[mezentius]

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.

[kimi]

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.

[mezentius]

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

[chrislongss]

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.

[mezentius]

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...

[DonHopkins]

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.

[pests]

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?

[mezentius]

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.

[pests]

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.