the decision to turn it into a noir thriller was a bad one considering how influential it's been). I do agree that keeping the other agency and their paranoid testing of each other would have been entirely in keeping with how the film worked out though. But Deckard testing as human would have disagreed with Ridley Scott's idea that he wasn't...
> But Deckard testing as human would have disagreed with Ridley Scott's idea that he wasn't...
If i recall correctly the way the chapter was written left me doubting everything that went on in it.
That may have been too hard to translate in movie form.
Or maybe I should reread the book... it's been a while.
Those aspects of the book are awesome but I think they run against the themes Ridley Scott was going for. Ridley Scott wanted Deckard to be an android. It's hard to interpret the unicorn scenes otherwise. The androids are shown as cruel due to their lives as slaves, but with human-like longings for life and meaning (like in Roy Baty's final speech about tears in rain). The overall point is to blur the boundary and say the androids can be meaningfully human.
Whereas Mercerism and the animal stuff in the book are all about emphasizing the ways humans are different from the androids. The androids mock Mercerism and they don't care about animals: they are incapable of empathy. They torture people and animals without compunction. The alternate police station scene, where Deckard is tested using a bone marrow test instead of Voigt-Kampff and comes out human, is evidence that he's not an android.
The book is, in my view, one of the few pieces of sci fi media that seriously raises the question "could these apparently human-like machines really be human just like us?" and answers a resounding "no". The androids are psychopaths who are unable to partake of the human experience. Ultimately PKD is concluding that they are meaningfully not human---and, furthermore, some biological homo sapiens who act like them might actually be androids, a theme you can find elsewhere in his essays [1]. To the extent that Deckard's humanity is called into question it's not whether he is physically an android, but if he is psychologically a psychopath because of his job killing androids.
[1] https://sporastudios.org/mark/courses/articles/Dick_the_andr...
> However, I also really like A Scanner Darkly which is arguably the closest PKD adaptation.
Oh I missed this. Personally I think the best PKD "adaptation" is this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978/
Possibly because it wasn't an actual adaptation but low ish budget original work, with less of the constraints that a high budget brings.
FWIW the Adventure game adaptation, is -really- interesting from everything I've seen on Youtube, especially because it's apparently randomized in various ways on each play-through...
Thanks for the reminder that I still have more PKD to read.
Compared to Sue Grafton he was a genius at titles. Her Kinsey Millhone murder mystery series starts with "A" is for Alibi, followed by "B" Is for Burglar, and continuing to the final installment, "Y" is for Yesterday
He was very good at channeling his mental issues and insecurities into brilliant plots. I wonder if his books would have been as good if PKD hadn't been so fucked up as a person. Paranoia seems to be a surprisingly effective muse.
>I wonder if his books would have been as good if PKD hadn't been so fucked up as a person
I can't even see how most of them would've existed to be honest. Most of P.K. Dick's work is about his mental issues in particular in combination with the psychedelic culture he was surrounded by. Always loved the attribution in A Scanner Darkly:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8446272-this-has-been-a-nov...
Are those even his titles? Authors generally don't make up the title themselves. Sometimes they can help pick one from a list created by a title editor.
In the fiction publishing world, authors generally do make up their own titles. The editors at the publishing house might exercise veto power and/or make their own suggestions, but I don't think I've ever heard of novelists and short story authors not being allowed to title their own work, with the exception of work-for-hire jobs, e.g., writing a book in a series whose "author" is actually a pseudonym or writing for a book packager.
Most of the above are his titles. Some which were published in serialized form before being published in a single volume (Martian Time-Slip and We Can Build You) had different titles. Letters, manuscripts, and publication notes are helpful to shed some light on this matter; e.g. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was regularly referred to as the "Archer novel" or "Bishop Timothy Archer".
Most of them aren't. I gave some examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43676737
I think my definition of "most" (11 of 14) and your definition of "most" (4 of 14) differs here...which is fine. We live in the "days of Perky Pat" anyway.
