Subject: Re: PKD Question
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Sat Mar 11 2000 - 13:36:43 EST
At 10:17 AM -0800 on 3/11/2000, you wrote:
> I think it is n the extreme emotional honesty that I admire in both
>writers. In his later novels like Valis and Transmigration, you see
>a piercing insight into the characters, and each writer's hallmark
>(I think) is to have the guts to show people in a very real fashion.
>I always thought the underlying success of PKD was in the humanity
>of his characters, not a strong suit in SF -especially throughout
>most of his career.
The one detail about Philip K. Dick that always strikes me is that he
writes like a man demonically possessed. (If one reads his
biography, one finds that he was a more-than-occasional user of
amphetamines, so that fact is not entirely a shock.) He definitely
gets into the heads and inside the skins of his characters; as far as
I'm concerned he's not so much a writer of SF as he is a writer of
"what if" -- viz., The Man in the High Tower or Ubik. In fact, every
month seems to bring forth a new invention or technique or innovation
that seems to have stepped out of the pages of a PKD text.
(For movie buffs among us, PKD's "Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?" was the story upon which "Blade Runner" was based, and Dick
died during the making of the movie, which is dedicated to his
memory.)
--tim o'connor (who now craves a copy of "The Man in the High Tower"
to re-read, but doesn't have one at hand!)
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