Philip K Dick favourites?

VALIS is my favourite, it is just crazy, mindblowing stuff.. It's on a different level to anything else.
But having said that, Martian Time-Slip, A Scanner Darkly, and Time out of Joint are all really damn good as well. Rediculously good.
UBIK and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are also good, but not as good as anything previously mentioned, IMHO.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Has got to get a mention as well.. I really think the whole 'doomed planet / post apocalyptic Earth' the novel was set in, and the whole 'robotic animal' thing was something special, however the way that tied in with the extinction / endangerment of so many of Earths animals was really well done.
 
I have read Man in the High Castle, Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ubik. My favorite so far is Scanner Darkly. I just started reading Flow My Tears.
 
New member here just looking around.

I thought I'd check this discussion thread out since Philip K. Dick is my favorite author. I've read a lot of his works over the years, but I haven't read anything lately. (There's some novels and shorter works that I missed that I hope to catch up on someday.)

Off the top of my head, some of my favorite novels:

Man in the High Castle
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Martian Time-Slip
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Galactic Pot Healer
The Zap Gun
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
... Some more will come to mind I'm sure
Oh yeah: Dr. Bloodmoney

I also loved a lot of his shorter works, like Second Variety, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, The Prepersons, The Electric Ant, The Father-Thing, etc etc etc.

Something about his quirky spin on things really appealed to me. In general, his writing style was simple, but also it was quite powerful at times.

Other writers I like: Ursula LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, Cordwainer Smith, J. G. Ballard, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Bruce Sterling ... many older writers, but also many newer ones like Paolo Bacigalupi and others.

John
 
So someone not familiar with any of his work, just his notoriety, what book would be the starting point? Novels? Short Stories? Any recommendations would be great.
 
PartMetalAlchemist83 said:
So someone not familiar with any of his work, just his notoriety, what book would be the starting point? Novels? Short Stories? Any recommendations would be great.
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This is a FAQ and poking around the threads here may turn up many useful posts but I'll give it another try.

Most people pay more attention to his novels (which is usually the case with everyone anyway) but starting with a collection, such as The Best of Philip K. Dick would give you a good variety (including "Second Variety"). If that works, there's the five volume Collected Stories.

If you wanted to start where history starts, there's Solar Lottery which is a minor, but enjoyable, novel showing van Vogtian influence.

If you want the award winner, there's the somewhat atypical The Man in the High Castle.

If you want the famous only-thematically-like-the-movie novel, there's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. (Blade Runner, in film.)

If you want, IMO, the full acid meltdown of totally Dickian Dick, there's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch but I think I've been told it's cruel to recommend that to someone as their first PKD. :) People may need to build up a tolerance.

So, short of that, I particularly liked Ubik and Martian Time-slip.

Basically, if you can find it at a library or otherwise cheaply, you shouldn't go wrong with the Four Novels of the 1960s omnibus to start with the novels.

-- Oh, and none of the above is saying anything against Flow My Tears the Policeman Said as an option - I just haven't read that one. And, incidentally, that's in the Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s omnibus, which is the second in the LoA series.
 
J-Sun said:
If you want, IMO, the full acid meltdown of totally Dickian Dick, there's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch but I think I've been told it's cruel to recommend that to someone as their first PKD. :) People may need to build up a tolerance.
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You reckon?:) My first PKD book was The Man in the High Castle, one I still like a lot, partly because it was my first. So, I thought I'd try another from the library and took out The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

I remember my sixteen year-old self wondering if it was the same author, or if my brain had just fried.:D It set me reading more of his work, though.
 
My vote is for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. not like the movie at all.
Then UBIK
But I liked the World that Jones Made and The Man Who Japed.
Which have not been mentioned.
Minority Report -short story
We Can Remember it For You- aka Total Recall again not like the movie
 
Just started Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, great premise so far. I love that there isn't a detailed explanation of students/teachers being kept apart from the general population. I like that the details of this dystopian future are described sort of organically as the narrative develops. The idea of a sterilization program after the Watts riots is horrifying. All and all very excited about this author. Thank you for the recommendations, the others mentioned will soon follow. Laundry is going to have to wait until tomorrow.
 
For some reason Time Out of Joint is my favorite sci-fi book of his. It's got intense literary realism bursts, cause it's written at the end of the 50's, before he gave up being a high lit author. His failed attempt at high lit - Confessions of a Crap Artist - is one of my favorite books ever.
 
TedKeller said:
For some reason Time Out of Joint is my favorite sci-fi book of his. It's got intense literary realism bursts, cause it's written at the end of the 50's, before he gave up being a high lit author. His failed attempt at high lit - Confessions of a Crap Artist - is one of my favorite books ever.
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I liked Time Out of Joint too -- looking forward to reading it again. You mention his realistic work -- have you read Humpty-Dumpty in Oakland? There is a scene in which the protagonist drives to a construction site and looks around, and somehow the writing filled me with delight. This sequence was before the fellow had a heart attack. Somehow I think it was my favorite passage in PKD (out of about ten books that I have read). Does anyone know what I am talking about??
 
The Man in The High Castle i just finished and it skyrockets to top of my fav PKD list. My fav and the best written PKD book i have read so far.

It doesnt make The Three Stigmata of Palmer Elderitch and Now Wait For Last Year less fantastic but its just above them.
 
Am I the only one who really like The Game Players of Titan? It's one of my faves. The others are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly.
 
A Scanner Darkly was the only book I have ever, ever re-read immediately after finishing it. I'm already getting misty-eyed thinking about the end.

Next three that probably come next are: Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and (for some reason) Maze of Death.

His short story corpus would complete my top 5 for PKD.
 
Zoolook said:
Am I the only one who really like The Game Players of Titan? It's one of my faves. The others are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly.
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The Game Players of Titan is very good and its one of my favs. Just outside my top 3-4 PKD books. I like it more than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which i found to be only decent and Maze of Death the only Dick novel i truly dislike.
 
What is it about Dick's books? Even my least favourites have been amazing reads. I am halfway through The Penultimate Truth and it is just fantastic. I guess it is the element of constant mystery (i.e. what the hell is going on?) mixed with real humanity in his characters. My favourite is probably Ubik, but I would be hard pushed to say what was his best. Maybe Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep because of the frailty of Deckard and the notion of empathy and how we seek to shut it out of our daily range of emotions. I hope that in 2000 years they are treated the way we treat Greek classics now, as insights into a civilisation coming to grips with the human condition.
 
Three stigmata, by far. Probably because it has such great depths to the imagination. Ubik is a close second, a terrifying novel indeed.
 
PKD has so much good stuff it's hard to decide. If I had to rate my favorites, I guess they would be

1. Ubik--All around amazing.
2. The Man in the High Castle--The scene when Tagomi sits on the bench and imagines our real future is just brilliant)
3. Scanner Darkly--Love the bits where one half of his brain is speaking German to the other, and he doesn't know German.
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep--Such great ideas: The empathy box, Mercerism, human/machine fusion, etc.

I also have a bit of a soft spot for The Game Players of Titan.
 
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