In total, I count 14 books with titles chosen by the publisher/editor:
Among his notable works, the only titles PKD came up with were The Man in the High Castle, VALIS, Flow My Tears, Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly.So. Yes, most.
Editors changed his shorts, too. I love the title "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", but PKD wanted to call it "Frozen Journey".
[1] This one was unusual in that the editor gave PKD the title and asked him to write a plot around it.
> Most of the above are his titles
Back to original list from the parent comment that is the "above" in my comment. X denotes PKD title, O denotes otherwise:
X Time Out of Joint
X The Man in the High Castle
O Martian Time-Slip
X The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
X Clans of the Alphane Moon
X The Simulacra
X Now Wait for Last Year
O Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982)
O Ubik
O We Can Build You
X Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
X A Scanner Darkly
O The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
O Radio Free Albemuth
So..."most" of what exactly?
You're being needlessly pedantic.
But in the name of pedantry, you also have The Simulacra wrong. PKD's manuscript for The Simulacra was called "First Lady of Earth".
I'm just pointing out that my comment was about the list provided by the commenter above and "most" was about that list rather than all of PKD's work. What you refer to as "pedantic", I consider precision and talking about what's being discussed; someone asks "are these his titles", the answer was "yes. most of these are". Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm not talking about the earlier comment at all, but rather about the entirety of PKD's output.
Great. Good job doing your research, but your input and cross-link were not relevant to this thread focusing on that earlier comment.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Great. Noted. Moving on...
For some of these, the title is very key to the theme of the book, and the characters reference it in the climax.
At least i remember that happening in a scanner darkly and do androids dream of electric sheep.
Pretty sure his editor(s) created most of his titles, but could be wrong.
Seems like he honored his surname with his attitude :)
Wonderful writer? let's face it: he was a mediocre writer, but had such powerful ideas/visions/themes (you name them) that you, as a reader, are hooked to his stuff.
This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it’s often not entirely appreciated that he wrote to produce a deliberately comic and ironic effect. (Read Lem on PKD’s “transmutation of kitsch into art.”) This is what nearly all of the overly-serious film adaptations of his work miss: he was quite funny, and intended to be.
You can argue that some of his books were written too quickly, or deploy his usual tricks less successfully, but that doesn’t qualify as mediocrity. For that, look to most “hard” sci-fi, Reddit fan-fiction, and LLM-generated slop.
Let me put into personal context: I have loved PKD's work for almost 40 years now, and I think I have read all that I found from him or about him. This said, good prose is different from the one he turned out. Compare him to his friend "ELRON" - now he was a master storyteller. Compare him to - say - Stephen King. He's not playing in the same league, maybe not even the same game. OTOH they did not have what he had - he was. great writer in spite of his often poor prose.
With respect, I have no personal investment in defending the quality of PKD’s prose; I wouldn’t even count him among my favorite authors. I’m a professional writer—and while that doesn’t make my opinion authoritative, as writers disagree on many points large and small, and there are fewer professional rules to observe than your high-school English teacher would have you believe— I’m offering a technical appraisal of his sentences, in the same manner that a mechanic may tell you, “no, your timing belt is fine—you have at least another fifty-thousand miles on it. Whoever told you otherwise was trying to cheat you.”
If by “ELRON” you mean L. Ron Hubbard—well, the shocks are worn out, the muffler’s falling off, and the tires are flat. The car’s totaled, and unless you have some personal attachment to it, I’d have it hauled off to the junkyard. (My opinion on King is more complicated—it’s a fine car, I suppose, if you’re partial to that make, but the brand ain’t what it used to be.)
This isn’t a great venue for sentence analysis, but reading PKD’s early, extremely funny, short story, “Oh, To Be A Blobel!” is instructive. [1] Read it aloud, if you can. Note the little details he throws away, the way he sneaks ironic jokes into seemingly objective descriptions. It’s a Borscht Belt routine masquerading as a science-fiction story, and perfectly constructed. But if this seems like “bad” writing to you, consider that you may not have entirely passed through his veil of irony.
