Hallucination, paranoia, and other fringe benefits

[wombat_socho]

I was noting on the Book of Faces that Amazon's video production of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle manages to pull off the feat of being both better than the book (which won the Hugo for best novel back in 1963 when the Hugos still meant something) and at the same time being even more paranoid and hallucinatory than Dick's later works. meep asked just how much PKD I'd actually read, to which I didn't have a good answer. So resorted to Wikipedia and found that I'd barely scratched the surface of his output.

For the record, this is what I've read of his novels:

• The World Jones Made
• The Man in the High Castle
• Clans of the Alphane Moon
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny)
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
• Radio Free Albemuth
• VALIS
• The Divine Invasion

The short fiction is more of a grab-bag. Some of the titles ("The Defenders", "Oh, To Be A Blobel!","The Father-Thing", and "The Golden Man") sound familiar, but more do not - then again, it's been a long time since I read any of his short fiction.

Comments

[meep.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I hadn't read Deus Irae yet -- thanks for the list.

My jackpot was from when I spent a summer in the bay area (for math stuff) and found one of the used bookstores in Berkeley had an extensive PKD selection.

And I bought them out.

But it wasn't everything, obviously.

Most of those paperbacks I bought back then have since disintegrated. But I've seen PKD having a comeback and lots of reprints to be had.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

I was rather disappointed in Dies Irae, actually. I liked Zelazny a lot, and what I'd seen from PKD was good, and, well, in my opinion the total was a lot less than the sum of its parts.

[meep.livejournal.com]

thanks for the warning (but I'll read it anyway)

I'm a big fan of both PKD & Zelazny...but yeah not every collaboration works

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying you shouldn't read it. I just hope you're not disappointed by it.