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quote:Originally posted by Billy Corgan:
He's the man who wrote the short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which became the film Blade Runner.
Um, for someone who supposedly loves PKD so much, this was a pretty dumb mistake to make. Do Androids... is a full length novel. We'll Remember It For You Wholesale, which was turned into Total Recall, was the short story.
Do Androids... is starting to be released under it's own name again, which is nice. For years it was released under the name, Bladerunner. Note though, it's best not to really think of the movie and the book having anything to do with each other. If you get to caught up in the connection between the two, the movie turns into a steaming pile of shit, IMHO.
quote:He's also the genius behind such books as VALIS, A Scanner Darkly, and Radio Free Albemuth.
Acctually, Albemuth is just a rewrite of VALIS with elements of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and Divine Invasion (the other two books in the VALIS trilogy) thrown in for the hell of it. It's possible that the book was never even meant for publication, since it was found amoung PKD's papers after his death. It's still a fun book, but should be looked at in context.
As for reccomendations:
VALIS, Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, are probably the ones you are going to run into most in these circles (with emphasis on VALIS). These three books were written after PKD went through a "mystical" experience. He spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of it. The three books are basically him bouncing around various ideas.
Do Androids... is possibly his most famous straight sci-fi book, mostly because of the Bladerunner connection.
Scanner Darkly was a fun paranoid drugged out book. The closest thing to a anti-drug book that PKD could write.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich is another really good straight sci-fi book. I prefer it to Do Androids..
You also might want to look into PKD's short stories. He wrote a shit load of them, and they're all kinds of twisted fun.
PKD is the only writer I've ever come across that could pull of a short story about how insects are acctually aliens trying to take over the world, and spiders are acctually defending man kind.
The worst PKD novels are fun, strange little trinkets to waste a day with. The best, will keep you thinking long after you've read them. Just pick something up.
edited to say: when I say straight fiction I'm making a seperation between PKD's early work, which was written for sci-fi audiences, and his later work. Which bordered on reguliar fiction at times, and tends to be thrown around as his most serious work.
Personally, I'm much more interested in the discussions of the nature of humanity and reality in his sci-fi stuff, then in his, "am I going mad?" stuff later on. They're still great books, but not as fun as his previous stuff, IMHO.
[ 23-01-2002: Message edited by: I Am ] |
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