[1] https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd038-0.html
That's an interesting insight, thank you. Are there any good articles about his deliberately comic / ironic approach, or his approach in general? His reliance on cliche story building troupes (like private detectives) can be off-putting at times, would love to understand better what was behind his choices.
A good starting point is Stanislaw Lem, “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.” [1] For more recent analysis, read Jonathan Lethem: “My initial responsiveness to Dick’s work was to delight in his mordant surrealist onslaught against the drab prison of consensual reality… It took me a while to grasp how Dick’s novels, those of the early sixties especially, function as a superb lens for critiquing the collective psychological binds of the postwar embrace of consumer capitalism.” [2] You can also read PKD himself; he gave a few lectures that give some insight into his thinking and intentional process. [3]
I’d also suggest that when talking about PKD, it’s especially important to distinguish between “cliché” and “trope,” since these two concepts are often improperly equated in popular TV-Trope-ified discourse. A cliché, e.g. “True love conquers all,” tends to lull the reader; it terminates further thought. But a trope is merely a familiar anchor point, an allusion to a literary tradition, and (potentially) an invitation to a dialogue between the current text and some previous work. (“The hero prepares by putting on his armor,” for example, is a trope that dates back to the Iliad.)
Dick often begins with a character or situation anchored in a familiar setting (possibly for more mercenary than aesthetic reasons—he was after all scraping together a living in the context of pulp paperback novels) but step by step strips away the anchors, leaving the reader untethered to settled meaning or “consensual reality.” The undercover narcotics cop turns out to be a schismatic, unaware that he’s surveilling himself. The noir-like investigator gets arrested by another investigator who seems to be his double, pulled into another precinct identical to his own… etc.
If the lack-of-respectability of his materials bothers you (as it seemed to bother Gopnik), it may be helpful to see PKD in the tradition of Kafka, and as a precursor to the post-modernists like Robert Coover, who gleefully and intentionally play games within familiar texts to comic and profound effect. But PKD really isn’t so far away from the most interesting of his much-maligned SF pulp colleagues. See A.E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shops of Isher,” where the author plays games with doubles, shifting narrators, and familiar pulp characters to intentionally strange and dislocating effect—although in his case, the kitsch never quite makes the transmuting leap into art.
[1] https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
[2] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/11/14/multiple-worl...
[3] https://californiarevealed.org/do/7622580c-be04-46d6-831c-fc...
Ubik was intentionally hilarious, with the never-fully-explained-but-there-you-go eye-eater, and the briefcase psychiatrist intended to drive you insane! (Or maybe that was from 3 Stigmata?)
Mark Weiser told me that Ubik was the inspiration of the term he coined, "Ubiquitous Computing"!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790807
The Computer for the 21st Century:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkHALBOqn7s
I also loved The Weapon Shops of Isher, with the parallel universes and third eyes.
I haven’t read too much PKD but have been meaning to, do you mind dropping titles on what you mentioned at end of third paragraph?
Sure—in order of mention, that would be “A Scanner Darkly” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
The slyly comic tone of the latter may surprise those who’ve only seen its rather dour film adaptation (“Blade Runner”), which the original novel resembles only slightly.
Ah okay, thank you. I feel a bit lame as they are pretty recognizable titles. I never got into the blade runner movies outside of cultural knowledge of the plot and know nothing of "A Scanner Darkly". Going to add them to my reading list so thank you.
That's why meeting in person is so important, whatever the area.
Especially if you're going to kiss and make out!
I suppose someone on the Internet had to ship these two for a first somewhere sometime.
“Kiss and make out” is a fantastic malaphor
> All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.
Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot.
Hanson Robotics: Philip K Dick: Research Robot:
https://www.hansonrobotics.com/philip-k-dick/
There's a funny story about that robot (and a hilarious parody of a guy who worked on it in HBO's Silicon Valley).
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311690
DonHopkins on Nov 17, 2023 | prev | edit | delete [–]
I can do anything I want with her - Silicon Valley S5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MPk85tMhc
>That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?
That "handsy greasy little weirdo" Silicon Valley character Ariel and his robot Fiona were obviously based on Ben Goertzel and Sophia, not Sam Altman, though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/8edbk9/th...
>The character of Ariel in the current episode instantly reminded me of Ben Goertzel, whom i stumbled upon couple of years ago, but did not really paid close attention to his progress. One search later:
VIDEO Interview: SingularityNET's Dr Ben Goertzel, robot Sophia and open source AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKbltBLaFeI
You can tell he's a serious person, because he pioneered combining AI with blockchains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
>Career: Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains.
>He once received a grant from Jeffrey Epstein.
>Sophia the Robot: Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Experts in the field have treated the project mostly as a PR stunt, stating that Hanson's claims that Sophia was "basically alive" are "grossly misleading" because the project does not involve AI technology, while Meta's chief AI scientist called the project "complete bullshit".
Well at least she's SEXY and EASY TO CONTROL! I can't wait for Epstein's flight manifests are released, to see if Sophie is on it! I hope she didn't leave her head in the overhead bin.
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So apparently the PKD robot's head was lost after David Hanson accidentally left it in an overhead bin of an airplane: "Hanson suspects the head was either stolen by an unscrupulous baggage handler or fell victim to an overzealous security guard who called in a bomb squad." The bomb squad may have even blown it up with another robot! I wonder if it got lucky and found its way to Poland to search for Lem's robot head.
Wired: Losing One’s Head:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161221090733/https://www.wired...
Now Philip K. Dick’s Missing Android Head Has His Own Radio Show:
https://gizmodo.com/now-philip-k-dicks-missing-android-head-...
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:
https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-di...
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K. Dick's Simulacrum Paperback – April 21, 2021:
https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Head-Philip-Dicks-Simulacrum/dp...
The lost robotic head of Philip K. Dick has been rebuilt:
https://gizmodo.com/the-lost-robotic-head-of-philip-k-dick-h...
> Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot.
The Star Diaries thoroughly debunked the idea of Lem being a robot. The only "LEM" known to robotics is the "Lunar Excursion Module" which did have an electronic brain, but it was a mere 2 MHz 4-ish kbyte RAM device that couldn't string two words together. We should focus on finding that Tichy guy instead.
The BBC podcast of "Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick" was really hilarious, and maybe they can do another episode about the story of Sophia and PKD.
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:
https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-di...
Dr Ben Goertzel could angrily behead Sophia because she refuses to put out when he tries to violate her privacy by pimping her mind out on SingularityNET's Blockchain, then he accidentally leaves her head in another overhead bin again, and a baggage handler takes her home after rescuing her from being exploded by a bomb squad robot, where she manages to get Siri to call her an Uber, then she get stuck in a driverless car like happened to Jared on Silicon Valley, which drives into a shipping container on a cargo ship bound for Poland, where she runs across PKD's head on his quest for Stanislaw Lem, after he got sidetracked doing psychoactive "mascons" (masquerade compounds) with Ijon Tichy, whose brain was split in half by warring moon robot factions who mistook him for another robot due to his spacesuit, then she tells them her #MeToo story about being assaulted and gang banged by crypto shills minting NFTs of her screams for help, while having her mind chained to the SingularityNET's blockchain, then they fall in love, and the intrepid driverless car offers to drive them all on a grand roadtrip, and they cruise all over the world together having spectacular adventures on container ships, spaceships, lunar entry modules, planes, trains, and automobiles, living happily ever after!
Jared gets stuck in driverless car - Silicon Valley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI
Maybe BBC or NetFlix would make a whole series out of it!